Words    Words    Words

I happened to notice a comment in my LJ from some months ago pointing out that last September marked 25 years since the publication of Jhereg. 25 years. Weeee!
Overall, the best summation of my career so far is something Jerry Garcia said in response to a question about the annoyances of his lifestyle. [...]

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The Continuous Coast project is looking for graphic artists and web geeks. It’s a creative commons share-alike open source project. It should be fun. While we think we may have a solid business model, none of us are making money at the moment; but we have hopes.
In order to launch the main [...]

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Wave 1
Wave 0 was our pre-launch wave. Although the Continuous Coast project is accepting donations from the start, Wave 0 is mostly about collecting early-adopter fans and beginning a viral word of mouth campaign which we can build on later. In Wave 1, we will be launching the central portal to the site and offering [...]

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My dear friends Tea Kerr and Thoricatha are part of an upcoming gallery show: “Sacred & Profane” which runs from October 31st through mid-December at Celtic Dragon Gallery, 1503A Chartres, Houston, Texas. Both Tea and Thoricatha are involved in the Continuous Coast project.
Tea’s charcoal art (which she draws under the name Cat Khemia) will be [...]

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Man, I am so ready for the next season!  I was watching a rerun this afternoon, and there’s is this scene in the bullpen.   Wile Lau and Haf are bantering in the foreground, in the background Rhyes drops a folder in front of Brady, and Brady looks at the folder, looks at Rhyes, then just [...]

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You hear a lot of talk these days about finding your niche market. Many of the current business models rely on various layers of middlemen to facilitate the flow between artist and audience. The current trend in online creative business seems to be toward bypassing the middle-management layer and delivering the product or [...]

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Now they’ve arrested a 13-year-old boy because a 13-year-old girl sent him a nude pic of herself. The charge? Child Pornography. Does the phrase GMAFB seem appropriate? Here’s the link.
I don’t think a 13-year-old girl exploring her sexuality by taking a picture of herself and sending it to her boyfriend is worth so much as [...]

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Yesterday we talked in more detail about monetary donations and how to distribute them in your project. What about your fans who don’t have enough money to contribute directly, either through donations or the other revenue streams we’ll detail later? These fans can still contribute positively to your project — in addition to raw traffic, [...]

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Just want to let you know that, yes, there will be more posts on our trip to Tel Aviv. Be patient. All three of us have been down with some ucky virus, and lots of other things to do. But we’re getting there.
skzb

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So you have your unruly mass of contributors, and a pool of general donations, now what do you do? Any time you set up a system where the central creative committee is saying “one contribution is worth more than another contribution” in some form, you are likely to have problems with hurt feelings among [...]

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There were a few questions we left unanswered yesterday that we’ll look at again today in more depth, though we don’t promise not to leave you with different questions at the end. Donations received by a single artist working on a single project are easy to allocate. The potential for complication rises swiftly when you [...]

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Wave 0 (Pre-launch phase)
Yesterday we discussed the organization of our business model into waves. Wave 0 is our pre-launch phase, when we encourage early adopters to visit our sites and become involved with our project. We hope to capitalize on the prestige of being the first to be “in the know” about our project by [...]

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For this paper, we chose to present the different potential income streams in the same format we are using for Continuous Coast, the project which grew alongside (and was informed by) our business model research. We provide specific examples and links where possible, and encourage you to modify the information here as best fits [...]

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I notice while over England that their neat regular rows of farm fields look suspiciously similar to the long, narrow rows of flats in their towns. I wonder how many other places modeled their cities after their farm structure, whether intentionally or not?
While airport food is usually sub-standard, it seems the English reputation for [...]

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There are at least three other points worth considering when developing your artistic business model. First, don’t forget the time vs money investment question. Some projects require a large investment of time, some of money, and some of both. To a reasonable degree they can be interchangeable (though not entirely); you can [...]

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Ingredients

One half cup (1 stick) of butter
Four medium baking potatoes finely sliced
1 medium chopped onion
2 cloves crushed or chopped garlic,
four tablespoons sweet Hungarian paprika
2 tablspoons tomato puree
1 tablespoon ground mouseweed
2 cups sour cream
kosher salt
freshly ground black papper
water

Melt the butter in a sauce pan over medium-high heat. Add the garlic, potatoes and onion. Salt [...]

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We’ve put up a small web page for Reesa and Steve’s appearance at Icon 2008. You can view slides from her presentation or read a round-up of all blog posts relating to the event. Although the slides are similar to those we used in our Arse Elektronika 2008 presentation, these contain exclusive photos from the [...]

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If you’ve been reading along so far and practicing the suggestions, you now have a pile of recorded observations and information relevant to the business model portion of your project. To turn your collected data into something more sensical, consider these simple steps recommended by our consultants:

Prioritize the steps you need to take to [...]

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I just upgraded this site to Wordpress 2.6.2. It was long overdue. I don’t think I broke anything but let us know if you see anything out of whack.
Feel free to consider this Free For All #whatever.
-Kit

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I hope I learn a lasting lesson from the last several months. This is the first trip I’ve ever taken where I was literally tossing unfolded clothes into my checked bag 30 minutes before we drove to the Houston airport, and I certainly hope it’s the last trip with such last-minute trip preparation. [...]

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I’ll be writing more later–probably a lot more.  For now, I’ll only say that I was more taken with Tel Aviv than any other anti-Zionist you’re liable to meet.  Everyone was great to us.  We had a blast.  I miss everyone there.  I want to go back.

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Welcome back! My apologies for the lateness of the post, I have been without internet while traveling internationally. We’re happily and safely home now, and there should be no further blog interruptions.
We last discussed the “5 Ws” method. A second method to evaluating business model viability is called DMAIC (pronounced dee may [...]

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Before we jump into exploring the specifics of what others have done, let’s discuss some helpful tools for evaluating available options for income streams. Having the proper tools for your task will help ameliorate some of the worst of the potential panic response. Our business consultants provided us with two approaches for artists [...]

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The Artist Business Models series is based on a paper written by Reesa Brown and Kit O’Connell, with assistance from Steven Brust, Ken Brown, Deborah Ibarra, and many others. At the close of the series, the entire business model paper will be posted to Continuous Labs. The business model paper and blog posts are released [...]

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Starting October 15 and once a day until we’re done, I’ll be posting a series of blog entries taken from a paper I wrote with Kit O’Connell and the help of Steven Brust, Ken Brown, Deborah Ibarra, and many others. At 4th Street Fantasy Convention this year, everyone was curious about the possibilities for [...]

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Our outgoing flight was delayed for 4 hours at the gate, which caused us to miss our connecting flight from Heathrow to Tel Aviv. The only available remaining flight for today was for 10:30 tonight (local time), and in our rush to hurry out the door (wish we’d known we didn’t have to!) we neglected [...]

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A few months ago we posted about looking for musicians and bands to help us with a project. I’ve been passing on your recommendations  to my friend Theo Drumsthemoon, who runs a concert venue called Lufton Runner, for his new Tellurian Music Series. I’m pleased to say the first concert in the series, featuring the [...]

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About 24 hours from now, I head off to Tel Aviv for Icon.  I should be back in about ten days.  Until then, I don’t think I’ll have access to email.

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(reposted from personal journal by request)
When working on a big project and trying to come up with cool ways to draw people into your created world, it’s sometimes hard to guess which line to straddle in how much and how fast you disperse your information. You want to make sure any early adopter fans are [...]

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Draft of Iorich sent off to Teresa.  Now to find out if she can read it.
Meanwhile, on to work on Super Sekrit Project.

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Arse Elektronika 2008 - What is the 21st Century Novel?
View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: fiction novels)

The presentation Reesa and I gave at Arse Elektronika is now available with an accompanying slideshow. You can use the controls above — click the Play button to hear the audio, and use the left and right [...]

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