Saturday, August 12, 2006

A Disturbing Trend...
I'm seeing a really disturbing trend--a lot of websites are hosting anime fansubs and then charging people to download them.

This is illegal, and blatantly unethical as well.

You can say what you want about fansubs, but the people who run these sites are actually profiting from the hard work of important companies, and the people who work within them.

They'll often claim that they'd LIKE to offer the fansubs for free, but that hosting expenses make that impossible. That's just bunk; these sites are motivated by greed alone.

In the last 6 months, I've refused advertising to 4 of these type of sites. I'm getting so sick of it.

...I wish someone would shut them down.
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Image Update
Thanks to Petie and Sunfall who sent me a JPG of the image I linked to yesterday. Sadly, the design people at the t-shirt company messed up and instead of sending me a vectorized picture of snow fox's lovely logo, sent me a picture of a radioactive warning symbol.

So things are a little further delayed on that front. I got a few emails from artists asking if they could send me their anime t-shirt designs to print and distribute. Heh, flattered to be asked, but I think that's way, way premature. I have no idea how the shirt run will go.

Anyway, on the book I've been working on, I have a lovely cover thanks to Rodbere, one of our Art of Otaku artists. She had made me a beautiful wallpaper for my birthday and, looking at it, it just *works* for the book's cover.
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Thursday, August 10, 2006

Ugh
To use the best type of printing for our upcoming t-shirt, I had to pay extra to have snow fox's design "vectorized." I just received the enhanced graphic, but it's in an obscure file format (.svg) that I've never seen before.

I tried downloading 2 separate programs to view this file, but neither worked!

Can you view these files (see below)? Give it a try. If so, can you take a screen shot and email them to me? I'd really appreciate it...

http://adam.velegant.com/ugh/
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Monday, August 7, 2006

Notes From The King
The hotel next door figured out I was stealing wifi and secured their connection. Ah well.

I'm at a Burger King Internet cafe of all places now, just checking in.

Here are a few notes:

(1) I'm on vacation now, so enjoying my time off. Me on vacation means I cook every meal myself, chill out a lot, and see lots of movies.

(2) Pleiades Rising and blackwings nailed it about the book I'm working on:

"In all honesty, I think that if any artist is serious about his/her art, then that person needs to have a basic understanding of business concepts. If this book teaches general principles which can be easily built upon for future learning, I find no faults in presenting such a book. General principles regarding any subject are an absolute necessity if one is to even hope to understand the task at hand. If the aim of your book is to provide these tools for building a stronger foundation to work upon, then you are on the right track!"

And:

"Actually what I think is that artist need a book about how to maximize your marketing on a minimum wage budget. Because my sister is a freelancer. Alot of the professionals don't understand why she isn't popular yet. But when you have to drop anywhere from two to five hundred just to get a 4x6 advertising space it becomes seriously hard for a minimum wage family to make it. And so far nothing has returned even half of its cost."

(Working at an advertising agency, one of the most important points I'm going to stress is that advertising is generally NOT a good medium to promote your work. You can lose a lot of money quickly and get no return from it. The best types of marketing are free and just require some hard, intelligent work.)

The book will be a rapid-fire resource giving you business concept after business concept all tailored to the "starving" artist with no business background (and no interest in business). I'll also try to make it fun and innovative. Some business books take one concept and spread it out to 200 pages. My goal is to have one "pocket manual" type book @ 100ish pages that contains 50+ concepts/ideas all illustrated as simply as possible.

I really have three goals for the book: First, to put down on paper for the first time all the ideas and learnings in my head.

Second, to light a fire under the reader to take action and think about how they can adopt some principles.

And third, to take someone with no interest in business and share with them my own passion for it, hopefully inspiring them to take up further study.

(3) Our Art of Otaku fan art contest is HARD to judge. Almost every entry is gorgeous. I've enlisted the help of our Art of Otaku writers to help me with it.

(4) Massin is in Japan right now. We're still going to get a lot of work done, but it might take a tad longer.

Tomorrow my regular Internet access should resume...

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Friday, August 4, 2006

400,000 Members :)
I still have very limited Internet access. Right now I'm stealing wifi from a neighboring hotel (shh!)

But we have 400k members. Milestone...sweet!

So I wanted to announce that I've started writing a new book. It's not nearly as epic as Art of Otaku (will probably take a few weeks versus 6 months), but will be on an important topic.

Like Art of Otaku, the book will be tailored to artists. But while Art of Otaku focuses on how artists can IMPROVE their craft, this book will teach artists how to MARKET their craft.

No...you won't get rich by reading it. But I guarantee it'll be a fun read that will teach you more relevant business concepts than a dozen textbooks.

(Even if you're not an artist, if you ever wanted to learn more about business, it will be a pretty awesome introduction.)

No, it won't be free or even cheap. But it's one project that should, if you're interested in selling your artwork, earn you back 10x its price.

What are your thoughts?
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Thursday, August 3, 2006

WTF?
Why is it that everything bad has to happen while im most vulnerable (i.e. in the process of moving with limited internet access)??
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Monday, July 31, 2006

   Thanks For The Reminder!
I completely forgot that it's myOtaku's 3rd birthday!

I guess it's a good time to mention that it's long, long overdo for a design upgrade with some new features. It's not the next project on my plate, but it's probably the one after that.

I wish I could celebrate more, but I'm moving today and will be on a business trip the rest of the week. Wish me luck.
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Follow-Up Letter
A really weird side debate has arisen over whether the term 'art' applies to essay writing. This really doesn't have to do with the site's direction at all. In this context I obviously mean art to be visual art.

Anyone who thinks I don't appreciate writers obviously doesn't know me...

It's like saying James doesn't appreciate video game designers, or Gail doesn't appreciate panda photographers. I'm a writer myself. (And, I might add, the person who pioneered the integration/idea of an articles site.)

I greatly value the work of our article writers...Bell, SomeGuy, Katana, etc. You're all great members of our community; from comments to blogs to news commentary to OB. Articles are just a small part of your value. I'd be really saddened if any of you chose to leave because of this.

Down the line we'll have projects that will need strong writers and if you do stick around I'd be happy to give you special preference for them (look at the great job Sarah/Kei/and Gail do, for example).

I really don't want to lose our writers, I think you're a strong part of our community.

Yes, Sarah can do a great job moderating the articles site. Yes, it won't 'kill' us to keep it around even as we shift focus to art. But we don't want to just 'survive', we want to constantly imrpove/streamline/build new features/and grow. And for that, we have to focus. We're not a niche fansite; I have to make decisions on a very high/holistic level.

A long time ago, I turned a gaming site with YEARS of gaming coverage and history into an anime site. You can imagine how many visitors and staff were in an uproar about that. Then I turned an anime site with literally thousands of pages of hand-written content into a user-generated portal.

...And look what happened...

I see a similar need for a strategic realignment. I really hope you stay with us and trust me. Because you're going to see something really slick come out of all of this.

And those of you who like storytelling; just wait until you see the FAN MANGA section we have planned. I hope to see a lot of artist/writer collaboration there.

QUESTION: Writers--Given this stance, please respond with what I can do to make this transition less painful for you. You have my service--Please, no complaints in this thread though, only constructive ideas.
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Sunday, July 30, 2006

I Love Artists...An Important Post
I feel a strong kinship with artists. It might be because my mother/aunt/brother are artists. Or it might be because I've made friends with a lot of artists on the network.

Or it might be because I think artists and entrepreneurs have a lot in common. They both have to create something from nothing, have to leverage the resources they have available...

Anyway, my point: We are going to be focusing HARD on artists in the coming months. We want to do more for artists than anyone else out there. That's our vision. And by focusing on artists, we're going to create a substantially better destination for visitors.

However, to do this, sacrifices must be made. For example, we have two sites: Articles and Reviews that we're going to have to retire.

You might be thinking: "I understand about reviews, that site's been dead forever, but...

ARTICLES?!?!?! HOW DARE YOU!"

First, let's take a step back, so you can understand my reasoning.

In terms of traffic, our articles site is less than 1% of our traffic (way less). Also, articles are difficult to maintain; unlike art where you just hit the 'approve' button, you actually have to read and edit articles. Finally, if we're going to focus on art, having article links is kind of distracting...

Even more importantly, we have two different mechanisms in place for letting people share their essays/thoughts: OtakuBoards and myOtaku. I want to encourage more people to use these avenues.

And, just so we don't alienate our wonderful article writers, I intend to build a kind of 'Articles' feature in myOtaku. And if you write a really good/timely one about anime, you're more than welcome to send it to our news team. If it gets linked, that'll lead to 10x more exposure for your article than it would get on the articles site.

I hope you understand. This was a difficult decision, especially considering I have a ton of articles published there myself and am ranked the #1 'most popular' as well. The site will remain online, will just not be linked in the left-nav anymore.
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Saturday, July 29, 2006

Eyes On DeviantArt...
What does DeviantArt do BEST and what do they do WORST? What can we learn from them?

Leave your messages...
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