The transitive property of equality states for any real numbers a, b, and c: If a = b and b = c, then a = c
Lindsay secretly loves math:
“One of us needs to walk Gatsby.
Walking Gatsby means putting on pants.
Therefore, you are walking Gatsby.”
This is my answer to a good question posed on a friend’s Facebook wall (and of course too long to post there.)
The key problem-in-search-of-a-revolution for self-publishing isn’t so much that self-publishing has a stigma itself…but rather that a self-published book hasn’t been vetted in a way readers yet trust.
I know that’s stating the obvious. But people rely on vetting for literary books way more than they do for movies or photos or restaurants. Literary books are much more of an investment in time (days or weeks of reading), money (usually over $20), and emotion (they can change your life in unpredictable ways). Yet still like movies and photos and restaurants, there are lots of books…Of the 22 million books registered with the Library of Congress, you have to choose which one to read now. So divide that limited time by your seemingly unlimited supply: If you start reading at age 3 and manage to read a book a week ’till your death at 100, you have to choose not to read 99.975% of all books.
Or put in psychosocial terms, traditionally embedded in your decision to buy a book is the opinion of the writer, agent, publisher, and bookstore/website who all thought the book was worth the cost of making it available to you, as well as the opinion of the reviewer and friend who recommended that you search that one book out. You have to choose one book out of 22 million available. You can’t possibly. So you need a shortcut: a vetting system.
Successful self-publishing means building a vetting system half as trusted as agent + publisher + reviewer, etc.
A quick note…
Tonight is the “Stand Up to Cancer” telethon, and though SU2C’s work is amazing, it highlights a paradox of cancer marketing.
Cancer marketing, to be effective at raising money, needs to frame the enemy as “cancer”.
Cancer research, however, has proven that “cancer” as a single disease doesn’t exist. While the word cancer may be useful as a catch-all term for diseases characterized by unregulated cell division, every kind of cancer—from acute lymphoblastic leukemia to Wilms tumor—has a particular cause, a particular reason for growing uncontrollably, and, one day, its own particular cure. You can’t “cure cancer” because cancer as a single disease doesn’t exist.
But “Wilms tumor” can’t get a nationwide telethon and raise $100 million in a single night.
The only way to solve the paradox—the apparent contradiction—is to perpetuate the misconception in order to get the money…and then, we hope, to be honest in that money’s disbursal. It does, nevertheless, come at the cost of misinforming the public.
Same shoulder bag, same watch, same hair (eventually). (The dog couldn’t be helped.)
Lindsay and I picked a couple Evos on Friday with a great deal reupping my old Sprint plan to a family plan, with unlimited data. Hence, this first-ever mobile post.
Thanks to Alan, Jade, and others for initial app recommendations…the Boston bus map realtime app is astounding. I can watch the #77 bus from my window at the same time the icon passes home on the app’s map. If I had that in 2008, I might have literally stayed at Tufts a few months longer instead of applying for new jobs near reliable T stops.
Of course now I get to work with people who make the apps, so it’s a good deal all around.
Anyway, we’re both geeking out. Or as my now-working-in-Silicon-Valley sister-in-law said Friday: “Welcome to 2006!”
On September 25, 2001, XM Satellite Radio (XM) launched a service to provide paying subscribers with radio that they would traditionally receive free of charge. With in hand an $80 million Federal Communications Commission license to broadcast its signals via satellite rather than through a network of ground-based transmitters, XM had raised $1.1 billion to launch two Boeing-made satellites and to build a 60,000 square-foot broadcasting headquarters in Washington, D.C. (Colker T1). XM also secured deals with electronics manufacturers and auto-makers to make certain the public can buy XM-ready receivers, and by pouring $100 million into a preliminary advertising campaign, it made sure the public would know about this new, “revolutionary” technology (Taub G1). What was supposed to be revolutionary was that this new conception of radio would financially support its 100, genre-specific channels with almost no advertising within their programming (see appendix for full channel listing). Instead, the commercial-free programming is funded directly by the listener through subscription fees.
The opening paragraph of my Wake Forest honors thesis just begins to hint at my enthusiasm, at the time, for the new medium of satellite radio. Indeed, at that time, I was still furious about the loss of my beloved 90.1 FM WDCU jazz station three years before—as a high schooler, I had written something of a precursor, citing Eric Boehlert’s Rolling Stone article “Radio Land Rush” warning about the dire effects on music quality and diversity of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which eliminated ownership restrictions on radio stations under the forward-looking but narrow logic that the public would soon be getting their music and information from sources other than radio, that radio needed to homogenize to survive. (Boehlert’s piece isn’t online, but he made a similar argument in “One Big Happy Channel?” for Salon.com in 2001.)
I hated those effects of the Telecom Act. WDCU went under (my friend Jon arrived at school, agitated, and told me the station, at midnight the night before, during a Miles Davis solo, had fallen to static). 99.1 WHFS, the alt-rock station that introduced me to Pearl Jam and Ted Leo, become a shell of itself, and in a few years, following the market, became a Spanish-language station. The Telecom Act allowed media companies to buy up many stations and program music from a single central list, rebroadcasted identically throughout the country. Except in the preposterously upped number of local furniture company ads, radio no longer had any connection to geographic communities.
But I was optimistic about satellite radio when it came along in 2001, after nearly two decades in the works. It had some of the same limitations…XM was broadcast entirely out of its DC headquarters, for example. But it had no ads, meaning the only way to make money was to play music the subscribers wanted, including new music the DJs thought their listeners would really like. And as the tone of my thesis can attest, I loved it. By 2004, XM had a 100% commercial-free lineup, had struck a deal with Major League Baseball to broadcast all their games nationwide, and, thanks to savvy deals with automakers, ended the year with over 3 million subscribers.
Despite this, it wasn’t long before the landscape around satellite radio changed enough that “playing music the subscribers wanted” became nonsensical. You no longer needed to subscribe to anything to get what you wanted; you had your iPod and your music sharing services and, more recently, social media and online recommendation engines that, to many, made the DJ role obsolete.
It was a few years later, in 2007, that XM and Sirius, pushed by their investors and a bad economy, decided to merge and were able to make a compelling case to the government it this wasn’t an anti-competitive move. Yes, these were the only two satellite music companies and had gotten a lot of what they wanted by dint of a promise that they’d never merge. But now they were up against traditional radio, web feeds, podcasts, iTunes, concert footage on YouTube, radio on cable TV, legal file sharing, illegal file sharing, and dozens of other distribution networks for music and information.
The government approved the merger, and on July 29, 2008, when the merger was completed, satellite radio officially began to suck.
DJs were laid off on stations like XMU—Sirius-XM’s alt-rock station—destroying the last human connection between listener and company. This is the primary reason I had decided to cancel my subscription. In the past year, though, Sirius-XM began to charge for listening on the web, even to existing subscribers, and the overall monthly cost continued to increase ahead of inflation. It got harder to justify paying more for so much less of a product.
From a business perspective, Sirius-XM weathered the recession with relative aplomb, avoiding a bankruptcy that was seen as all but certain after its shares fell to $0.05. But from a music-lover’s perspective, the service is, like terrestrial radio in 2001, a shell of itself. I recently listened to the station RealJazz, for example, and heard entire blocks of music repeated during one afternoon, reinforcing the fact that I was no longer listening to a radio station staffed by fellow music lovers. I was listening to a computer program run by Wall Street investors.
I get it. I do. I know it’s a business and Sirius-XM has to do what it can to survive and thrive financially. But like the changes made by conglomerates the wake of the ’96 Telecom Act, these changes feel more like a betrayal to a community than forgivable good business sense.
Anyway. So I made the call yesterday. After only a little well-trained pushback from the person at the other end of the phone, my XM radio, for the first time since 2001, fell to static.
Three years ago today, I went to the hospital with memory loss and ended up with a diagnosis of Hodgkin’s lymphoma. (The full run-down written on cancerversary #1, when I’d long been given a clean bill of health.)
My wife and I were chatting about this on the walk to work today, noting how natural it has become to celebrate the anniversary of something so nasty. We’ll go out tonight, toast each other, toast to some friends who supported us. But the celebration, as it were, is to recognize the dramatic before-and-after. July 16 is the watershed date. It’s when we knew how we would react as a family to crisis. It’s when we knew that our best friends would remain our best friends forever. So it’s a date worth celebrating.
We couldn’t have recognized it at the time, but now we know that an incident in 2007 gave us a comfort we can rely on the rest of our lives.
But boy will we need it. Back in January, my primary care physician, whom I will not be visiting again, told me it looked like I had developed a related cancer. His turned out to be incompetent doctoring (he ignored the fact that I had a cold sore during my bloodwork, which skewed all the numbers), but for the several days it took to clear up the misdiagnosis, we thought we were heading down that same road again. And worse, the realization that it could recur meant…it could recur, again and again. I was no longer cancer’s asskicker. I was another guy subject to the whim of the universe and the talents (or lack thereof) of doctors.
Amazingly, that put life into perspective much more than the original diagnosis did. While the first diagnosis taught us we truly could handle anything and we had the people around us we needed, the second (mis)diagnosis taught us, a little more darkly, to avoid needing to handle anything, to stay healthy, and to treasure the people around us.
The first diagnosis showed us life is nuts. The second, that life is short.
So on this third cancerversary, I want to highlight the things we’re loving in our short lives. We love that we’ll see our families next week and in October, after this month having seen my wife’s family two weekends in a row. We love that we have this ridiculous dog:
We love that we’re taking our involvement in our communities–particularly cancer charities and friends affected by cancer–a little more seriously. We love reading, maybe more than ever now. We love our dreams–from finding the right house to raise kids in to finding a Saturday to go to Curtis’ Bar-B-Q in Putney, Vermont. We love that my dear friend Patrick, whose first wedding anniversary is in two days, is now a proud father.
These things, they’re not anything that a little worry about illness can ever get in the way of.
Inversely, men always like enterprises where the snags are either hidden or willfully ignored. See: Invasion of Iraq, 2007 mortgage meltdown, 2010 Gulf oil disaster.
