I was saddened to read J.C. Hutchins’s recent post where he gave his community an update on his work.  Regretfully, for his fans (and the other folks who have been enjoying his stuff), he’s decided to give up his “free” (read:  unpaid) podcasting work for the foreseeable future and is now focusing on paying writing.  He also says that his publisher has chosen not to publish the sequels to his first novel 7th Son:  Descent.  The three 7th Son novels have been available in podcast form for several years (and they’re great stuff).

(Note:  J.C. has also written Personal Effects:  Dark Arts with Jordan Weisman.)

I don’t know J. C. other than a few chats and jokes shared on Twitter, although he did contribute to a great group project on doing great work that I published here on Broadcasting Brain a number of weeks ago.  However, he strikes me as a nice guy, in addition to being talented and one heck of a hard worker.  I don’t fault him one iota for working on things that will advance his writing career and provide  him with income.  The guy’s more than paid his dues and he’s managed to put together an amazing quantity of free content out there on the Web.  Kudos to him for assessing the situation and making the decision that is right for him.

It is sad, however, that his faith in the process that he’s used has been shaken, as per the following excerpt from his blog post:

For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to make a living wage telling stories. That day has not yet come, and I fear that it won’t, unless some serious decisions are made. I’ve made these decisions, and I apologize for how this will affect you.

Creating podcast fiction does does not generate direct revenue for me. Based on anecdotal and statistical data, very few people are willing to pay for general podcast content, much less podcast fiction. Since my goal is to make a living wage with my words, the current monetization models — including in-show advertisements — will not deliver this. Dedicating time and effort to my non-fiction podcast projects will deliver equally underwhelming monetary results.

It is also apparent to me that using the Free model to promote a tangible product, such as I did with 7th Son: Descent and Personal Effects: Dark Art, does not deliver sustainable sales results. I have friends — some of whom are my best friends, the most talented people I’ve had the privilege to know and work with –  who have absolute faith in this model. I treasure their trailblazing efforts and enthusiasm. My faith, however, has been fundamentally rattled.

Put simply: The new media model viably supports only the most blessed and talented of authors. The time, effort and money I invest in entertaining you for free pulls my attention and talent away from projects that can generate revenue. While podcasting, podcast fiction, and — most importantly — your support and evangelism has positively impacted my life and career in ways I’ll never be able to fully express, I cannot continue to release free audiofiction if I wish to make a living wage with my words.

The sad thing is that J. C. recorded an entertaining and damned interesting thriller of an interview with Mitch Joel a couple of months ago where he seemed to be feeling more upbeat about, although a bit stressed by, the potential of the  Free Model.

None of us know the whole story, include all of the blood, sweat, and tears that Hutchins poured into these projects and none of us really know why 7th Son:  Descent didn’t meet the publisher’s expectations.  On the surface, you could point to one probable challenge that the publisher faced:  the entire trilogy has been available for free in several formats for a number of years, so how do you entice the average consumer to pay money for a copy? At the same time, however, there’s probably a large number of people who wouldn’t have know that and might not have been able to find it or figure out how to obtain access to the free versions.

I truly believe that Hutchins will eventually attain his goals, although it looks likely that he’ll have to come up with brand new, original material to do that.  I think he’s come too far and gained too much exposure for it to all end now and he still seems to have an excellent relationship with his publisher.  Nonetheless, if nothing else, this experience provides an interesting case study for the Free Model.

Here’s hoping that J.C. keeps getting the fast pitches and that he keeps swinging for the fences – I think this baseball metaphor still holds true.

EDIT (March 1, 2010) – Indiana Jim’s podcast #37 has a lot of great analysis and thinking about podcasters/podcast novelists working to become professional writers, citing both J.C. Hutchins and Scott Sigler (assist to J.C. for helping to score this goal).

I was pleased to be interviewed by Gail Seymour at her Paying Hobby blog.  She uses the same type of E-Mail interview that I’ve used many times here at Broadcasting Brain, but she formats the results in a more article-like structure which looks quite good.  She interviewed me from the perspective of a paying hobby.

There are a few things related to this interview that I’d just like to touch upon for a moment, just so there’s no misunderstandings:

• I do not get compensated directly for blogging at Broadcasting Brain.  I do not write paid or sponsored posts on this blog.
• I do use Amazon.com affiliate links for book reviews, but only if I truly believe that the book is worth someone else’s hard-earned cash to buy.  I disclose how I get the books that I review.
• I have used advertising on this blog, but the amount of money that I’ve “made” by doing that would barely pay for two months of hosting time.

So, the paying hobby aspect that she interviewed me about does not have to do with this blog.  It has to do with the following source of income:  writing articles on user generated content websites.

I have a number of articles on the following websites, as are listed in the Other Writing page of this blog:

Bizcovering

Socyberty

WebUpon

My Helium articles

I don’t normally talk about my articles on those Web sites because they have a different purpose that the writing on this blog.  This blog is, I guess, the place where I’m trying to build authority and make a difference in the world by pointing out valuable resources and trying to create my own content to help other people.  In Schawbel-speak, this would be my personal branding hub.

My articles on the other websites are there to generate income, pure and simple. The income from those websites will pay for my hosting and domain registration fees, plus the occasional extra.  I do not consider them to be great writing, on average.  In fact, they’re hack work, but they serve a purpose.  I generally try to keep the two types of content separated, although I will occasionally link out to one of these articles on these other websites if it will fit within the context of the blog post I’m writing.  In that sense, I may make a tiny bit of income from a blog post, but we’re talking a few pennies at best.

I am doing more article writing on those sites these days, but I intend to maintain the same kind of separation that I’ve had in place for the past few years.

I don’t know if this post was necessary, but I feel  better after writing it.

Any questions?

I found a link in my GMail this morning which is kind of a blast from my past.  WAAAAY back in the mid 1990s I tried my hand at electronic zine writing and signed myself up for John Labovitz’s e-zine list.  I wrote about three small pieces and then abandoned the project.  So it just seems funny that I would get an E-Mail about that today.

If you take a look at this and scroll down to the  section called The “Bobby” Chronicles you’ll see my entry.

Sad thing is, I don’t think I have a copy of that stuff anymore.  Which was a shame because it was actually pretty fun to write.

An essay on disquiet is a great essay about… disquiet.

It’s not what some people would consider to be good writing these days, especially for writing available on the Web, published in a blog.

Here’s my precis of the essay:

Popular opinion is sometimes wrong.  The Internet has made it easier for errors to be exposed, but popular opinion is still hard to change.  Popular opinion suggests, as does this article, that 21st century life is chaotic, busy, and full of movement.  Thus, it’s even hard for professional or motivated readers to find the time and necessary silence to read.  However, the real issue is stillness of the mind, not the body or the senses.  This is not a new problem – people have always had to deal with their mental noise.  If reading is important to us, we need to make it a priority and do it.  Don’t blame the Internet; it’s  just another distraction.

Some of you may argue that Freed’s essay is flowery, long winded, and a waste of time.  Other readers may wish that more people wrote like Freed.

Freed used nine more paragraphs and many more words than I did, but we’re delivering the same essential message. Heck, you could reduce my precis to one sentence and get the gist of it.

There’s still a need for longer form writing, something that blogging often fails to do. Blogging and other forms of electronic publishing often provide information dumps without context or supportive argument in order to keep the post short, sweet, and tight.  That’s great for, say, an instruction manual, but poor if you’re trying to make more complicated arguments or, better yet, trying to help people to think and behave differently.

Freed’s essay takes communication to a different extreme where there’s a lot of thought and care put into selecting words and arranging them to meet style and taste.  I think there’s a continuum of expression between instruction manuals (or recipes) and the wordiest, most rambling prose that can be used by writers.  I still believe that the old rule of omitting needless words holds true.  Sometimes it’s not about the individual words, though – it’s about how they work together in ways that build a larger picture, even if the details occasionally look a bit bloated.  The medium should be irrelevant, though, whether it’s on paper, silkscreen, or a computer monitor.

Related: Copyblogger.com recently published a blog post about long blog posts, written in their trademark crisp and direct style, which provides another take on this topic.

So, if you’re wondering why I’m not posting here as often as I once did:

Most of my recent writing is going into a little hardcover journal that I bought a few months ago.  I’m tracking some of the minutia of my life in this book, including some habit changes that I’ve been working on.  I seem to go through paper journal writing phases in my life.  If memory serves, it’s been about ten years since I last maintained this kind of journal with any kind of regular activity.

Why a paper journal?  Easy:  it’s portable and private.  It’s not that I’m writing a lot of confidential stuff in this journal (well, OK, maybe some), but what I’m writing is mainly personal and of limited relevance to anyone else.  Writing by hand (and this is cursive writing, not printing, for the most part) seems to activate certain mental pathways that typing doesn’t, which is important.  Plus I don’t have to fire up my computer to do this.

So, while getting a D on the revered social media “transparency” exam, I’ll take a B+ for meeting my own needs.  Or does the “transparency” stuff actually only apply to organizations and not to people?

Between this new journal writing habit, and a series of other routine, thinking, and schedule changes, my focus on blogging, or any other kind of writing, is at a two year low.  I do have things that I’m still interested in writing about, but right now I’m not trying to live up to some kind of daily posting schedule as I have in the past.

I do want to take a moment to tip my hat to the many folks out there who do seem to be able to keep up the daily posting routine with a high level of quality and professionalism.  Where there’s a will (and some talent) there’s a way, no doubt.

Onward.

Here are two interesting, funny, and valuable quotes about the process of creation and writing from the late Douglas Adams, creator of the now-legendary SF comedy franchise The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  The two quotes appeared in a piece called “Where do you get all your ideas from?” that appeared in The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:  The Original Radio Scripts (which, incidentally, is the original version of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - a BBC radio show).

The first quote is rather blunt about the fact that writing can be hard work:

An idea is only an idea.

An actual script [Adams was writing about radio script writing in this piece], on the other hand, is hundreds of ideas bashed around, screwed up, thrown into the bin, fished out of the bin an hour later and folded up into thick wads and put under the leg of a table to stop it wobbling.  And then the same again for the next line, and the next, and so on, until you have a whole page or the table finally keels over.

Quote the second, which is Adams imagining how he came up with the name of the character Zaphod Beeblebrox (or maybe this is how it really happened, I’m not sure):

I sat and stared out of the window for a while, trying to think of a good name for a character.  I old myself that, as a reward, I would let myself go and make a Bovril sandwich once I’d thought of it.

I stared out of the window some more and thought that probably what I really needed to help get the creative juices going was to have a Bovril sandwich now, which presented with a problem that I could only successfully resolve by thinking it over in the bath.

An hour, a bath, three Bovril sandwiches, another bath and a cup of coffee later, I realized that I still hadn’t thought of a good name for a character, and decided that I would try calling him Zaphod Beeblebrox and see if that worked.

I sat and stared out of the window for a while, trying to think of something for him to say…

This second quote says two things to me:

One is that writers, like other people, can procrastinate an awful lot when they are trying to work on something.

The second is that sometimes you just need to pick a name, topic, word, phrase out of the blue and just start working with it.  Otherwise, you’re back to the bath and the sandwiches all over again.

Consciously or subconsciously, this little story about the naming of Zaphod Beeblebrox has influenced me tremendously in the small bit of fiction writing that I’ve done.  Here’s an example from the novel that I started over a year ago with some enthusiasm, wrote about 15 pages for, and then locked away in a box, which I think about occasionally, but I’m not sure that I’ll ever complete:

I was trying to think of a name for my protagonist, an accountant (really, a bookkeeper) who was going to have some amazing adventures in a story similar to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  I came up with the name Herbert Muckfeather, which sounded nerdy, odd, and very unlikely for a protagonist’s name.  It wasn’t very good, but at least it helped me keep going.  Later on,  I changed his name to Neil Clerk, which isn’t much better, but, honestly, is just the set up for a dumb joke that would appear later in the novel.  But it IS shorter and easier to remember.

See, if I can come up with a silly little anecdote like this, I bet you have a story that is much, much better.  So if you do (or you don’t, for that matter) have a good writing/naming story like this, why not share it in the comments section?  Please? 

To help keep yourself from panicking, try subscribing to Broadcasting Brain, the ideas should calm you down a bit.