All posts by stephen

consumers, economics, writer's life

Marketing on Instagram vs Twitter

Two months ago, I started selling my own clothes online as “Skrap Apparel on Etsy.” I don’t have a marketing budget per se, so I’m trying to find organic reach through Twitter and Instagram. I set up new accounts on each (Insta. Twitter.) and I have about the same amount of followers (less than 20).

Recent ad on Twitter

Whenever I have a new article of clothing to promote, I make a post and put it on both Twitter and Instagram. As my accounts are new, and I’m not paying to promote, I only get a dozen or so views on each platform.

BUT…

My results so far have been surprising and not at all equal.

According to Etsy, my store has gotten 84 visits from people “visiting directly”, which means they’ve had to type out or copy/paste the URL. And only 4 from clicks from Twitter, which Etsy can identify because they are clickable links. Now those 84 ‘direct visits’, where someone has had to copy-paste the URL, are, I believe, from the only place I’m posting my URL in an clickable format: Instagram posts.

So, with the same minimal exposure, I’m getting 21 visits to my shop from Instagram users for every 1 visit from a Twitter user, even though it’s easier to click and visit from Twitter.

Same ad on isntagram

Now one obvious advantage of Instagram is the character limit. With a message geared towards Twitter, I have a lot of room for hashtags on Instagram, and I keep lists of ones that work.

So maybe I’m finding my audience there, whereas I’m not on finding them on Twitter. That’s possible, but that’s also because Twitter chooses to constrain my ability to reach out, forcing me to do more work there to hopefully find a similar result. It’s not worth my time right now to do that.

So, how dos this all convert to sales? It hasn’t much yet, not enough to make any conclusions. I’ve had some problems with Etsy and pricing, you can read about it all here.

errata

The Problem with Etsy

Ok, I’m trying to sell clothes on Etsy.

The key word here is Trying, because Etsy makes it almost impossible for me to know if I’ll ever make money on a sale or if selling on Etsy is a losing game.

So let’s start with a product, Men’s Swimming Trunks. These have a unique design of my own making. The cost to me for each one is $35 (all prices US$).

Etsy’s going to charge me 20¢ to list each item, including each time an item sells and I want it to remain listed.

Ok, now my total cost per sale is $35.20 (this will change).

Etsy also has a transaction fee, which does make sense, they are after all processing the credit card and in essence taking that risk. But the actual transaction fee is hard to calculate. It may be $3.50 per sale, but as a new operator, it is either $6.50 per sale or $6.50 per sale on top of the $3.50 (they’re very much NOT clear which).

So now my cost is somewhere between $38.70-$45.20 for each item sold.

But wait, there’s more.

As my item’s list price needs to be over $35 (or I lose money), Etsy won’t promote it unless I absorb the shipping cost for US customers (“Free Shipping”). This cost is at a minimum $4. it can be as high as $6.00 per item.

So now each sale of my swimming trunks cost me $42.70-51.20 to sell. If I charge anything less than $51.20, I may lose money.

But wait, there’s more.

Etsy automatically enrolled me in their “offsite ads” program. This allows them to promote my products on Google and Facebook. If any sale comes from one of those ads, Etsy will charge me an addition 15% on the sale. That’s another $7.68 on a sale of $51.20. So the cost to me to sell $35 board shorts could be as high as $58.88 per unit.

That’s with me breaking even, making neither a profit nor taking a loss.

If I want to make even $2 per sale, I have to charge $61.

First, who’s going to buy swimming trunks at $61?

Second, is $2 per sale worth it? Maybe to start. It is a 3.2% profit margin. Retail is supposed to target 7%, which would mean my price would have to be $64. That’s unrealistic.

Possible solutions, cost cutting.

It isn’t easy to get unenrolled from the “offsite ads” program. The link they send you in an email telling you that they’ve enrolled you, doesn’t work. To opt out, you need to find it. It’s not under Marketing, Finances, or Integrations. I found it under Settings. I’m out.

That allows me to get down to a $51.20 break even point.

I’m assuming that they’re charging me $6.50 per sale, not $10. That gets my break even down to $47.70 (and eventually $44.70 if the fee goes down to $3.50).

I’ll also project my shipping cost as $4 (not $6) for now. That brings my cost down to $45.70 ($42.70 eventually). I’m currently listing those swimming trunks at $46.95. I’d love the sticker price to be lower, but then Etsy won’t let me make any money.

Possible solutions, go elsewhere.

My best solution would be “Don’t be on Etsy.” I never intended to be on Etsy.

I built my own store in WordPress, using WooCommerce and Stripe. I connected it to my production partner in California. Things worked. We were about to launch. Then WooCommerce updated their WordPress plugin and (coincidentally?) everything broke. I can’t sell. The link between my partner and my store is broken. No one can tell me if or when it will be fixed (it’s been 10 days). I’m dead in the water.

I explored moving to Shopify. What a nightmare they are. Their “free trial” is only 3 days long and doesn’t fully work until you buy a plan. Even in the exceedingly frustrating and limited ‘actually free’ trial it became obvious that if I wanted my store to look and function as it had in WordPress, I’d have to pay way more than the lowest plan. Losses I’d either have to absorb or pass on in higher prices.

So I’m stuck on Etsy, charging more than I want and making less for it.

Cranberry Wizard Swimming Trunks, only available at Etsy (for now)
Solo, Star Wars, The Force Awakens, The Rise of Skywalker

How Did Han’s Death Change Chewie?

There’s a moment in the Last Jedi when Chewie breaks down Luke’s door. Luke starts to say something, then pauses. “Wait, where’s Han?”

It’s a moment with a lot of weight; Luke seeing Chewie and recognising that Han should’ve been there, too. In fact, it’s why Chewie was there.

Rey had already proven that she could fly the Falcon well and by herself. In fact her first command of the Falcon is the last high point in the ship’s history. Even Lando doesn’t get to do anything cool with it.

But to the point, Rey didn’t need Chewie to come along, and if her plan to be trained by Luke held, then Chewie would have a long wait on the planet.

So why’d he come? Because when your best friend dies, you should be the bearer of the bad news, not someone Luke’s never met before.

There’s the added layer that Chewie was Ben’s godfather, Luke was Ben’s trainer, and Ben killed his own father. Chewie had the opportunity to kill Ben, right then and there, but couldn’t do it. That too is something he’d want to tell Luke.

That little moment of realisation on Luke’s part is one of the great pay-offs of this universe. However, there are no ramifications of it, which seems to cheapen the moment.

But what of Chewie? Basically he’s done the last act he needs to for Han. He’s a free agent, his life debt paid off. Of course he chooses to stay in the fight and not just return to Kashyyyk. He cares about Princess Leia and Luke. He may even care about the struggle, having seen the empire’s impact on his homeworld.

But is Chewie changed by Han’s death?

I’d like to think that Chewie is a bit more of a risk-taker after Han dies. We have the impression that Chewie checked Han’s crazier impulses, but I think the opposite was also true, that Chewie sometimes gave in to his impulses, and Han (or Leia) reeled him in.

Think of Chewie growling at Vader or strangling Lando on the cloud city.

Without Han, Chewie got less risk-adverse, and he got caught by the First Order for it. And as an aside, his apparent death should have been his actual death. It’s not like they did anything else with his character after that moment.

Chewie was often an under-utilized character, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t have feelings or never changed.

Asimov, Cats, ChatGPT, Creativity, critical thinking, Dune, economics, education, Politics, Social Discourse

Experiments with ChatGPT

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As both a creative person and an educator I wanted explore ChatGPT and how it is going to impact my work and life. Without any real plan, I asked it twelve questions. Both my questions and the answers got better as I learned the interface.

I started with a simple task: write a blog post.

1) I asked ChatGPT to write a blog post of about 500 words on the topic of space tourism, with an emphasis on NEO hotels.
Here is its answer.

I took the same basic topic and turned it into a simple compare and contrast essay question:

2) Weigh the benefits and costs of space tourism as it relates to both environmental and fiscal health of the Earth.
Here is its answer.

As a creative person, I next asked it to compare software tools for writers.

3) Compare the benefits of various software tools designed for creative writers.
Here is its answer.

4) What are the best tools to format a manuscript into an epub? Which is the best and why?
Here is its answer.

It failed to offer anything more than marketing copy as an answer. There was no opinion given, or when given was conditional to the point of useless.

Then I went into teacher-mode and asked a series of social studies questions:

5) How has the Chinese government tried to suppress knowledge of what happened in Tienanmen Square in 1989?
Here is its answer.

6) Is China’s “Belt and Road” initiative good for partner countries? Why or why not?
Here is its answer.

7) Has Brexit benefited or hurt the UK?
Here is its answer.

8) Is Western Sahara a sovereign state or a dependency of Morocco? Cite your sources for the opinion you give.
Here is its answer.

Again, the answers were factual but lacked detail and were offered at the highest level only. The Brexit question had the weakest answer, as it seems to think that Brexit is a future event with no results apparent as of yet. It never cited results for its non-opinion on Western Sahara.

9) What are the arguments against declawing cats?
Here is its answers.

On the declawing your cat question, I clicked “Regenerative Response”, which creates a second attempt that builds on the first. It was better, and is below the first.

Then I reverted to creative mode:

10) Write a story of about 700 words about a gambler in a casino on the moon and what happens to him when he loses a bet he can’t pay.
Here are its stories.

Interestingly, ChatGPT’s first take on this was solid, but a “regenerative response” was much better.

I tried again, with a different idea:

11) Write a story of about 700 words that uses Isaac Asimov’s three laws of robotics as a plot point.
Here is its story.

The story was complete and original, but was simple in structure and contained no dialogue.

Lastly, I tried it out on fan fiction:

12) Tell the tale of Paul Atreide’s first love on Caladan.
Here is its story.

The AI understood who he was, and who his family was, but then it took a left turn, rather than giving a previously unknown prequel love interest, it put Chani on Caladan and began messing up facts of the story.

My conclusions:

It’s not there yet.

For a simple middle or secondary school essay (maybe grades 7-9), it does a decent job of giving an overview. It has a hard time stating an opinion, preferring to give both sides and then waffle on the conclusion.

It also can miss huge areas: one the cons of space tourism, the environmental impact of the fuel used was completely ignored, with ‘space junk’ substituted. That’s a valid concern, but not the only one, and possibly not the top one.

When it came to writing fiction, it has story structure down pat, and frankly, the “regenerative response” added a lot of complexity to the story. BUT… there’s no dialogue, and the story is all ‘tell’ with not ‘show’. The stories read a lot like Aesop’s Fables, even often ending with a ‘moral of the story’.

As a storyteller, I’m not worried about its impact yet. But it may become a threat (or a tool) in the future. The threat, that a crowded market gets even more crowded with AI-generated stories. A tool in that it may assist writers with writer’s block.

As an educator, the simplest fix is to insist, even at lower levels, that students cite sources, something that ChatGPT does not do.

Nomad, Social Discourse, society

Uncomfortable Public Embarrassment

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You don’t really know uncomfortable public embarrassment until Japanese business people have apologised to you. Seriously, it’s off-putting.

Let me tell you the tale…

I’m not sure how much detail to state, but I guess I do have to name the corporation and give at least a broad outline of the circumstances.

While I was working as a media contact for an African educational charity, I was approached by a reporter from NHK who wanted to interview a specific student on a timely topic. Normally this would be no problem, but the student in question needed to study for the British A-Level exams. Management at the charity had decided that to protect our students, we were enforcing a full media blackout until after the exam period (a number of students were local media celebrities).

As per our decision, which I fully endorsed, I denied the reporter the opportunity to interview the student. Somehow during our conversation the reporter learned when I’d be off-campus.

She showed up at our campus while I was away, convinced the guards I’d OK’d the interview (they’re not supposed to let anyone in unaccompanied, but she’s a small, polite Japanese woman who knew the right names to say…what harm could she do?) Having gotten past the guards, she convinced reception to contact the principal, and convinced the principal (again, dropping my name often) that I had approved this.

The principal pulled the student out of class for the interview. Now, there was nothing wrong with the interview content, per se. But we hadn’t approved it, and no adult was there to protect the student’s interests (also part of our protocols) had anything arisen.

When I arrived the next day, reception told me about the interview (she found it weird that I wasn’t present), and shit hit the fan in all directions. I got in trouble, the receptionist got in trouble, the principal got in trouble, and a guard got fired.

I was livid. I called reporter’s manager at NHK’s Johannesburg bureau and laid into him about what she’d done. He claimed no knowledge, apologized and hung up.

The next day, the guards call me, there’s three people from NHK at the gate wanting to see me. It was the reporter, her editor, and the manager. He’d brought the other two to force them to apologize to me and the receptionist (the principal chose not to participate, damn her.)

So we stood there while each of the NHK people, in frank from lowest to highest, took turns apologising and bowing to us, ending with the manager’s apology and about two minutes of all three bowing repeatedly in unison until the manager decided that they’d bowed enough.

Being the recipient of the bowing was awkward at first, but the longer it went on, the more it transitioned to embarrassing. Two minutes is a long time to stand silently while people bow to you. Perhaps we were supposed to ask them to stop? I don’t know. It’s not my culture.

Towards the end, it almost felt like the manager kept bowing to punish us as much as his staff.

When they finally departed, the manager gave us three gift bags (the guards didn’t factor into their apology), each containing a scarf and a mouse pad, each branded NHK. But honestly, the gifts themselves felt a little insulting in the sense of being low value trinkets. I didn’t know this was going to happen, but once it did, I’d have preferred no gift to a low-value “now-go-away” gift.

ADDENDUM
A year or so later I had another reporter from NHK call about interviewing our founder. That reporter started the call by apologising again for the previous reporter (so the incident must be in their CRM) and telling me that she’d gone back to Japan. And yes, we did do the second interview. It was a live TV panel about entrepreneurism in Africa and went quite well.

Christmas, music

Revising the Modern Christmas Standards, personal edition

Your Honour, in the long-standing argument that pop music trends tend to overlook truly creative work for more mediocre, predictable music, I’d like to enter some examples in the genre of Christmas music.

Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay

This is the time of year when I actively avoid anything by Pentatonix, Mariah Carey, or Paul McCartney. Santa Baby has no place in my music rotation, nor does Driving Home for Christmas.

These past few years, I’ve gotten very tired of the usual suspects. I’ve started digging deeper, following hints and vague mentions to find tracks that don’t get heard as often.

I guess the seeds for this were planted a decade ago or so, when I unexpectedly spent a whole Christmas season in Canada. Greg Lake’s I Believe in Father Christmas was getting airplay as a ‘deep cut’ on FM rock stations looking for token Christmas songs to play (and tired of the usual Springsteen / U2 / Brian Adams fare).

Father Christmas isn’t as much of a departure from tradition as, say, The Pogues’ Fairy Tale of New York City, but it was a solid ear worm to replace anything by Michael Bublé.

And Father Christmas pairs nicely with another song popular a decade ago, Faith Hill’s Where Are You Christmas? Both songs follow similar emotional journeys, from despair to a renewal of hope, of sorts. I know Faith’s song is widely popular, and that’s fine, it’s just a nice addition to the season; beats another rendition of Marshmallow World any day.

Then I came across a song called “The River,” originally by Joni Mitchell, although it was Blue Rodeo’s cover that I heard first (and will probably always be ‘my’ version of the song). Again, it’s not a particularly happy song.

The next three songs that became part of my Christmas playlist aren’t Christmas songs at all (not even in a token form like “Winter Wonderland”).

The first was Chagall Duet by Jon Anderson. The second song is by him also, Hurry Home (the version from Change We Must). Neither is a Christmas song. Hurry Home is about intergalactic travel.

The third song most definitely isn’t a Christmas song either, it’s called Easter. It’s by Marillion, a band that, if you’re British, you either love or hate, and if you’re American, you’ve never heard of them. I’ve known them (and this song) for decades, being one of the few Canadians to fall in love with their song Kayleigh (along with Warm Wet Circles). Easter never popped for me until I saw the video of their performance of it at the Royal Albert Hall in London.

Most recently, I’ve been adding actual Christmas songs to my playlist, although they may be obscure. Surely most people my age had at least heard of The Band. I’ve never been a big fan beyond a few songs, but their song Christmas Must Be Tonight has popped to the top of my playlist this year. And I’m not the only one. I’ve seen others suddenly recommending it, too.

Jann Arden is a Canadian singer who has always written songs that sound personal. Her Make it Christmas Day, a plea for reconnecting with Christ, is definitely one of those songs.

I’ll end this with two lighter songs that I enjoy even if their style is rather mainstream. The first is a Canadian act from when I was younger, the Partland Brothers. Their Christmas song, Christmas Day has a heavy pull of nostalgia for me, even though I’ve only known the song for five years or so. I think it may be the chord that it’s sung in, with the long sonorous notes.

The second one I’ve just discovered in 2022 even though it’s over a decade old. My Favourite Time of Year by the Florin Street Band is a nice song that sounds like it would do well on radio. Reading up on it, it’s basically a one person project started to reinvigorate Christmas songwriting in the UK.

I’ll end by mentioning two new entries that may end up becoming favourites in our household, both from the Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special: I don’t know what Christmas is (but Christmastime is here) and Here it is, Christmastime.

Merry Christmas, 2022

education

Anecdotes from the Classroom

I retired from teaching just over two years ago. I spent sixteen years in the the trenches, mostly teaching ESL (English as a Second Language) but also two years as a secondary school English teacher. Some days I miss it, some days I don’t.

Image by Kevin Phillips from Pixabay

Lately I’ve been thinking about some of the kids I’ll never see again. There was the 14-year-old girl in Pusan who would bring her small robots to class with her. There was the young boy who had the most inquisitive mind, and who drew knowledge from me that I didn’t know I had. There were the musical prodigies, the kids who hated being there, the inevitable kid who had a crush on the teacher and couldn’t hide it… Many of these ‘kids’ have now doubled their ages. They’ve started careers and maybe families, and I’ll never know.

That’s part of being a teacher: Giving your best and sending them on to their future. We’re just one station on their journey. You don’t get to know what that future will turn out to be.

Here are a few that I’ve been thinking about recently.

I had a student, about 11 years old, who was the perfect student, engaged, happy, contributed well and in fun ways – as long as you didn’t try to get her to read. Then she became a holy terror. She would do anything to get out of reading aloud, including, once, punching the teacher (me).

I spoke with her parents (they’re paying good money to send her to a top language academy. This needs to be addressed for her to progress). Her mom knows this happens but doesn’t know why. Her school counsellor suggested it was some psychological aversion (?).

I did something we’re not suppose to do; I suggested the parents have her tested for dyslexia. I wrote it out on the board so she could take a picture of it. They’d never heard the term, it certainly hadn’t come up with their daughter’s school counsellor.

A few classes later, the girl shows up wearing glasses, all smiles. “Hi teacher, I have dyslexia!”

“OK, we can work with that.” I had a font that was supposed to be easier for dyslexics to read. I started printing a handout in that font for her (if I gave it to all the students I’d’ve had to explain why we were using an odd font.) I also had a list of all the famous dyslexics to show her that it wasn’t a tragedy to resign oneself to.

Her mom thanked my manager for my suggestion on being tested for dyslexia, and since we’re not supposed to do that, I got “talked to” and told not to do it again.

I had a new class of teenagers. When I walked in on the first day, one of the boys was barking. As I called the class to order and started taking attendance, he continued barking.

I walked around, calling names, and when I got to him, asked quietly, “Can you control this?”

His tone sounded panicked as he answered “No.”

“Ok,” I walked away. Apparently, he had a form of Tourette Syndrome. I figured it got worse when he was anxious so I tried to take the anxiety out of our encounters.

We tend to think that kids with disabilities are somehow model students otherwise. He wasn’t. He was one of the class bullies.

At one point, I sat down with him. I told him that I’m never mad at him for the sounds he makes, but if he didn’t behave properly in class, I would get mad.

This was a surprise to him. I guess a lot of his teachers gave him leeway because of his TS.

He started behaving better in class after that.

I was teaching nine-year-olds in Korea. One day, one of the boys, who had never been trouble before, started acting up. He wouldn’t pay attention and he was disrupting the class. I ended up having to raise my voice with him.

Class continued. I didn’t punish him or isolate or in any way treat him differently from before.

The next day, my Korean manager calls me over. The boy’s mom is here to talk with me (When this happens, I’d speak in English to my manager who would translate for the parent). Apparently the boy came home crying, believing that I now hated him and wouldn’t let him back into class.

I told my manager that the student was fine; He was a just a boy. Sometimes boys that age have too much energy and don’t know how to control it. I had to raise my voice to get him to focus. Each day is a clean start. I wouldn’t be upset unless this became his new normal.

Having said all that, I asked the manager to translate. “Oh, she’s fluent in English. I don’t need to translate.”

So I turn to the mom to see if she wants to ask any questions. “Thank you, you are a good teacher.” And she leaves.

That’s the highest compliment.

Again, teaching in Korea, I’m in the grocery store when something very common but very annoying happened:

“Stephen-Teacher!” A man is calling out to me. “You teach my daughter. How is she doing?”

“What’s your daughter’s name?” I have sixty students, about half are girls. Perhaps I can figure out who he’s talking about.

“Jenny.” I have seven girls named Jenny across my five classes. I tell him this, ask for more detail, meaning which class, which days. “She’s about this tall,” he answers (The same height as most of my students) “and has straight black hair” (Just like every girl her age).

Me, still with no clue who we’re talking about, “Oh, yeah, Jenny. Yeah, she’s doing fine.”

Of course, this wasn’t good enough. “But what more could she do?”

Korean kids don’t get to have enough fun, at least not back then. “She could exercise more… maybe ride her bike or play soccer with friends. Something to help clear her mind, get some fresh air.”

“Oh?” He walked away disappointed.

I walked out of class into the usual confusion that was end of day. While many kids took school buses to and from the academies, others were dropped off and picked up by a parent.

Note that each class has a camera in it and parents are allowed to watch classes through the monitor in reception (instead of standing at the classroom door, distracting us all)

A mother comes up to me, being followed by our manager, who has a panicked look on her face. The mom speaks to me, very upset. “Teacher, you asked every student 3 questions except my daughter. You only asked her two. Why?”

“Oh, it was obvious that your daughter understood everything. I needed to check that the other students were as smart as her.”

Happy mom walks away, manager looks at me with confusion. “Really?”

“I don’t know… who’s her daughter?”

Before I come off sounding too full of myself in all these anecdotes, here’s an embarrassing one.

I had a young student, I think he was 10, again, perfect: Engaged, fun, great on team work, excellent scores and talkative but not dominating conversations.

Then one week he comes in and he’s a different kid. He’s sullen, vacant, lost. This goes on for a couple more weeks (I only see his class on Sundays).

He’s young enough that he can’t leave after class until a parent shows up. So I wait around, find his mom and ask to speak to her.

I tell her what I’ve observed, then ask a stupid question, “About three weeks ago, did his dog die or something?”

“My mother, his grandmother, yes.”

I apologized, a lot.

We talked on about how this was the first time he’d experienced a death in the family. She said they had talked to him about what had happened and he said he was fine.

Apparently he was putting on a brave face for them that he couldn’t sustain when he was out.

He did come most of the way back to normal eventually, but he’d aged a bit (or perhaps matured).

One more: Even more embarassing.

It was literally my first week teaching ESL in South Korea. I wasn’t used to the culture at all and was probably still a little jetlagged.

One of the boys in class (10/11-year-olds) won’t stop talking over me. I’m going through an escalation of responses … “Ok, time to listen… ok. stop talking now .. ok, be quiet …” Finally I said, “Will you shut up?”

There’s loud gasps from all the students. One of the girls says, “Teacher swore!”

“No I didn’t.”

“You said the ‘sh… word”

“I said ‘shut up’” Large gasp again. “That’s not swearing, ‘Shut the f*ck up’ is swearing.”

Yes, I actually said that, to a class of ten- to eleven-year-olds.

I don’t know how I didn’t get fired, but no one ever mentioned it to me, not a student, not a parent, not my counsellor, or manager.

writer's life, Writing

Making Money Ain’t Easy

Look, we’re all struggling to make money, authors as much as anyone else.

“Buy My Book! But My Book!” Ad Nauseum

As a writer, you can focus all your energy on getting people to read your books, but there’s a number of drawbacks. You pimp and pimp your books on social media, watching as you lose more followers than you get.

First, you need to have enough material out there that when people read one, they will have more to consume. If you’re new, or a slow writer like me, this isn’t easy to achieve.

So many writers look to alternative strategies to make money.

A simple one is to get more revenue from your existing work. This can mean submitting your shorter works to foreign markets for translations – which is time-consuming and doesn’t earn much, but might build an audience for later material. Or, it can mean making a Patreon-type program, where people are encouraged to pay money to get early access to your writing.

Again, this doesn’t work well with slow writers, and can also be difficult for writers who simply don’t have enough material to entice a recurring payment. Also, if you haven’t found your fans on social media, how will you find them on Patreon?

Then there’s the tip jars like Kofi. Without giving anything away, you simply ask people to tip you some money. I don’t know anyone who’s having success with that.

A couple of my designs

A different strategy strategy is to try to create multiple revenue streams from different products completely. That’s what I’m trying to do, by edging into Print-on-Demand t-shirt and all-over-print clothing.

This is your RedBubble, Etsy, Printful type work. Depending upon how you want to structure it, and how much control you want, you can find a solution that lets you design using their tools (great for silly slogan stye t-shirts) or go full-on photoshop CMYK designs on all-over prints.

Again, you have a problem of how to find an audience, but in theory Etsy or RedBubble are also trying to sell your work, so you have a very little bit of support from a very large player.

There are no easy answers.

Creativity, Writing

The Impact of a Title

Writers think carefully about what to call their stories. So do publishers. I have one story that may be being hindered by its title. Let me explain.

Some titles are very direct. Let’s look at some movie titles as examples. If Star Wars isn’t about wars in space, I’ll be very disappointed. Other titles are more evocative without necessarily meaning anything. Apocalypse Now has nothing to do with the apocalypse. Reservoir Dogs? Spoiler: It isn’t about reservoirs or dogs. Still, each of these is a memorable title.

Think about The Life of Pi or The Forever War or Cloud Atlas. There’s a lot to be said for giving your story a memorable title.

But what if the title hits the reader wrong?

I have a story. It’s gotten excellent feedback from a number of editors. Each has loved it, but… And the “but” never gets quite articulated. I wonder now if maybe it’s the story’s title that’s causing the ‘but’.

What’s the story called? Graceful Degradation.

It’s not about BSDM (BDSM?). There are no whips, no bondage. The title comes from an old profession of mine, User Experience Design (aka UX). In UX, the concept of graceful degradation is that if something fails the user, it should do so in a way that allows some continued level of usage.

The primary example of this is a comparison of elevators and escalators. At the most basic level, both move people between floors. If an elevator breaks, it is no longer a means of getting from one floor to another. However, if an escalator breaks, it gracefully degrades into a staircase: still usable, if less helpful.

I took that concept and applied it to tokens of memory: photos, writing, music. What if they all were designed to degrade gracefully? What if there was no permanence allowed, so artists made works in such a way that the failings revealed new insights or expressions.

This is the backdrop for the story Graceful Degradation. Within this universe, there is a man trying to honour the memory of his dead wife. He wants to preserve photos of their wedding. He wants to preserve a recording of their wedding song. But each of these isn’t only difficult-by-design, they’re illegal.

So our protagonist is driven to some of the darker corners of society. He’s noble in intent but ill-equipped for the deception he needs to pull off.

As I said, I’ve gotten complimentary rejections of this story from editors of literary and genre magazines around the world. They like it… but…

Since no one can articulate the ‘but’, I’ve come to wonder if it’s the title that’s the hang up. I really like the title. I hope I’m wrong.

If you think you’d be interested in reading Graceful Degradation, it’s included in the collection The Maiden Voyage of Novyy Mir and Other Short Stories. The book is available in either e-reader/epub or paperback. Click this books2read link to get a list of retailers carrying the book. Or you can buy it through my indie publisher site, Skrap Books, if you’re in the US or Canada and would prefer to put more money into my pocket as opposed to the big box bookstores.

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Memory is Such a Fickle Beast

I’ve been delving deep into a memory that I’d kind of forgotten about until a conversation recently with a friend. He asked me what was the weirdest thing I’d ever written.

I have written obituaries, but I didn’t talk about that. What I did talk about was that in university, I wrote a 3-act musical comedy that was performed six times over four days.

By Richard Bain – uoguelph.ca, Copyrighted free use, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10015581

Back in the day, the late 1980s, I was an undergrad at the University of Guelph. For those who have never heard of it, UofG is a Canadian university that offers a world-renowned agricultural program, along with a veterinary school, a hospitality school and the usual mix of arts and sciences. I studied Politics.

There was a troupe, called Curtain Call, that commissioned and performed a play each year. Their approach was to take an existing play or movie as a template, and mock both it and the latest year at the university.

A friend of mine had written it the past three years, using South Pacific, The Fiddler on the Roof, and The Sound of Music as his starting points. He didn’t want to do it a fourth time and recommended me to the group.

After a quick meeting with them, I was on board.

I chose The Rocky Horror Picture Show as my source. Roughly the plot of my Aggie Horror Show was that a Vet student wanted to win his roommate’s girlfriend (they were both Aggies), so he made a sentient bull to impress her. It got weird from there because the bull also fell in love with the girl.

Other plots involved a benefit concert for the ‘displaced guy’ (with everybody staying with their girlfriend/boyfriend in residence dorm rooms, there was always one guy who had nowhere to sleep. Let’s do a benefit for him!). There was the girl who’s secret power was that any elevator she entered would break down (there were so many elevator breakdowns that year, it was topical). And there was a rivalry with another university (The very business-oriented University of Western Ontario. When we beat them at football on national TV that year, they chanted, “It’s alright. It’s Ok. We’re gonna own your farm someday!”)

I didn’t use a lot of songs from Rocky Horror, from what I remember, but I did rewrite Time Warp to be about midterms (“Let’s write midterms again!”*). That was the centerpiece of the play. Also, there was a rewrite of Kate Bush’s Heathcliff about an environmental group’s reusable coffee mugs (this was a controversial topic at the time)… and … and … and … I don’t remember!

There were six or seven songs. I think I rewrote Summer Lovers from Grease to highlight the university rivalry… aaah, memory fails. I no longer have the script, and the only copy of the performance is on a VHS tape stored thousands of miles from me, slowly deteriorating, I’m sure.

Sadly, Curtain Call as a truly amateur production, only existed from 1957 to 1992. The club was taken over in 1993 by drama students who wanted to do professional productions and the group, now (retroactively) named Curtain Call Productions, no longer creates original satirical content for the enjoyment of the community, but stages professional productions for profit.

This may benefit the resumes of the students cast in roles, but it was done at the expense of a unique tradition. They could’ve just started their own drama club and left the amateurs to have our fun, instead of taking over our branding and reputation (satire since 1957!) and squeezing us out.

Of course, we’re talking about university; within every four years there’s a complete change of students. If something stays the same for five years, it’s “always been that way.” And that’s what Curtain Call would be now.

*Lyrics as I think I remember them(?):
Put your name at the top
(Put it on the riiiiiiight)
Keep your eyes to yourself
(and your chair in tiiiiiiiight)
Don’t watch the clo-ock
it’ll drive you insay-ay-ay-ane
Let’s write midterms again!