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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