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John Lemke

How I Make a Living as a Writer (and You Can, Too) - 0 views

  • If you sit down at a blank screen every day and simply do nothing then you are a writer. If you write one word, even better. Some people will disagree. Maybe you will disagree. That's fine. We also can all disagree. Meanwhile, our DNA is telling us we are pretty much exactly the same.
  • I try to read pieces or chapters in 3-4 books a day or more. I read at least from one non-fiction, one or two quality fiction, and one inspirational. I try to read at the level I want to write. I do this in the morning before I start writing.
  • Destroy every gatekeeper.
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  • Do what you want. Self-publishing simply means you write a book and you figure out how to get it into the hands of other people. It might just be you sell it on your email list. Congrats! You're then a published author. In my post "How to Self Publish a Bestseller" I write about the details and the numbers.
  • This seems opposite of what I said above. But blogging is not such a bad idea. How come? Because it makes you write every day. And it also is fun to build friends and community around your blog. But if you want to blog, don't just register a domain name and start blogging. You won't get any traffic.
  • There's a thousand ways to build community and practice writing on the Internet. Blog is one of them but there are many others. My #1 suggestion: first practice on Quora (cc Marc Bodnick) If you go there, follow me and say "Hi!".
  • If you don't write every day, you won't know what your potential skill level is. You will be producing sub-par work. And in a world where 15 million books will be published this year, your book will have little chance to shine.
  • Do the math: if you just write 1,000 words a day that are publishable then you have a book every two months. 1,000 words a day is not easy. But it's not hard either.
  • No. You used to be able to make a living writing articles. Just a few years ago. In 2005 I made a good living writing about 3-4 articles a day for different publications while I was running my fund and before I started and sold Stockpickr. But those days are over. People just don't pay for content. And there are too many writers. It's a supply and demand thing.
  • ou have to write more than one book. And for most people, you have to write dozens of books.
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    A great article of advice from a published author.
John Lemke

Self-Publishing Truism Bingo « terribleminds: chuck wendig - 0 views

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    A good read exploring the "publishing war" and self-publishing.
John Lemke

What happens with digital rights management in the real world? | Technology | theguardi... - 0 views

  • In 1997's Bernstein v United States, another US appeals court found that code was protected expression. Bernstein was a turning point in the history of computers and the law: it concerned itself with a UC Berkeley mathematician named Daniel Bernstein who challenged the American prohibition on producing cryptographic tools that could scramble messages with such efficiency that the police could not unscramble them. The US National Security Agency (NSA) called such programs "munitions" and severely restricted their use and publication. Bernstein published his encryption programs on the internet, and successfully defended his right to do so by citing the First Amendment. When the appellate court agreed, the NSA's ability to control civilian use of strong cryptography was destroyed. Ever since, our computers have had the power to keep secrets that none may extract except with our permission – that's why the NSA and GCHQ's secret anti-security initiatives, Bullrun and Edgehill, targetted vulnerabilities in operating systems, programs, and hardware. They couldn't defeat the maths (they also tried to subvert the maths, getting the US National Institute for Standards in Technology to adopt a weak algorithm for producing random numbers).
    • John Lemke
       
      This is also why they have a hard on for developing a quantum computer.
  • An increase in the security of the companies you buy your media from means a decrease in your own security. When your computer is designed to treat you as an untrusted party, you are at serious risk: anyone who can put malicious software on your computer has only to take advantage of your computer's intentional capacity to disguise its operation from you in order to make it much harder for you to know when and how you've been compromised.
  • The DMCA's injunction against publishing weaknesses in DRM means that its vulnerabilities remain unpatched for longer than in comparable systems that are not covered by the DMCA. That means that any system with DRM will on average be more dangerous for its users than one without DRM.
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  • For example, in 2005, Sony-BMG music shipped a DRM called the "Sony Rootkit" on 51m audio CDs. When one of these CDs was inserted into a PC, it automatically and undetectably changed the operating system so that it could no longer see files or programs that started with "$SYS$." The rootkit infected millions of computers, including over 200,000 US military and government networks, before its existence became public. However, various large and respected security organisations say they knew about the Sony Rootkit months before the disclosure, but did not publish because they feared punishment under the DMCA. Meanwhile, virus-writers immediately began renaming their programs to begin with $SYS$, because these files would be invisible to virus-checkers if they landed on a computer that had been compromised by Sony.
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      How the Sony DRM created serious security issues.  It should also be considered a violation of our civil rights.  Who the hell gave Sony permission to modify my OS!  Furthermore why didn't the OS companies sue Sony?  Likely because they are in bed together.
  • If I was a canny entrepreneur with a high appetite for risk -- and a reasonable war-chest for litigation – I would be thinking very seriously about how to build a technology that adds legal features to a DRM-enfeebled system (say, Itunes/Netflix/Amazon video), features that all my competitors are too cowardly to contemplate. The potential market for devices that do legal things that people want to do is titanic, and a judgment that went the right way on this would eliminate a serious existential threat to computer security, which, these days, is a synonym for security itself.And once anti-circumvention is a dead letter in America, it can't survive long in the rest of the world. For one thing, a product like a notional Itunes/Amazon/Netflix video unlocker would leak across national borders very easily, making non-US bans demonstrably pointless. For another, most countries that have anti-circumvention on the books got there due to pressure from the US Trade Representative; if the US drops anti-circumvention, the trading partners it armed-twisted into the same position won't be far behind.I've talked to some lawyers who are intimate with all the relevant cases and none of them told me it was a lost cause (on the other hand, none of them said it was a sure thing, either). It's a risky proposition, but something must be done. You see, contrary to what the judge in Reimerdes said in 2000, this has nothing to do with whether information is free or not – it's all about whether people are free.
  • The DMCA is a long and complex instrument, but what I'm talking about here is section 1201: the notorious "anti-circumvention" provisions. They make it illegal to circumvent an "effective means of access control" that restricts a copyrighted work. The companies that make DRM and the courts have interpreted this very broadly, enjoining people from publishing information about vulnerabilities in DRM, from publishing the secret keys hidden in the DRM, from publishing instructions for getting around the DRM – basically, anything that could conceivably give aid and comfort to someone who wanted to do something that the manufacturer or the copyright holder forbade.
  • Significantly, in 2000, a US appeals court found (in Universal City Studios, Inc v Reimerdes) that breaking DRM was illegal, even if you were trying to do something that would otherwise be legal. In other words, if your ebook has a restriction that stops you reading it on Wednesdays, you can't break that restriction, even if it would be otherwise legal to read the book on Wednesdays.
John Lemke

Why so many digital publishers are flocking back to print | Digiday - 0 views

  • Publishers are leaning heavily on the idea that these are “premium” magazines, with deep reporting and full-page photos. Music reviews site Pitchfork even hopes that printing its quarterly magazine’s long-form features and illustrations on high-quality paper stock will encourage readers to collect them just as they collect vinyl records.
  • ather than eye the big general-interest numbers of Time and Rolling Stone, digital publishers are creating their magazines with lower circulations and content aimed at more niche audiences.
  • Most media companies have historically treated magazines as loss leaders, selling them for cheap in the hopes of building the sort of big circulation numbers
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  • That’s not the model that these digital publishers are following. Rather than sell the magazines for cheap, Pitchfork is asking for $50 a year (or $20 an issue).
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    A few interesting differences about today's print and yesterday's.  Seems there is still a market for premium content and consumers will actually pay much more than in yesteryear.
John Lemke

9 Irresistible Incentives That'll Grow Your Email List Like Crazy - 0 views

  • Unless they see the value of joining your list, they simply won’t invest any of those valuable minutes in you and your blog.
  • Do something for me and I’ll do something for you. In this case, the bribe is “give me your email address and I’ll give you something that isn’t freely available on my blog.”
  • Minimum requirements: Useful and engaging content, whether unique to the bribe or already published on your blog, that you can easily break into pieces. On the technical side, you’ll need an email newsletter service (e.g. Mailchimp, AWeber (aff), etc.) with an autoresponder feature ($10-20/month).
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  • Minimum requirements: A word processor like Microsoft Word, Apple Pages or OpenOffice Writer is sufficient for creating a simple cheat sheet, but for a more sophisticated end product, you might require a desktop publishing package such as Adobe InDesign, Microsoft Publisher, or QuarkXPress. Alternatively, you can use a cheat sheet tool like Cheatography to generate cheat sheets based on a default template.
  • Minimum requirements: Your chosen word processor is enough to create a basic template, but to make it even more visually appealing, consider using some simple design elements such as colors, backgrounds and borders. If the template is meant to be printed, you can convert your .docx or .pages file into a downloadable PDF for your readers’ convenience.
John Lemke

Theme Week: Publish Your Blog Post Without SEO, and 1000s of Visits Will Be Forever Los... - 0 views

  • Search, and Google in particular (with 90% of worldwide share), still drive vastly greater quantities of traffic than all the social networks combined (some good research from DefineMG here). Given Google’s 3.5+ Billion searches performed each day, that shouldn’t be a surprise, but to many bloggers, thinking about search, Google, and all that “SEO stuff” has been put aside in favor of Facebook shares, likes, tweets, +1s, and the more visible feedback and applause that come from social sources.
  • Thankfully, you can resolve to make this a priority in the future. It may sound like a bad infomercial, but you can substantially upgrade your blog’s SEO potential with less than 5 minutes per post. Here’s how:
  • The other keyword research source I’d encourage you to pursue is Google’s autosuggest.
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  • Once you’ve found a few keywords that might work, modify your blog post’s title to include it if you can.
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    Most people publish to be found and read.  If that is the case, how can you ignore SEO?
John Lemke

» Review of Lightspeed - 0 views

  • They pay their authors 8 cents a word and publish stories of up to 7,500 words in length, although their general preference is for stories that are around 5,000 words. They do not publish stories under 1,500 words in length. They do occasionally publish unsolicited reprints, but in those situations they pay 2 cents per word.
  • Lightspeed accepts less than 1% of the work submitted to them. They also reply to all submissions within a week. They request that all authors wait a week before submitting another short story if their work is rejected.
John Lemke

Writers Don't Write to Get Published | Goins, Writer - 0 views

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    I write because I can't not write. This article is a good one on that perspective.
John Lemke

» "Is there really writing work out there?" : Freedom With Writing - 0 views

  • How, then, do writing opportunities work? To be paid for writing, you need to look for a person with two characteristics: They’ve got money to spare. They’re looking for writers. This could be: A magazine editor who is looking for feature articles. An aristocrat or multi-billionaire who wants to support the career of an aspiring artist. A blogger who makes money from advertisements, or from selling information products, but is too busy to do all their blogging themselves. A book publisher who is looking for the next Da Vinci Code or Harry Potter. A business owner who needs help from a writer to promote their business. Do you see where this is going? There are writing opportunities out there, if you know where to look, and if you know the right people.
  • First, the more money a potential client has, the more they’ll be willing to pay you. Bloggers and content creators don’t typically earn much money from advertising. That’s why revenue sharing sites, which share advertising revenue with writers in exchange for content, often pay a relatively low rate. Magazine editors and book publishers are somewhere in the middle. They pay reasonably well, but they’re looking for extremely high quality, so you’ve got to be real good to get their attention. Business owners who have a steady income usually pay the most generous fees to writers. Businesses have a budget for marketing, so they’ve got cash to splash.
John Lemke

Get Published: We Help With Publishing A Novel, Story, Poem, Book - 0 views

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    A site to submit to so that you can improve your writing.
John Lemke

Writer Unboxed » How to Keep Writing? Break It Down. - 0 views

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    A published author shares their method to daily writing.  
John Lemke

Why You Should Care About Google+, SEO and Semantic Search - 0 views

  • Everything Google is doing, from Google+ to semantic search serves its mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
  • In order for Google to provide the most relevant search results, it looks beyond the keywords to find context of your query based on your connections and social signals, +1’s, shares, likes etc..
  • Google Authorship ties you to your content no matter where you publish on the web where “rel=authorship” is installed.
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  • Links send signals to Google that people like and trust your content.
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    A brief explanation of how Google+ factors into search in this day and age. Not only worth the read but the sources it cites are as well.
John Lemke

Writer Unboxed » Is Your Book Good Enough for Publication? A Cold-Blooded Ass... - 0 views

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    This article nicely breaks the rough and tough process into logical stages and steps. It also is very realistic.
John Lemke

New, inexpensive production materials boost promise of hydrogen fuel (Feb. 21, 2014) - 0 views

  • The trouble with solar fuel production is the cost of producing the sun-capturing semiconductors and the catalysts to generate fuel. The most efficient materials are far too expensive to produce fuel at a price that can compete with gasoline.
  • "In order to make commercially viable devices for solar fuel production, the material and the processing costs should be reduced significantly while achieving a high solar-to-fuel conversion efficiency," says
  • Choi and postdoctoral researcher Tae Woo Kim combined cheap, oxide-based materials to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gases using solar energy with a solar-to-hydrogen conversion efficiency of 1.7 percent, the highest reported for any oxide-based photoelectrode system.
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  • "Without fancy equipment, high temperature or high pressure, we made a nanoporous semiconductor of very tiny particles that have a high surface area," says Choi, whose work is supported by the National Science Foundation. "More surface area means more contact area with water, and, therefore, more efficient water splitting."
  • "Since no one catalyst can make a good interface with both the semiconductor and the water that is our reactant, we choose to split that work into two parts," Choi says. "The iron oxide makes a good junction with bismuth vanadate, and the nickel oxide makes a good catalytic interface with water. So we use them together." The dual-layer catalyst design enabled simultaneous optimization of semiconductor-catalyst junction and catalyst-water junction.
  • In a study published last week in the journal Science, Choi and postdoctoral researcher Tae Woo Kim combined cheap, oxide-based materials to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gases using solar energy with a solar-to-hydrogen conversion efficiency of 1.7 percent, the highest reported for any oxide-based photoelectrode system.
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    I am an advocate of switching to hydrogen for combustion engines.  One of the best reasons is that combustion produces water.  Furthermore, it is much safer than most people believe.  (Your car is not going to turn into the Hindenburg.) In Ben Bova's Book "Break Throughs" he talked of huge floating solar powered hydrogen producing plants.  In Room's "The Hype About Hydrogen" he painfully points out that H2 production is still not cost effective enough to complete with Gasoline.  That said, research like this leaves us hope for the future.
John Lemke

Writer Unboxed » A 'Logic Model' for Author Success - 0 views

  • in this age of the “writer as an entrepreneur” responsible for a growing share of the work required to not only create but also sell a book, adding management skills to our repertoire of abilities is not at all a bad idea.
  • as launch time approaches, authors get overwhelmed by thinking that they have to do “everything:” Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, ad campaigns, bookstore talks, conference panels, media articles, email newsletters, book clubs…you name it.
  • what our goals are beyond sales
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  • Based on our mission and our definition of success, we can then work out a manageable set of steps to take in line with our specific interests and goals. We feel more in control and less anxious about having to “do it all.”
  • A more viable definition of success does have a quantitative element, but it doesn’t necessarily mean “number of copies sold or dollars earned.” It can mean other measurable outcomes such as landing a teaching job or a column in a respected publication.
John Lemke

15 Shocking Facts You Don't Know About Weed - weather.com - 0 views

  • A Swedish study of 45,450 males showed no increase in the 15-year mortality rate of pot smokers, compared to those who did not smoke, according to an editorial published in BMJ.
John Lemke

15 Shocking Facts You Don't Know About Weed - weather.com - 0 views

  • Extremely low doses of THC may protect the brain from long-term cognitive damage in the wake of injury from a lack of oxygen, seizures or toxic drugs, one study in mice published in the journal Experimental Brain Research found.Another mouse study concluded that CBD might help stop alcohol-related brain damage.
John Lemke

The Smart Way to Use Other People's Audiences to Build Your Own - Copyblogger - 0 views

  • That’s the basic idea: Get in front of OPA, and then publish fantastic content so you can earn that audience’s respect and trust.
  • Interacting with others, sharing the content of others, and participating in communities are all great ways to generate attention and build an audience.
  • build an audience that is relevant to what you do
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  • If you get attribution links as a result of the guest post, then the site and page giving you the link will be closely matched to your site and the specific page receiving the link.
  • You are not a fit for every audience. Don’t worry about it. Pass on opportunities where you can’t bring the good stuff, and focus your energies in the places where you can.
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    As people often say regarding writing, "it is just as much about networking as it is working".  If you blog or write, these are some great ways to build your audience.
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