The King and the Kingdom

Well, the wedding's over, and presumably everyone survived. I suppose it's to be seen if Harry lives through the after-party.

I've never been much of one for the Royals -- I thoroughly avoided the Charles/Di debacle thirty years ago. It seems to me that the hype this time around was much less, possibly because Pr. William has not bandied about for fifteen years as an eligible bachelor like his father. I also have detected more cynicism about this wedding, which shouldn't be surprising from my seat here in the U.S., and I think it's political in nature.

Since the royal wedding thirty years ago, a lot has happened in the world besides the royal blowup, namely, democracy is rampant. The Eastern Bloc and even (for Pete's sake) the Soviet Union have fallen apart, majority rule came to South Africa, de facto representative governments stuck their heads above water in Afghanistan and Iraq, who-knows-what is trying to overthrow dictators in the Middle East and North Africa, and even China has granted economic freedoms. Monarchies and other authoritarians are becoming more and more of an anachronism.

Which poses a question for Western Christians -- how ready are you to bow to the King? Does it seem odd to think of being under absolute authority? Even decisions in most of our protestant churches are made by committees or direct election, not by elders as scripture directs (and the U.S. is definitely a protestant nation in nature.) The church in the West has no inkling of what it means to fall to your knees before one you call Lord. Something to think about.

Oh yeah. Buy my book.

No Bad Publicity

If you're an author, you're probably not reading this. If you are an author reading this, you can quit now, because you've already seen it.

This is what Internet marketing is all about, in a twisted kind of way. Independent book publishers/authors are all salivating after that killer review, but this woman got more than she bargained for. Jacqueline Howett sent her book, The Greek Seaman, to Big Al's Books and Pals for a review. And that's what she got, and it wasn't particularly bad. But "Big Al" did point out technical flaws in her writing, which led to this firestorm. Now more people know about Jacqueline's book than she could ever have hoped for, and maybe some of them will even buy it.

But more will probably buy this. It's a real measure of our current media culture that you can make a fool of yourself, and someone will be making a profit off you before you can get up off the floor. Big Al is also suffering from the aftermath. Which didn't stop me from sending him a request to review "The Job," because let's face it, a lot more people know of his blog now than they did a week ago. But his sudden fame has surely brought on an onslaught of review requests, so I don't expect to hear from him. But given the size headache he no doubt has now, he might benefit from reading "The Job" anyway.

In other news, Sample Sunday is coming up again. This week I'll be featuring a chapter from "Wars of the Aoten," once again based on St. Celibart statistics, the most popular chapter. If you're on Twitter, just search for #samplesunday, and click the links that authors have tweeted. If you like their writing, then retweet their links to your followers. Help out an indie.

New Media and New Marketing XIV

Well, SampleSunday passed, and I finally learned how to see retweets, and my tweets for Feallengod were retweeted exactly once, and that by a friend I had to pay a lot of money to. JK. But only the last part. So it remains true that social networks are really useless unless your network is really behind you. That seems to be the nut remaining to crack. But I'm going to stick with it for awhile; next weekend, Wars of the Aoten.

But, in other news, I did learn how to track retweets, which proved to be quite easy. For some reason I couldn't find any instructions on how to do it on the World Wide Web. Another thing I've been struggling with is Amazon's best-seller lists based on genre. I think I've finally figured that out as well, and The Job is #68 in the Christian humor fiction category. And this after a brutal March. So tell your friends.

The final comment I'd make today is that Twitter followers are really fickle. Although I'm up by about 30% again after this weekend, that includes a number of drop-outs. I think a lot of people are just trying to set records with followers, and if they pick you up and you don't reciprocate, then you're done. But if someone has several thousand followers, they're never going to see your tweets anyway, so what's the point? So I'm happy with the handful I've got. Especially if they retweet.

Mediasaurus

I was literally lying around the other day, reviewing my stellar career in the news media. The reverie was brought on because I'd seen a promotion the newspaper I used to work for had posted online for its new Twitter news feed. This development had made me remember how I told a co-worker in the mid '90s that print newspapers would mostly disappear in 20 years (I thought the only survivors would be huge "newspapers of record," as they are called, and small-town weeklies.) Just call me Nostradamus. My afore-mentioned employer has been very slow to develop its Internet presence, much less apps for smart phones and touch pads. They seem to finally be dipping their toes in the social media. Meanwhile, they've been cutting positions and salaries like Johnny Depp in "The Demon Barber of Fleet Street."

So what's new in all this? Well, as my mind was wandering around, it occurred to me that even with all the adjustments the newsies are making to use new media, newspapers and magazines are doggedly hanging on to the printed page, even though that technology is sinking faster than the Andrea Doria (thought I was going to say Titanic, didn't you?) After salaries, ink and paper are the biggest expense a daily newspaper has. If these news outlets would jettison their printing, they'd have a windfall of money to invest in improving their staff and therefore their product. So there must be some reason they're hanging onto this deck chair, even though it's water-logged and dragging them down.

I think it's because the printed page is their last vestige of exclusivity. Anyone can blog, anyone can Tweet, anyone can become a clearing house of news links on the Internet (this essentially is what the Drudge Report is.) I have a friend who's been following the turmoil in North Africa via Twitter's news feed, and he's been better informed about the overall scene than reporters who are there. But not everyone can afford to print their product every day, or week or even month. That sets these old media outlets apart, and I think they're clinging to it as a mark of legitimacy and therefore power. But that's another thing they just don't get -- the new media has put the lie to press "objectivity" and the limits that printed pages (that is to say, space) put on news coverage. The same thing can be said about the limits (that is to say, time) put upon broadcast news. The old media is just inferior in every way. And it will die a tortured death if it doesn't recognize that soon.

Check out my page on Goodreads.

Comics are Serious Business

All through my childhood and well into my adult years, my dream job was to draw a newspaper comic strip. "Mac Quack: Corporate Duck" was my last attempt at this, and like all others, was universally hated by syndicates. But, like everything else, the electronic media has made newspaper comics an anachronism, and anyone can reach the world with their comics electronically now, if the world can find it. Also, if you are willing to take up the daily grind for no reward whatsoever.

So who cares? Nobody. I only bring it up because I recently bought another original of "Pogo" by Walt Kelly. The remarkable thing about this particular strip is the larger character inside the bag is Simple J. Malarkey, Kelly's caricature of Sen. Joe McCarthy during the height of McCarthyism. Kelly stood among only a handful in the media to publicly challenge McCarthy's innuendo and bullying. Communism was a real threat hanging over the country domestically and internationally during the '50s, but McCarthy's tactics were self-serving, unconstitutional and in the end served only to de-legitimize more measured efforts to protect the nation.

So this drawing is a part of certainly the most significant sequence Kelly did in more than 20 years of drawing the celebrated strip. I can't be sure, but it seems like this character appeared in only about 30 strips. Of course, here you can't see the character per se, but there's even a funny story behind that. There was another character, a chicken, who already had been established as a Rhode Island Red from Providence. When the caricature of McCarthy reappeared in mid-1954 (he had first appeared in 1953), the newspaper in Providence had declared that if his face showed up again they would drop "Pogo." So Kelly, who must have been working on a very short deadline, had Malarkey say "No one from Providence can see me" as the chicken approached, and put a bag over his head. The newspaper got the joke, but indeed Malarkey's face never appeared again.

This strip was relatively cheap, particularly for an example from the '50s. I think maybe the seller didn't know what she had. This feels like a piece of history to me.

The Was that Will Be

First, kudos to Walt Kelly and the fact that I could steal and pretty much destroy his title for this very important blog post.

Once upon a time, the publishing business didn't really exist. After Gutenberg's invention of the press, authors would pay printers to print and bind their works, and then they would deliver them to local bookstores for sale. There wasn't that much reading material available, so stores were happy to take whatever books they could get, and readers as well. So what came to be known as publishers were just a hired service, and authors made only what they could get stores to pay them for books. If the author couldn't afford printing costs, well, that was just too bad.

Somewhere along the way printers found that they could take on the costs of publishing, thereby attracting popular authors and make a tidy profit. I don't know how this came about, but I do know that Charles Dickens became widely popular by having his stories serialized in magazines, then afterwards published as full books when the audience was well established. This was the mid-1800s.

So who cares? Nobody. But it appears we're back at square one, as traditional publishers struggle to squeeze out a profit while thousands of would-be authors pay self-publishers to print and bind their books for a fee. The catch again is whether these authors can get bookstores to carry their books, now in a culture where not only is there no lack of reading material, but also the broad audience would rather watch Hulu than read anyway. The growth of e-readers will only increase this cacophony of information. This is where I am with "The Job", although I add the twist of being my own printer. How to get notice remains the greatest challenge.

Life is a "Cabaret", again

Watched "Cabaret" again for the first time in decades the other night, and I was struck by how modern it is. The movie came out in 1972, based on the Broadway musical of 1966, based on the 1951 play "I Am a Camera," based on the 1939 novel "Goodbye to Berlin," based on 1931 Wiemar Germany. The main thrust of the story is the decadent escapism of Berlin night life, offering  the people some release from the anxieties of daily life, punctuated by the militant rise of the Nazi party (National Socialists). Thrown in for good measure are homosexuality, abortion, alternative sex partnering, racism and political indifference within private life. The only issue of Wiemar Germany that is glossed over is the economic disaster of hyper-inflation and a worthless mark.

So I was watching it, and I'd see a character and say (quietly to myself) "Wow, she looks just like (insert current celebrity)", or I'd hear a line and say "That sounds just like (insert current political agenda)" or a scene would develop and I'd say "Wow, that's just like (insert current international ideology)". It was truly creepy. One musical number has the androgynous master of ceremonies singing about wanting to marry someone in a gorilla suit, and at the end tells the audience, "She doesn't look Jewish at all." There is even now a prominent group worldwide that describes Jews as pigs and apes.

The warning is that – although I doubt the movie makers intended this – the culture of the cabaret life was inviting the rise of fascism. It is a well-documented cycle that liberal (and I mean that in the classic sense) cultures devolve into hedonism which then gives rise within the population a desire for stricter authority. This is what "Cabaret" presents, and it is unmistakeably the condition of the western world today, in Europe even more so than the U.S. On top of that, the undermining of currency through government borrowing and printing of money (the head of the Federal Reserve a few months ago printed up hundreds of billions of dollars in hopes of creating inflation) will eventually further undermine the stability of our society. What large movement looms on the horizon today, ready to fill a vacuum and force discipline that current authorities are unwilling to enforce? You figure it out. In my mind, we need to get ahold of ourselves before it's too late, or our children might be living in a much-more unforgiving world.

I recommend "Cabaret" as a study of the western condition, and besides, the musical numbers are great. And I'm not generally a fan of musicals.