Saturday, September 23, 2006

Here's a list of sections in the book I'm writing on business 101 for artists. Do any sections catch your eye?

Take Them By The Hand
Don't Be A Sell Out
Make A Bundle
Stay On Target
Hold Your Position
Know Thou Self
Family First
Absolute Integrity
It's About YOU, Not Your Art
Focus, Focus, Focus
Pay Attention To Processes
How Much Do I Charge?
It'll Never Be This Good
The Storyteller
Don't Be A Commodity
On Advertising...
Building An Audience
What Are You Fighting For
Don't Get Ahead Of Yourself
The Passion Of The Artist
Segmenting Your Audience
Fire in Your Belly
Set Your Anchors
Your Environment Matters
Success Builds On Success
Intelligent Collaboration
Negotiating 101
Measure EVERYTHING
What's In It For Me?
Lunch Is The Most Important Meal of The Day
Play To Your Strengths
The Synergizer Bunny
Finance 101
Money Shows Its Age
One Egg Per Basket Is Difficult To Carry
Risk-Return Opportunities
Bottom Up Versus Top Down Planning
Let Your Unique You Shine
Death By 1,000 Paper Cuts
Evolutionary Design
The Sales Cannibal
The Positive Science
The 80/20 Rule
Quantity Versus Quality
Stop Waiting For Permission!
Can Artpreneurship Be Taught?
Never Give Up (But Morph Losses Wisely)
Selling to Companies Versus People
Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal
Competition 101
Everything You Know About Brainstorming Is Wrong
Artpreneurship Skill #1: Seeking
Artpreneurship Skill #2: Opportunity Focus
The Sales Funnel
The Busier, The Better
Love To Say No
On Your Own Excuses And Others' Excuses
Escape Your Comfort Zone
So-And-So Told Me You Were Awesome
JIT: The Inventory Problem
How Much Am I Really Spending?
Don't Let Extremists Dictate How You Treat Your Best Customers
Coming Up With Your Own Solutions
Power Naming
PR 101: The WOW Factor
I Bet That Testimonial Is Fake!
I Highly Recommend...
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Friday, September 22, 2006

- Any Chrono Trigger fans? I've been learning how to play Frog's theme song on the piano. I know, I'm a geek at heart :-).

- I'm trying to stop checking my email and the news so often. I must check them both 100+ times per day.

- I have an outline of everything I want to do strategically with the network for the next seven months. It's an ambitious plan, but I have high hopes...

- Did you notice? On the cosplay site, I moved the thumbnails within each gallery to the top of the page. I was browsing it and realized how much I hated constant down-scrolling.

- Stop what you're doing! Gail has finally updated her blog with news about her SF trip.
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Wednesday, September 20, 2006

You know the drill:

- I was lazy for dinner and just had a smoked salmon sandwich + corn on the cob.

- I love my DS, am really quite excited about the Wii...

- Massin is doing a really fantastic job so far with the Fan Manga site. This is site has the most potential of any other one we've done.
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Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Total Hotness
- Early next week, the t-shirts will be in our warehouse. And the week after that, they'll be in your home!

Here's a prototype I just received today:



My camera doesn't do it justice, the white is really bright and the fabric feels nice

- Sonic Rush is a really fun DS game

- I threw some fish sticks in the oven and boiled pasta for dinner. I also drank a 40oz slurpee
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Monday, September 18, 2006

Sunday Notes
- I took the exam for graduate school on Saturday (it's like the SATs). I loaded up on bananas, orange juice, and carbs to keep my mind sharp for the four hours of the exam. I ended up doing very well, with a score that's competitive for pretty much any grad school in the country. Only 9% of test-takers did better. Go me & thanks for your support :-).

(I still think standardized tests = crap.)

- I love our podcasters.

- The winners were announced for the Canadian animation award show. Congrats to them all and I hope I served the contestants fairly in judging.

- I was asleep most of the weekend. After the exam, I felt mentally drained.

- I bought a ton of groceries and look forward to cooking tasty food in the coming week. When I bought the groceries, I asked if they could deliver them to my apartment, but they said it was one block outside their radius. Ugh. So my exercise for the day was walking very far with five heavy bags.

- My book on teaching artists business principles is still progressing nicely. I think that everyone here could benefit from reading it, to be honest--not just artists.

However, the book is not something I'm going to plug heavily on the network like I do with Art of Otaku. The reason is that there's an audience mis-match. The ideal audience for this book is someone a little older and a little more serious about their work than the typical otaku visitor.

That's one reason why the book won't have the word "Otaku" in the title :-).
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Saturday, September 16, 2006

- I have "the test" tomorrow. Wish me luck! I'll let you know how I did tomorrow. On the GMAT, here are the score ranges:

500-640: I didn't do well
650-700: I did well, but not great
700+: I did great :-).

The highest you can get is an 800. On my practice tests, I've been getting a lot of mid-600's and even some high 500's. Grrr...hopefully I can pull some magic tomorrow.

- I baked chicken in the oven with cranberry sauce...it came out very well.

- I love my new apartment but the lack of space is annoying. Like if I got a TV it would require a lot of maneuvering to even fit it. Also, I've had to pack my piano/keyboard in my closet. You really have to be rich to get a decent-sized apartment in a nice building/area. Apparently Tokyo is even worse though.

- We've sold out of Art of Otaku CDs. Only selling the download for the time being.
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Friday, September 15, 2006

Can you take a moment and give me your thoughts on the last bullet point?

- You should see The New World, starring Colin Farrel and Christian Bale. It's such a remarkable movie; the characters, plot, dialogue are all secondary. The main character is the scenery. Even when I have no idea what's happening I enjoy just sitting back and admiring it.

Also, I think I'm in love with Pocahontas.

- We've settled on a design for the Fan Manga site. It's going to be rather innovative, kind of a cross between the Fan Art and Cosplay sites.

- I don't know why I keep falling asleep in the mid-evening. This never used to happen to me. Today I found myself asleep from 9 PM - 11 PM.

- I'm very interested in Nintendo's Wii console. Problem is I don't have a TV. Is it worth buying a TV for a Wii. Hm...

- I'm taking the GMAT on Saturday. It's an important test for business graduate school, like the SAT. Judging from my practice tests, I don't think I'll do well, to be honest. Not that I really mind, I think accomplishment is much grander than an arbitrary number.

- People love posting quiz results on their myOtaku sites, blogs, MySpace pages, etc. I had a strange idea in my head to create an "Adoptions" art site, where people create "badges" of individual characters that they can easily throw on their sites to adopt. For example, if I'm a big fan of Vash, I'd go to the site, find a badge I like, and then copy-paste the HTML code to MyO. It would say like "I've Adopted...Chibi-Vash!" and would have either graphically enhanced screen caps or original art.
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Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Straight To The Point
- I spent the last two days doing initial planning for the Fan Manga site. It's going to be the most complex site on the network in terms of details. I hope it takes off...

- I like iTunes 7.

- I found out Mustard Man is a well-known improv actor. I guess I can't really mock him anymore, he's probably 10x cooler than I am in real life. Hats off to you, sir.

- Hopefully the rest of my week will be more balanced than it's been. I've basically worked all day, come home and worked all night. Work during the day has been agonizingly slow.

- The book about business and artists is coming along well. I've been interviewing successful commercial artists.

- I fired the company that was supposed to do our t-shirt printing. I'm in talks with a couple others, hopefully one will be worthy of the task. Honestly, it's been a while since I've worked with such an incompetent company - they actually tried to print our shirts with the design color-inverted without telling me first! They're not getting anywhere near our customers/visitors.

- While adding features and improving bugs is important, my #1 job is to grow the network's audience...
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Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Sighs
I wrote a really long blog post, but my FireFox crashed and I'm tired. Good night.
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Monday, September 11, 2006

:-)
Things are really moving along! I love it.

Anyway, because Lady Katana was such a good sport about the mustard prank incident, I entrusted her with a real photo of myself. The only condition was she had to keep it a secret.

...I don't want to end up like the mustard man.
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