danblank

it’s a shame sometimes to see self-publishing so overwhelmed with people doing the same thing. You see more of the same kind of covers, more of the same kind of romance or science fiction. Why don’t you do something different with format? You can be as long or as short as you need it to be. You can be as serialized as you need it to be. Self-publishing doesn’t need to just be like, “Well, it’s an ebook novel and it looks just like what you’d see on the shelves,” or, unfortunately, in some cases, worse. So why not take some risks and get crazy with it? - danblank

The novelist talks us through his reluctant engagement with the digital age, and his strategies for escaping it - danblank

The key is to pick something to try and to see whether it connects with your readership and to learn as much as you can while you’re doing it. Often you end up evolving what you do to the point that it is a better fit for you and your blog – but you’ll never get to that point without starting. - danblank

In the introduction to this series, I admitted that imitating the rituals and habits of great artists is not going to make anyone suddenly capable of producing great art. But I do think there is some useful advice to be gleaned from these entries—not just for struggling artists but for anyone trying to get more done each day. - danblank

A publicist can send out between fifty and one hundred e-mails pitching people and maybe, if they are lucky, get a handful of replies. If it sounds dreadful, it is. No publicist worth her salt will guarantee results—she will, however, guarantee a herculean effort to get people to pay attention to your book. - danblank

Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it's to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential-as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth. You'll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you're doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you'll hear about them. - danblank

He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day. "After a few days you'll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You'll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain." - danblank

While we all may have our hunches that Google+ and Google Authorship influence our search results, I wanted to create a case study to better the SEO community by isolating the value of Google+ on search results. - danblank

IImagine a time before smartphones. Before laptops. Before Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and even the mighty Google. A world without Web browsers, when the Internet belonged to universities and going online meant logging onto a local electronic bulletin board. Now imagine being able to smell it all coming—not the details, but the impact of a networked world on culture, business, politics, daily life. These were the preconditions that spawned Wired. - danblank

For every outlier like myself or Bella Andre or Amanda Hocking, there must be hundreds of people doing well enough with their writing to pay a few bills. The more time I spent online in various writing forums, the more this hunch hardened into a real theory. People I interacted with every day were appearing on bestseller lists or emailing me for advice on handling calls from agents. The hundreds appeared to be thousands. And this could only be a fraction of the actual number. - danblank

And we should all stop saying, “if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product,” because it doesn’t really mean anything, it excuses the behavior of bad companies, and it makes you sound kind of like a stoner looking at their hand for the first time. - danblank

despite all the attention it was getting, sold maybe 10,000 copies. It wasn’t some sort of international publishing phenomenon. It was, at best, sort of a moderately successful indie-rock project. So I still had to do stuff like write promotional copy for Weight Watchers to support myself and pay my mortgage, which was relatively small. The year I quit the Reader, I made almost no money. Maybe $30,000. And I thought, “Aren’t I supposed to be a famous writer? Is this it? A drafty townhouse in Philadelphia?” So that pattern established itself for me over the years; I’d have a little success, let it go to my head, and then make some outrageous move to try and capitalize on that, and the move would come crashing down on my head. I would always get a little overexcited. - danblank

Frankly, this is difficult to do with even a traditionally-published novel. But there lies the third lesson: if you don’t have the publishing chops and don’t have any kind of inbuilt audience or signal boost, then traditional publishing is a smarter path. I don’t mean this universally, I just mean that self-publishing successfully takes a certain kind of reach and/or work ethic that doesn’t fit well with some folks. A publisher has that reach and that ethic (in theory) to carry your book forward in ways you could not or were not willing to explore. - danblank

Vine is like a mixture of Twitter, Instagram, and animated GIFs. Like Twitter, it limits length by design -- Vine limits video length to three to six seconds. Like Instagram, it allows users to easily and quickly create visuals and upload them to social networks. And like animated GIFs, Vines continuously loop in the iOS app and web interface and have high spreadability potential. - danblank

Is there something proprietary that takes place in a reader's mind once he or she has spent hours and hours reading a writer's words? Or an unwritten contract between the writer and reader that opening one's veins onto the page makes you blood brothers? The argument's been made that when writers write about a certain subject -- particularly in memoir --they're asking for it. - danblank

Today I'm really happy to announce a new milestone for Goodreads: We are joining the Amazon family. We truly could not think of a more perfect partner for Goodreads as we both share a love of books and an appreciation for the authors who write them. We also both love to invent products and services that touch millions of people. - danblank

Before they were legends... - danblank

Our future economic development no longer turns on pumping resources mindlessly out of the ground or tearing up the environment to build houses on the suburban periphery. Real economic growth and development turns on the development of the full talents and capabilities of all our workers in high-tech, knowledge and creative fields, and in factories, farms, and services. And the places that are best suited to that task are our dense, innovative cities—our greatest innovation of all. - danblank

From Game of Thrones to the new Arrested Development, television is better than ever. And it’s not just a lucky accident. Turns out that networks and advertisers are using all-new metrics to design hit shows. Under these new rules, Twitter feeds are as important as ratings, fresh ideas beat tired formulas, and niche stars can be as valuable as big names. Case in point: Mad Men and Community’s Alison Brie. - danblank

Beyond the immediate concern over prices, publishers also worry that the disappearance of the physical bookstore could endanger the entire book business, even (ironically) Amazon. Research has shown that readers don’t tend to use online bookstores to discover books; they use them to purchase titles they find out about elsewhere—frequently at physical stores. - danblank

Compared to a relatively quiet environment (50 decibels), a moderate level of ambient noise (70 dB) enhanced subjects' performance on the creativity tasks, while a high level of noise (85 dB) hurt it. Modest background noise, the scientists explain, creates enough of a distraction to encourage people to think more imaginatively. (Here's a helpful chart on typical noise levels.) - danblank

Together, Cutie and Harry "PopPop" Cooper blogged as The OGs, sharing stories in text, photos and videos about Boyle Heights, their travel adventures abroad, and advice on staying together. - danblank

A big part of it in my opinion it comes down to culture. If you have one remote worker and 35 local workers, that’s a problem because there’s a real disconnect between people at the office and that one lone person. The culture splinters into the “here” culture and the “there” culture. It becomes almost like there are two companies, and that’s what you have to avoid. - danblank

Most people at the conference also seemed to be in love with ideas, full stop; with the value of ideas, and the value of intellectual discourse and discovery. - danblank