Blog – Page 88 – The Designer Monologues

December 4, 2013

Insurgent Creative: Matt Wallace’s First Year

Matt Wallace is a former professional wrestler, and current novelist, screenwriter and all-around purveyor of awesomeness. A year ago, he decided to release his novel, The Failed Cities, independently.

Today, he posts an examination of the first year of the book’s release, providing a look at sales numbers, his promotional and production choices, and more, all with links to additional posts discussing the various decision points along the past 12 months.

One of the interesting elements in his Year One study is his thoughts on collaboration with traditional publishing — where the author releases the digital, and contracts with a publisher for the print edition. He sees this as a model that is coming, despite his own experiences with trying to lead the horse to water:

I decided to use The Failed Cities as a proof-of-concept and pitch another book to larger publishers. I sent several proposals to some mid-range publishers basically saying, “Hey, I did this, we sold this many. I can produce/promote digital copies. You can produce physical copies. They’ll each promote and feed the other.”

They reacted like I was insane, of course. Publishers make huge bank off digital rights at the moment. They share criminally little of it with authors who are in general ignorant, frightened, and happy to give their money away. Publishers aren’t giving that up to some schmuck with a few thousand sales.

Only it’s not insane. It’s not insane at all. Louis CK did the exact same thing with HBO with his last one-hour special. He told them they could buy and broadcast the special, but he needed to be able to retain and sell the digital himself. It wasn’t worth it to him otherwise. If they didn’t agree he’d walk. They agreed.

He’s Louis CK and I’m Matt Wallace so the publishers told me to go screw. I get that. My numbers are too small and it’s too soon.

I’m of the opinion that this is a business model that a lot of smaller publishers should be looking into — partnering with author-publishers on the release of print editions of independently-released ebooks. Not the old “vanity press” model, where authors are duped into fronting the costs of production and un-distributed books end up filling the author’s garage, but a true business partnership — publishers licensing the rights to an existing work, to handle the production and distribution of the print edition. The large publishing houses are more interested in partnering with scummy scam artists like Author Solutions, so it will have to be the smaller publishers who move quickly and offer this valuable service — and it’s already starting to happen (as demonstrated by Wallace’s release of a limited edition hardcover of The Failed Cities in partnership with Murky Depths).

So head on over and check out his Year One report. Being an Insurgent Creative is all about being able to adapt, and having more information makes that process much easier. Be small, think big, move fast.

November 23, 2013

Fifty Years

My favorite television show is older than I am. I’m a bit of a Johnny-Come-Lately — when I started watching Doctor Who, it had already been on the air for a dozen years. A baker’s dozen, in fact — appropriate, since when I first saw the show, in the bicentennial year of 1976, Tom Baker was portraying the Fourth Doctor. I was living in upstate New York, and this was before the widespread import of the show into America, via Public Television stations, which would occur across the country in 1978-79. No, one of the local UHF stations would show 2 episodes back-to-back on Sunday mornings, part of the Time-Life television syndication package — complete with awful voice-overs from Howard DeSilva over the beginning of each episode, explaining the strange goings-on to my fellow benighted colonials.

The first thing that I remember was the title sequence, like nothing I’d seen before. Strange streaming patterns of energy, the staring, unsmiling face of a man, and an ornate title logo that looked like stained glass, all accompanied by this eerie music: haunting, howling, urgent. It scared me more than a little bit — but not the kind of fright that made me turn away. (In later years, in fact, this reaction would be shared by my oldest daughter, who, as a toddler, would shout out “SCARY MUSIC!” whenever she heard the theme.)

The first episode that I clearly remember watching was “The Pyramids of Mars” — still my favorite Doctor Who story of all time, a mix of H.G. Wells and Hammer-horror Egyptology. I was, quite simply, hooked.

The show has been a constant in my life ever since. One of the first short stories I ever wrote featured a Krynoid (from “The Seeds of Doom”). My first TV-star crush was Elisabeth Sladen, who portrayed the Doctor’s companion, Sarah Jane Smith. When my parents told me, at age 14, that we’d be moving to Kansas, I was in my room, watching Episode 3 of “The Pyramids of Mars” on a beat-up old black-and-white set with rabbit ears. I met my best friend during a high school chemistry class, when he noticed that I was reading a copy of Doctor Who Magazine. Watching Doctor Who and playing the RPG published by FASA filled weekends and summers through high school and into college. The night my first child was born, “The Pirate Planet” was playing on a hospital TV.

During the period of from 1989 to 2005, even when there was no new Who to watch (aside from the 1996 Fox-produced TV pilot), there was still more Who to be had — novels featuring the most recent Doctors (Sylvester McCoy’s 7th, before the TV movie, Paul McGann’s 8th afterward) kept the adventure going. Novels featuring earlier Doctors filled in gaps in the past. At the turn of the century, when I was living in New York City, new dramatic performances featuring past Doctors, produced by Big Finish as audio plays, accompanied me on endless subway rides.

Then the show came back… and impossibly, became a global hit. Doctor Who was on TV again — everywhere. The show had a big budget, and the same wonderful writing that has always been its core. Christopher Eccleston’s war-wounded lonely 9th Doctor gave way (too soon — I still want more) to David Tennant’s hipster genius geek 10th Doctor, who began to rival the 4th as my favorite. The 10th became the 11th with Matt Smith, in a top-to-bottom tonal reinvention of the show that played upon the theme of classic fairy tales — wondrous, but with a darkness lurking at the edges.

I then had the opportunity to fulfill a lifelong dream of writing for Doctor Who, when my colleagues at Cubicle 7 Entertainment offered me the chance to produce material for the Adventures in Time and Space role-playing game. (As an aside, I would still love to write for a Big Finish audio, or a Doctor Who novel, so, y’know, if you’re reading this and can make that happen, drop me a line…).

For a nerd of my generation, who used to have to explain why we loved Doctor Who, who were often, dare I say it, embarrassed by our devotion to a show originally intended for children, the newfound popularity of Doctor Who is still something shocking. It still gives me pause to see Doctor Who merchandise in mainstream shops, to see non-outcast kids who love the show, who embrace the ethos of a clever individualist hero, saving the universe with moral authority and without irony. The show has gotten flashier — more streamlined, faster-paced, bigger — but the core of it has not, mercifully, changed. As Craig Ferguson famously said, it remains a show about the triumph of intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism.

Happy 50th, Doctor Who… and thank you.

November 12, 2013

Insurgent Creative: Independence

Valuable advice from filmmaker Gary Hustwit, excerpted from Tell Me Something: Advice from Documentary Filmmakers:

“Embrace the idea of releasing your work yourself, without a film distributor or record label or book publisher or other middleman involved. Don’t listen to people who try to convince you that you need them in order to get your work out there. You don’t.

The Internet is such an incredible gift to creative artists, one that allows us to reach the people who want our work directly. But I’m amazed at how quickly some people want to give that gift back and let someone else control how their art reaches the audience, and how they’re compensated for that art.

Build a direct relationship with the people who want to see your work, and run your own small company to produce and distribute it. I know, to some of you that doesn’t sound like a good thing. But it is. You might be thinking, I don’t want to be a businessperson. I’m an artist; I just want to focus on the creative stuff. Well, if you want to keep creating, you need to know where the funds are coming from. I know it sounds like a lot of work and responsibility dealing with the business issues yourself, but you’ll be much more knowledgeable about your industry if you learn how it works through doing it.

Yes, it would be convenient to hand off these responsibilities to someone else. But if your goal as an artist is to be self-sustaining – that is, to be able to work on whatever projects you want to without anyone else’s approval, and be able to make a living from that work – then I don’t really see any alternative. A catalog of work that you create over your career, and that you retain full rights to, is a long-term asset that will continue to benefit you in ways you can’t even imagine right now.”

To which I would only add:

The creative work is the hard part, and you’re already doing that. Building direct relationships with people who enjoy what you create? Running a small company to produce and distribute your own stuff? That’s comparatively simple.