Archives for May 2015

Last Chance for WEIRD Things

May 20, 2015 by Jon Frater Leave a Comment

Remember last week when I told you about the Apocalypse Weird fund raiser?

Of course you do. You came here and read about it. Maybe you even clicked on the campaign link and donated. And you did these things because you care about brave new ideas in the world of fiction and about my willingness to be part of it.

So here we are, with 13 hours to go before Indiegogo closes the campaign, tallies up the numbers and your change to be part of something new and awesome disappears.

But . . .

If the campaign makes its goal, then Indiegogo will keep the clock running. That’s added time to donate in exchange for outstanding perks, a heartfelt “Thank you!”, and maybe some mention of the project and books to friends who like to read books about the world ending in wacky and outlandish ways.

So this is it, The Big Push. As I write this the campaign is 66% funded. Another $3,421 puts us over the edge and allows the process to continue, giving you access to perks long after the clock stops as well as many more months of outstanding books.

But for now, the clock is ticking . . .

awcountdown — Donation Clock of Doom Awaits!

[books_custom size=”150″ type=”random” custom_sort=”publisher” custom_sort_value=”Wonderment Media Incorporated”]

You Can Have WEIRD Things

May 13, 2015 by Jon Frater 1 Comment

(I know, I owe you a post about imagining the “death of the library.” But this is a big deal.)

I recently got into a Facebook thread with a former (now grown up) student over e-book pricing decisions. She’s an avid reader but refuses to buy any e-book that’s more than a dollar or two in price. It was nothing against the authors, or the books themselves, she explained. She just didn’t see why she should ever pay more than that for a book. Neither did her friends.

It’s a fair point, especially if all you’ve ever known about the experience of acquiring books is looking at price lists on Amazon and clicking a button. From the producer’s side of the transaction, it’s more complicated.

There’s the author, who creates a labor of love until the minute someone decides to click that yellow button that says “Buy”. There’s the editor, who toils over the manuscript to make it readable. Some editors will carve out whole chunks of text to achieve that, others will simply correct the grammar, spacing, and spelling, but the effort is the same.

There is the cover artist who brings a point of story from inside the pages of the manuscript into blazing life.

The point, as Kevin G. Summers makes clear here, is that books cost money to make. Considerable amounts of money. In the case of indie publishing, everyone except the author makes money, at least until he or she sells enough copies to recover the costs of the book in question. Speaking as someone who has just started down this road, it’s a steep learning curve.

Indy authors Nick Cole and Michael Bunker, and ThirdScribe creator Rob McClellan have made a thing, called Apocalypse Weird. I’ve mentioned it on Facebook and Twitter, and I’ve reviewed a bunch of the books they’ve released.

To be blunt, they need money to keep the ball rolling, and have built an Indiegogo project to raise it. Three greats ways of donating stand out:

First, just drop a buck into the bucket. It makes no dent in your budget and still helps us out.

Second, you can drop a fiver into the bucket and get a neat perk.

Third–and my favorite option–$20 buys you the first eight AW novels, which have been getting rave reviews across the board for months. Or, for the same $20, you can pre-order the next eight AW novels in the series, which are sure to be every bit as good.

Sixteen outstanding works of End of the World fiction for $40. It doesn’t get better than that.

Actually–it does get better. There are plenty of awesome perks to choose from. But, the sale ends in 8 days, so check out the fund raiser to donate now!

[books_custom size=”150″ type=”random” custom_sort=”publisher” custom_sort_value=”Wonderment Media Incorporated”]

Digital Recovery Plans, Libraries, and Us

May 6, 2015 by Jon Frater Leave a Comment

I’ll just say that if you couldn’t make it to NYTSL’s Spring Program last night, you missed an excellent discussion.

The program was “”Disaster Recovery and the Digital Library”, and as such, it brought a bit of real world application to the often abstract world of disaster planning. NYTSL’s guest speakers were Frank J. Monaco, a retired Army Colonel and the recently retired CIO of Pace University; and Neil H. Rambo, the Director of NYU Health Science Libraries and Knowledge Informatics.

Both men spoke about experiences that put their training, planning, and experience to the test. In Frank Monaco’s case, it was managing the school’s recovery from the 9-11 attacks.

Verizon facility serving most of downtown Manhattan — 140 West St, damaged by 7 WTC’s collapse.

Monaco has already written extensively on what he did that day but briefly: after he transitioned from the military to CIO of Pace U., the first part of his plan was to move the institutional data centers as far away from downtown as possible, meaning Briarcliff Manor, the site of Pace’s Westchester campus. This turned out out to be a fortuitous decision. When the Internet collapsed (literally, as data transfers relied on the Verizon facility at 140 West Street which was damaged by the 7 WTC building collapse) Pace’s CTO had to physically carry the school’s mission-critical external servers and move them to a disaster-recovery site in Hawthorne, NY. After 24 hours to allow new IP addresses to propagate, web pages and e-mail returned to functionality.

Importantly, Monaco noted that their disaster recovery plan was still incomplete at the time of the attack. He also pointed out that restoring service was a very small part of the tremendous effort exerted by Pace’s president, executive staff, administrative staff, faculty, and students.

Neil Rambo told a hair-raising tale of the events that occurred in 2012 when Hurricane Sandy heaped a few million cubic feet of water on New York City. Long story short, a 14-foot storm surge sent a wall of water powerful enough to blow steel doors off their hinges and send part of the East River into the lowermost levels of NYU’s Langone Medical Center on First Avenue. The result was a ruined library, destroyed archives, and a non-functional hospital.

Part of the problem was that NYU had previously weathered hurricane in 2011, Irene, which did minimal damage, and created a plan that expected similar damage from Sandy. After creating a response that planned for a cleanup and restoration of the medical center, library staff were enabled to work out of different facilities in a building across the street, reducing the loss of activity. It’s taken this long to determine that the library will be rebuilt into a superior environment which will devote nearly all its space to electronic resources, and is due to open later this year.

The lessons here aren’t really that surprising: make plans when things are running well, because there won’t be a chance when things break. A great plan, properly executed, is always better than an okay plan properly executed and light-years ahead of no plan at all. Optimally, the highest levels of administration need to be on board from the first stages of planning. Monaco’s advice on achieving this: “Scare the hell out of them.” Rambo’s advice was a bit more circumspect: “Imagine what would happen if you library was just gone, and work from that.”

And so I did. I’ll tell you what I figured out in the next post.

Get My Books

[author_books amount=”3″ size=”150″ type=”random” name=”jonfrater”]