Quick Lit
Monday, 14 January 2008
On an otherwise uneventful summer morning in 2003 I sat down in front of my computer and started writing a short story. After 30 minutes of typing I was done. I sent the story to a friend and went about my day.
The next morning I woke up, stared into a blank screen and wrote another story. The morning after I did the same.
This went on for a 146 consecutive days, at the end of which I had written Nanotales, my first book - http://www.nanotales.net
I never intended to write a book. I always found it incredibly hard to focus on anything for more than a few minutes at a time and I knew, from reading about the art of writing, that books aren't written during coffee breaks. Most authors wake up in the morning and go to work. They write for 8 or 9 hours and then they go home.
And so once the book was written, I had no intentions of publishing it and never got around to looking for an agent.
About a year later, I met up with a director friend of mine for coffee. I told him about a few eBooks I had just finished (one on innovation, the other on future trends) and he asked whether it was cool to send these to a publisher he knew.
Next thing I know, I get a call from the publisher...
"I like the way you write," he said, "but I don't do business publishing. Have you ever written anything else?"
"Emmm, I've written a few short stories..." I muttered, disappointed. "Well, send them over," he said.
To cut a short story even shorter, I sent him my stories and Nanotales, a collection of 83 short short stories, came out in February 2007.
There was a bit of a media frenzy when the book came out. Traditionally, there's no market for short stories. Bookstores don't sell them, so people don't buy them, so publishers don't publish them. There was also a lot of talk about whether literature as we know it is dying (reading stats in the UK for teenagers are dismal).
The most common question I got asked in interviews was whether I thought Nanotales and its kin would kill traditional, long-form writing. Clearly, the answer is no. But if people have less and less free time on their hands, why isn't the publishing world adapting and giving them what they want, instead of whining about the future of the book?"
That ticked off a few people, but I love reading novels. I just finished Sarah Gruen's Water for Elephants and I'm loving Khaled Hosseini's new book. But what's wrong with providing the attention deficit audience a fast, quality literary experience (assuming, of course, you think what I wrote is quality...).
Increasingly, all sorts of experiences are being programmed by the people formerly known as "the audience" and increasingly it is they, and not the traditional gatekeepers of culture, who are now defining what "quality" means.
Ziv Navoth is a London-based writer, consultant and trend spotter
Financial fitness and dehydration techniques
Friday, 07 December 2007
Aaron Patzer was in Atomic's media studio yesterday working on an upcoming podcast series - stand by for that. Aaron is founder and CEO of Mint (www.mint.com) the fresh new place to manage your money online and winner of best presenting company at TechCrunch40 2007 and Finovate 2007. We learned some interesting things between segments. For one thing, Aaron was at Princeton with author, blogger and affiliate marketing whiz Tim Ferris (www.fourhourworkweek.com) who somewhat hilariously applied controlled super de- and re-hydration techniques in his successful bid to win the Chinese National Kickboxing Championship. On an oddly related note, Aaron won his weight division in a local Evanston, Illinois bodybuilding competition when he was 17, then immediately retired from the sport. Dehydration plays a part there too, but for a different reason.
A grand time for Music
Friday, 08 June 2007
The story of why the music industry is dying at record speed is old news. By now if you still believe that the music industry is still just trying to "recover" you are most likely more pathetic then the industry itself. The old men in the stogy walled gardens let the place catch on fire. Yes Rome is burning and it ain't coming back. So if the music industry is a poster child on how not to move w/ the times, adopt new technology and be able to reinvent itself, Why is it a grand time for music?
The creation, development and distribution of music now starts with the musician. This is an incredible shift from the past and present where the record company owned the intellectual material (appropriately known as the "Master"). The musician now owns his intellectual material and licenses and distributes in a way true to their intent and artistic vision (check out how Trent Reznor released 9 inch nail's last effort). A more viral natural distribution through conversation. thus distribution is straight from source to the appreciator or fan who immediately gets to enter the conversation, in fact they are the conversation (www.purevolume.com, http://www.buzznet.com, http://www.pampelmoose.com to name a few) .
When a record company gave a large advance, expectations were really high on both sides of the equation. The musician feels like they have creatively signed a part of their life away, pressured to come up w/ hits on the slight chance they will sell through their advance. The company demanding hits to pay back their huge investment. It's not that the record companies lacked and idea of how to market the package good. They failed to recognize the conversation. They missed the boat of inter connectivity -- the idea that we want to keep engaged, we wanna interact, we wanna be Socially and culturally networked.
The conversation recognizes the package good. It has a place over in the merchandise section next to tee shirts and hats. Its cool. Its the by-product not the product. The music is distributed through conversation. The music, or our connection, does not stop when the CD ends or the last note on stage is played. The conversation keeps going because we are connected. 50% of the youth finds out about their entertainment online. The news is it is not about justifying the middleman, the A+R exec the middle level management exec caught in the corporate justification of inefficiency and love for the package good. It's about freedom to be plugged in, to interconnect and start conversing. The music is out of its bottle. BTW what makes things really scary is the fear of what unknown is about to come our way... just ask any record exec what they thought of Napster the first time they experienced it...."
-- Martin Shore is the founder of Social Capital Entertainment, an innovative independent entertainment studio with a diverse portfolio of projects spanning film, music and interactive entertainment. SCE is the producer of the recently released film "Snoop Dogg's Hood of Horror". Martin is also a successful real estate entrepreneur; recognized by Ernst & Young as runner up for its California Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 1998.
