Over at Vertical, Inc., they're in the process of setting up a bunch of new licensing requests - some of them in-house items, some gleaned from wishlists provided by fans. I didn't figure they could talk specifics - like Criterion and most other media companies of their ilk, they tend to remain tightlipped about what's been licensed until all the ( Read more... )

During a discussion with someone else about giving things away that you'd normally charge for, this insight came up: When you take the price tag off something, you deprive most people of the easiest way they have to gauge its value.

I meet a lot of folks at cons who aren't rich, but they've often doing okay and are at the con because they can ( Read more... )

Two ends of the spectrum. Or maybe better to say two pieces of it.

On the one hand, there is Cat Valente's impassioned defense of traditional publishing over the freemium money-later model, where (in her purview) a few short-term gains are weak compensation for a long-term denaturing of publishing as a whole.

Then there is C.E. Murphy's notions ( Read more... )

Manohla Dargis argues for a new way to make - and more importantly, market, independent films:

Independent Cinema - Poised for a D.I.Y. Revolution - NYTimes.com
... filmmakers who use Facebook to sell their movies aren’t simply partaking in a social-networking fad; they are trying to create a more complex, interactive and personalized relationship ( Read more... )

Among the usual roundup of links in this week's AICN Anime installment, there are several overviews of the industry in general. The word is not good, and a lot of that is because Japan remains hidebound by old-school ways of doing business.

SOFT POWER, HARD TALK / Is this the year Japan jumps the shark?

When I raised the possibility that ( Read more... )

The book publishers are making the same mistake the music industry did: they assume the customer is an adversary.

Wary Book Publishers Are Fighting the Future - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

The publishers seem to be picking a fight with the wrong team: their customer. They are punishing the people who buy their content instead of making it simple for ( Read more... )

Among the books I picked up during a one-dollar spree at The Strand a while back is a nifty little volume entitled Off-Hollywood: The Making and Marketing of Independent Films. The emphasis is as much on the marketing as it is the making - that is, the process of finding money for the project, the logistics of creating it, the often knotty problems ( Read more... )

Sometime in the coming year I may end up getting back to work on a project I never finished. Tentatively titled Vajra, it was my NaNo project for 2007; it fell short of the needed word count for the month and I ended up shelving it and turning attention to other things. But once it's finished and retitled, it'll be the third book I've written, more ( Read more... )