media | Ian M Rountree

The Future of Media – Dowager Shadow

February 21, 2011 by Ian 2 Comments

I’m writing a novel. But it won’t be Tor, Orion, or Bantam Press publishing my work; it’ll be me.

Chris Brogan just dropped a perfect opportunity for me to hold myself to account here. You see, I’ve missed my deadline for having the promotional site for the book up. It was supposed to be finished on February 2nd, with some content available to act as a teaser for the actual volume coming in summer. Nearly a month late, I still have 10 hours of work to do on the promo site, and no time budgeted to it.

Before you finish reading this, jump out and read/ watch Chris’ video post, The Future of Media.

Back? Good. Now I’ll explain.

The Dowager Shadow, which I’ve spoken of before here, is a fantasy fiction parallax that has been where I’ve put most of my energy for the last four years. It started making its way from ongoing roleplay to novel with 2008’s National Novel Writing Month – my co-author Leila and I smashed the 50k word barrier easily, and immediately had what amounts to a full first volume of book.

Last year, I began publishing the novel as a serial – you can still read some of it on dowagershadow.com until I get the new site up, but I warn you, the manuscript has seen a lot of editing since then.

Here’s what you’ll see once the new site is actually up, and I’ve got the manuscript finished and produced:

The first volume will be available for purchase as an eBook, with built in interactivity like an appendix, maps, and other information.
In addition to each volume, there will be a few rounds of shorter stories available for free through Pay With a Tweet. This will take care of some of the promotion of the book.
Each subsequent volume will be released in two ways: stand-alone purchase, or bundled with the previous volumes, each of which will have been updated with information pertinent to the new volume.
There will be a print version, produced through a self-publisher, which can be ordered alongside the eBook. I’m aiming to have two production runs per year for the physical artifact.

It sounds like a lot, but it’s really no more work than this blog.

Building interactivity into a book is a very new media thing. It’s the kind of thing that’s going on all over the place. Usually, though, it’s products like Digging Into WordPress. However, given the success of products like DigWP, and the many thousands of well produced eBooks out there, I can’t help but see this kind of thing as the future of media.

We’re going far beyond the entrepreneurial journalism that blogging has been for the last decade, and moving into an era of entrepreneurial publishing of all flavours. That, I believe, is the future of media.

Children's Games and Social Media

January 8, 2010 by Ian 1 Comment

I was always crap at Simon Says. I was the kid who could only ever think of three things to have people do – stand up, sit down, run in place – and I’ve learned to mark this down to both an inability to develop internal go-to lists, and a dislike of having to issue mindless rapid-fire commands. Yet as I watch people tweet their lives away sometimes I wonder exactly how useful these skills are in real life? Like learning trigonometry, I had always figured it was something to get good at or avoid, but now I’m not so sure.

Like it or not, Social Media is here to stay. I hope someone comes up with a better, permanent term for what’s going on, because I dislike that buzzword, but there you are. I’m fortuitous to be getting into networking just now, because I have a nearly three year old son, and while considering the things we need to make sure he learns, at the same time I’m watching the foibles of high-powered people online, and seeing a lot of parallel.

One of the many things I dislike about Twitter’s ecosphere is the MLM phenomenon. It sounds like a pyramid scheme on the outside (and runs like one) but the behavior of the people involved, or at least the visible output of the bots, looks an awful lot like Simon Says. Rapid fire information with little available content driving people who are unlucky enough to get sucked in to useless products or a hookup to the scheme. It’s a social failing, but it’s one of those pendulum behaviors – those who understand just enough are exploiting those who don’t yet know.

How many pundit blogs do you read? I don’t specifically mean political pundits, I mean Apple and Google and Microsoft fanboy blogs as well. Notice anything about their habits? Suggesting certain new products, dropping bombs on others. For some reason this always reminds me of Red Light, Green Light.

The less said about Michael Arrington’s apparent tabloidism the better – but the entire leak culture feels like one big game of telephone.

Corporate recruiting feels a bit like Red Rover.

It’s amazing how often this kind of thing happens. Perhaps it’s early training, rearing it’s head on our adult lives. On the other hand, like just about anything, when you know just enough about how these habits form, you can exploit them. And when that gets old, you can become a benefactor and teach others either to exploit the habits, or how to avoid having these habits exploited.

Until you know where your habits come from, and what the tells are, how are you going to ensure you’re not being taken advantage of?

Otherwise, it’s duck-duck goose, and someone’s got their eye on turning you into the next goose.

Photo by Mykl Roventine

The Mental Disadvantage of Intentional Deviance

December 27, 2009 by Ian 5 Comments

Boxing day was a bust. We spent much of the day trying to figure out why, and we came up with a few answers. It’s come down to either: (a) everyone knows Boxing Day sales are incredible, but also doesn’t want to be part of the crush; or (b) everyone went to the big box stores; or (c) everyone shopped online.

It’s perfectly possible Amazon and other e-tailers could have had awesome one-day-only deals. Even though there’s so much fuss over Cyber Monday, Boxing Day is a universally recognized deal-grab that any business dealing with the public would be stupid to not take advantage of. This is altogether likely, and I don’t have the stats, but I don’t think I could be as frustrated with that; it’s not because online shopping is killing retail, it’s because ecommerce is an entirely different industry selling a similar product. It’s like comparing journalism to copywriting – same product, worlds apart.

Well, sure, lots of people go to big box stores for the great deals – doorcrashers have been a way of life for them for years, whereas my chain is only three years into the Great Door Crasher trend. But one of my colleagues figured that one box store has, maybe, 13 of a given TV which means a hundred people will go and 87% miss out. We, however, have four locations for each of their single monoliths, and if we have four TVs per location, it means there’s actually a much MUCH larger percentage chance you’ll get what you want from us. But if a TV goes Doorcrasher in a boutique, does it make a sale?

We ended up asking a couple of people, by the end of the day. And it turns out most people know – deeply believe – that boxing day in the malls will be idiotically busy, and try to avoid it unless absolutely necessary. One customer even called it Pugilist Day – needless to say, we lost our hats laughing.

But is this the case?

There’s a gap, where everyone avoids an action because “everyone else” will be doing it. People avoid entrepreneurship because it’s already done. Shoppers avoid the busy days, because they want to avoid the crowds more than they want to take advantage of the deals. As the actions and their consequences scale upwards, the result of this intentional deviance gets bigger, and eventually we see what we had yesterday: malls with no one in them on the biggest shopping day of the year.

I almost wish I was at the shop today to see if everyone who avoided coming in yesterday showed up today; that’s the other result. If everyone takes the road less travelled, you still end up in the middle of the pack. But of course, you can’t see this because the pack surrounds you, and for all you know the other road holds ten times the number of people.

Being different just like everyone else – isn’t always a good idea.