Rob Reid's Blog

(Note: this post also ran in big, glorious color on Boing Boing yesterday – thank you, Boing Boing!)

A few months back I got to see the mighty, ever-reigning dinosaur kings of rock, the Rolling Stones.  I had a general admission ticket and a small pocket camera, and arrived many hours early so as to worm my way clear up to the front.

It was a thunderous, spellbinding show.  Keith, Ronnie & Darryl didn’t miss a note, Charlie didn’t miss a beat, and Mick preened and darted around the vast arena like a man a third his age.  Smirking hipsters dismiss the Stones for being old (how dare they!), for lacking modern relevance, and/or for cynically milking their fans for every last dollar.  Whatever.  That night I saw a band that cared very, very deeply about its creations and its legacy – guys whose wealth long since freed them from any chore they’d rather avoid, and who spent that and dozens of other nights exerting themselves to the limit to create their spectacle.

I’ve seen the Stones several times over the years, but this was the first time I brought a camera.  The smartphone tsunami has forced concert promoters to give up their long-running battle against fan photos.  Fancy SLR’s are still prohibited at lots of shows.  But apart from a few hardline reactionaries like Prince, most performers let their audiences go hog wild with pocket cameras and cellphones.

This is a long-winded preamble to what I really want to discuss in this post – which is the awesome capabilities that you can now find in a pocket camera.  With extreme lighting, fast-moving subjects, and chaotic settings, live concerts present photographers with an awful lot of headwinds.  I hope these shots show that you can now achieve impressive results in the trickiest environments with just a wisp of hardware (at the bottom of this post you’ll find a link to much larger versions of the photos, which will give you a better sense of their quality).

OK, so the the holidays are pretty much past us – nonetheless, my belated gift suggestion for avid photographers at ANY level of expertise is the Sony RX-100, which took all of these shots.  It comes in two flavors – the original RX-100 (which dates back to mid-2012) and its ingeniously named successor, the RX-100 II.  I can usually be gulled into upgrading to any new version of my favorite gizmos.  But even as a rabid RX-100 fan, I sat out the new version, and suggest that you do the same.  The specs are barely improved, yet the new version will run you a couple hundred dollars more.  To be clear, you have to love someone a lot to buy them even the dowdy old original, which rounds to $500.  But it’s a breathtaking piece of technology.

I bought mine shortly after it first came out, when the the mighty David Pogue – a reviewer who is not prone to hyperbole (at least not for non-Apple products) – began a New York Times piece with the words, “This is a review of the best pocket camera ever made.”  Eighteen months on, I’d say this introduction remains largely accurate.  The RX-100 has many superpowers.  And one of the most important ones might strike some people as obscure – specifically, its ability to shoot images in the RAW format.

Thousands of carefully chosen words can be written about RAW, but the Cliff Notes are that it gives unbelievable after-the-fact control over the tone and quality of light in an image.  Harnessing this power requires sophisticated software, and I’m a huge fan of Lightroom by Adobe.  This will run you about a hundred bucks, but (much more significantly) I’d say you should expect to spend about a hundred hours truly mastering it.  The good news is that you can spread this over a year or more, because you’ll start achieving amazing things almost immediately, and the complete learning process will be a joy to anyone who loves engaging in digital images.  I’ve read plenty of Lightroom books over the years, and the by-far best in my view is Scott Kelby’s.  If you steadily work your way through this gem, testing out everything he discusses, you will gradually become a true Lightroom ninja.  Take your time and enjoy the journey.

And that journey should absolutely include smuggling your camera into every concert that you attend.  If you’re interested in this sort of thing, you should absolutely read this detailed & articulate discussion of concert photography and hardware (including the RX-100) by Jason DeBord.  Jason’s wonderful blog features a constant procession of shows that he documents using both professional and civilian camera gear.

Finally to reiterate a prior point, I absolutely recommend the RX-100 and its ilk to photographers at any level – including pros with enough fancy gear to fill a Hummer.  I have a wonderful, cumbersome SLR that takes stunning images, and which I wouldn’t want to lug into 90% of the environments that I inhabit on any given day.  It’s a truism that the best camera for any situation is the one that you happen to have with you at the time.  Usually, this will be your cellphone.  If you’re lucky enough to go on safari, you may be lucky enough to own a Canon 7D, and you should absolutely pack it.  But for those in-between situations that call for both fabulous imagery and super-portable technology, high-end pocket cameras are really starting to deliver the goods.  And as with all things tech-related, you can expect today’s top-of-the-line performance to migrate into bargain price points within a few years.

Incidentally, is it just me, or does it look like Charlie is about to be swallowed by a gigantic Stones logo up there?  The things you can do with a Jumbotron these days…

Anyway – if you enjoy these images, I’ve posted much larger versions of them and dozens of others in this SmugMug photo album.  Click on the large image on the right side of the screen to see it in ultra-big form, and then navigate through the album using your arrow keys.

Enjoy, and happy holidays!

 

Random House is pricing my first novel like an MP3 single. And as the founder of the company that built the Rhapsody music service, I’m thrilled.  The reason is that I love writing fiction.  But building a big audience for self-published books would require ghoulish levels of social media stamina that I lack (proof: this is only my third blog post in fourteen months).  This means that if I want to reach readers – and I do – I need the backing & support of a publisher.  Make that a solvent publisher.

So hats off to Random House for testing out pricing tactics that some would view as kamikaze lunacy.  They released the paperback edition of my novel (Year Zero) just six month ago.  And for at least a few days, their eBook will undersell it by 93% (as Amazon conveniently calculates on its Kindle page).  Not that Random House was counting on my paperback sales to make its quarter.  But they’ve been experimenting relentlessly with pricing for at least a year now, and not just with small fry like me.

Being reliant on publisher solvency, I’m delighted – because this is the only way to survive when the time-honored rules of your industry are collapsing or rewriting themselves all around you.  You experiment. You learn. You adapt. You don’t do what the music industry did when faced with its digital bogeyman – and whine, litigate, and deny.

I had a front-row seat to that horror show back when we were building Rhapsody. And having watched the American music industry bleed out half of its revenues over ten years, I sure don’t want publishing to do the same.   Because if my own novel to is be believed (and to be perfectly clear – IT IS NOT), it’s precisely these sorts of shenanigans that can DESTROY THE EARTH ITSELF (for a brief explanation, you can watch Year Zero’s animated trailer, three paragraphs below).

A convenient fiction that still makes the rounds blames music’s gruesome decade on Napster-abetted piracy.  This is like saying that the outsiders commonly called Barbarians caused Rome’s collapse.  Rome conquered the Samnites, Carthage, Hellenist empires, and countless other well-oiled foes. But Rome ultimately fell because it reacted to the Barbarian threat in wholly self-destructive ways – not because the mere existence of Barbarians magically doomed history’s greatest empire.

Piracy was the Barbarian horde to the music industry’s Rome (and I won’t say who played Caligula – although Vivend/Universal’s Jean Marie Messier sure had an ego on him).  Piracy wasn’t lethal in and of itself.  But it could be (and was) exceptionally dangerous if dealt with clumsily.  Entire books have been written about the major music labels’ boo-boo’s in the age of file sharing.  But to me, the uber-blunder was their dogged refusal to sell digital products on any terms, or at any price, throughout the Internet’s formative years.

To put this in context, recall that downloading constituted the umpteenth format in recorded music’s 125-year history.  And during that time, nothing – not waxen cylinders, LP’s, 8-tracks, cassettes, or CD’s – generated more immediate desire amongst music lovers.  Despite this, the major labels embargoed their catalogs from downloading for almost half a decade after Napster’s rise (and here comes that trailer.  The essay continues beneath it…)

And so the music-loving public went from acute excitement over the new format, to acute confusion over its absence from any legitimate store.  And from there it was a short jaunt to a prohibition mindset.  One that basically said, this stuff is fabulous, it is illegal, and that is insane.  And I am therefore not a criminal for desiring it.  So over five years, literally hundreds of millions of people grew comfortable – on every level – with piracy.

By the time the labels grudgingly started licensing their catalogs, they had given illicit file sharing a massive head start.  Habits die hard, and free is an especially easy price to acclimate to.  And so the paid-for online music industry will struggle for many more years to overcome the enormous beachhead that the major labels granted to file sharing.  The lesson here is not that digital piracy automatically dooms content industries.  The lesson is that you should never, ever give piracy a five-year monopoly on awesomeness – as I argued in this piece in the Wall Street Journal.

I’ll barely make a dime from Random House’s rock-bottom pricing experiment with my novel.  But in a digitizing industry, the only way forward is to embrace the chaos.  Bold experiments are teaching publishers a lot about price elasticity, “windowing” (what the studios do in marching films from theaters, to DVD’s, to broadcast, etc.) and more.  And publishing is thriving several years after eBooks went mainstream – in stark contrast to the music industry’s fate.

For years, we pleaded with the major labels to at least experiment with selling downloads for 99¢ a song.  We were always told that this would “devalue” music.  As if the only way to properly honor that one Chumbawumba song (yes, it was that long ago…) was to charge $15.99 to get it glued to eleven other songs in a full-length CD.   Wrong.  What truly devalued music was requiring the downloading public to pirate it rather than purchase it for five long years.

If after reading all this you’re interested in a 357-page yarn about a vast alien civilization that’s so into American pop music that it accidentally commits the biggest copyright violation since the Big Bang (thereby bankrupting the entire universe), for at least the next couple of days, US-based readers can grab the eBook for 99¢ at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, BAM, eBooks,  Google Play, diesel, iTunes/iBookstore, Kobo, or Sony.

 

 

 

Last week, Janet Echelman assembled an amazing, vast, and temporary sculpture in Santa Monica.  I was lucky enough to be there the night before it premiered (AND concluded), and got some great photos of it before its debut (AND finale).  For instance:

Janet works with nets and light.  I’m not sure if this is quite how she’d put it, but as an outside observer, I see these as being her media (along with wind & sound, in some cases).  Back in 2011 she gave this talk at TED, in which she revealed how this all started.  Long story short, she was in India on a Fulbright grant, intending to make art … and when her paints didn’t arrive in time for a key show, she was forced to improvise.  Wandering along a beach and wondering what to do, she saw some fishermen tangling with these vast, billowing nets – and inspired by this, she made her first net sculpture.

Sometime thereafter she married an old friend of my from business school, which is how we met.  And then over time, her unique, airy forms developed an international following.  A couple years back, the San Francisco International Airport invited her to shape the space & volume of its (now) gorgeous Terminal 2 with this sculpture.  Illuminating it properly required some gaping skylights, which the Airport Authority approved.  Now, as far as I’m concerned, anyone who’s allowed to bash holes into airport ceilings in the post 9/11 world is pretty much a bigwig – so at that point, I knew she had arrived.

I’m sure her SFO piece will be there for decades, but this piece in Santa Monica was completely ephemeral

In creating it, she was as much a director – or a producer – as an artist.  Cranes arrived.  Bulldozers too.  Over a few days they moved towering volumes of sand, and hauled in something like 70,000 pounds of cement.  Then the lighting ninja’s showed up.

By wonderful coincidence, the lighting company that Janet ended up working with happens to be co-owned by the husband of one of my wife’s best friends (yeah I know that’s a mouthful … but for all intents & purposes, the guy is basically my brother-in-law).  Janet and the lighting team logged God knows how many hours, and the results were sublime.

The nets billowed overhead, in dimensions of a circus tent.  The lights shifted in a leisurely march, casting a series of brooding colors on them.  A eerie, murmuring soundtrack underpinned it all.  I hung out there with Janet, her crew, and her husband (both of us doing our best to stay the hell out of the way) the night before the crowds showed up.  And crowds there were – over 100,000 people came by the following evening for Glow Santa Monica – an annual art extravaganza.  There were about a dozen other pieces on exhibit – all by LA artists, with Janet being the only non-local invited to participate (she’s Boston-based).  And the press showed up in force too – this piece in the New York Times tells the story pretty well.

All of this has gotten me thinking of the ephemeral nature of art.  This was a massive effort – but like a cicada, it existed only briefly after a long gestation.  This is an extreme case – but almost all art is like this on some level.  Van Gogh’s colors have faded in ways that in some cases mask his original intent. The most obsessive Broadway revival can’t precisely replicate vanished sets, performances, or actors.  And even things that are flawlessly transmitted to our day – written works, say – morph tremendously with the passage of time.  There’s just no way we can consume a Jane Austen novel like a true native of her time and place. Sure, we can follow the storyline – but the language & values are antique to us.  This intercedes with its impact, and it just won’t have the gut immediacy of something that’s native to our time (Breaking Bad, say).

Here’s a funny example – I loved Janet’s piece in part because it reminded me of my favorite video game from childhood, Tempest.

But try explaining Tempest’s impact, importance & beauty – all of which were immense – to anyone who grew up on Halo.  They’ll be able to grasp it cognitively if they’re really patient & effortful about it.  But it will be a neck-up thing.  You just can’t pluck a piece of art out of its time without transmuting its impact.

Anyway – Janet’s piece was awesome, and I’m really happy that I got to see it during its brief stint in the here & now.  I have a bigger gallery of pictures of it here if you’re interested.

 

 

A few days back, Heyne Verlag (a Random House division) published a German translation of Year Zero under the very un-Germanic title “Galaxy Tunes.”

The way the alien critter is centered directly under my name kind of makes it seem like it’s a portrait of me.  IT IS NOT.  After spending hundreds of hours in the gym for the express purpose of developing calves like those, I hoisted the white flag some years back.  Apparently the artist was aware of this, and the non-portrait is some kind of a cruel parody…

In all seriousness, at first I wished that they’d used the US cover – the fun mash-up of the Roswell alien head, the Listen.com/Rhapsody logo, and the Napster logo:

 

But the German cover is turning out to be pretty popular with people, and I’m coming around to it.  First of all, the Apple ear buds are a fabulous touch.  The background is also a damn lovely shade of blue.  And then there’s those calves…

A reader on my Facebook author page shared a link to this early review.  I don’t speak a word of German, but Google Translate came through with a delightfully wooden translation (“a humorous space opera that stops at nothing and no one stop”).

And here it is at Amazon Germany.  There is only one reader review up there as I write this.  But it is very kind, saying Google Translated things like “Galaxy Tunes was for me a real discovery of gold. I laughed so hard for a long time not more than a book and chuckled – sometimes I had to put down the book to laugh easily.”

This is the first foreign edition of the book.  Korean and Spanish versions are both in the near-term pipeline…

 

 

The whole point of social media for nobody writers is to nurture an audience, so that when you actually release something (a very rare…

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The whole point of social media for nobody writers is to nurture an audience, so that when you actually release something (a very rare occasion, for most of us) someone (or PERHAPS EVEN DOZENS OF PEOPLE) kind of – you know, notices.

My book has been out for two and a half weeks now, during which I’ve managed a Facebook post, exactly one blog post (which, to be fair, did get a comment.  Thanks, Vincent!), and (apart from retweets and direct responses) maybe a ninth of a Twitter post (and yes, this implies that it had 140.5555 characters – but I used a semicolon, okay?).

This is about a fifth of my posting frequency BEFORE I actually had something to promote.  I’d make a dramatic info-graphic to illustrate this, but I’d end up staying up past dawn fussing over fonts and icons, and while I’d end up with an AWESOME info-graphic (because I’m good at this shit), its bottom-line implication would embarrass me so much that I wouldn’t post it, so we’d just have more radio silence (which I could fabricate just as easily by watching eight episodes of 30 Rock and downing a quarter bottle of Pappy Van Winkle – which, come to think of it, sounds like a hell of a plan).

So instead, I thought I’d tell you about what I’ve been up to when I haven’t been posting.  First, there’s the obvious stuff – I’ve done some signings, some panels, a number of interviews, and several other appearances.  I talked about some of this in my last post – and the more recent stuff has largely been in the same vein, so I won’t blather on about it at length (although some of it has been outlandishly fun & magical – yes, I’m thinking about that that insane Boston reception of yours, Juan, Mary & Chris).

But this only accounts for maybe 6-7 hours of each day.  An honest day’s work, almost, but hardly an alibi for an alleged writer who appears to have stopped writing altogether.  So to this, add masses of email.   All of this signing, paneling, interviewing, and appearing incur endless logistics, which devour the hours, leaving only slightly-depleted in-boxes in their wake.  Next, I give every moment that I can to my family (primarily Morgan and Ashby the Dog).  But I’ve been sorely lacking in this department over the months surrounding my publication date, so this only accounts for snippets of time, rather than the thickets it deserves.

So otherwise, I’ve mainly been … obsessing.  Checking.  Calculating.  Hitting re-load buttons.

Like all human experiences, mine have been unique to some extent.  But I think there’s something all too typical about them in the strange, narrow world of post-social-media authors.  So I’ve decided to dedicate a few posts to my recent obsessions.  You can view them as being a journal or a travelogue – or, perhaps as a warning, if you’re thinking about embarking on a post-Facebook writerly life yourself.

I’m going to write about several things in a yet-determined order.  They include:

Formal reviews (from publications & major blogs)
Populist reviews (Amazon, GoodReads, book blogs, etc).
Amazon Sales Rank (Satan begone!  The Power of the Lord compels you!)
Bookstores & shelf space
Press (and/or utter lack thereof)

I believe that these are near-universal obsessions of the modern author (particularly us first-time novelists).  They could become your own obsessions if you choose to follow this path.  You have been warned.

This here has been a pre-amble.  Actual content to follow.

Last week was the most eventful span of my writing life, and I didn’t … you, know, write about it.  Ah, the sad irony.

But that’s what the wee hours of a Sunday night are for, so here goes…

Monday night was Year Zero’s launch party at the Mysterious Galaxy bookstore in Redondo.   Below is a crew of Random House bigwigs who dined on foie gras and caviar FOR AN ENTIRE MONTH as they floated out on the Del Rey Executive Zeppelin from New York, along with Mysterious Galaxy czarina LeAnna H.  We all look pleased, apart from my editor, who looks like a sad, sad panda.  I’m the towering guy wearing the badass headphones in the back.  Yes, that’s a statuette of me on the sconce to the right.

On Thursday night I did what amounted to 12 minutes of standup comedy for the first time in my life.  What better way to do it that, than in front of 1,200 people?  This was at the w00tstock show at Comic Con.  EVERY OTHER PERFORMER WAS 90-12,113 TIMES MORE FAMOUS THAN ME.  They had Scientists on-hand to verify this.  It was completely demoralizing.  Here we are hanging out in the green room before the big show:

Although I was NOT TREMBLING EVEN SLIGHTLY FROM STAGE FRIGHT, a massive (but outrageously brief) earthquake hit just as my cheap-ass cell phone camera’s aperture opened.  But while it’s hard to pick out the faces, here you have Adam Savage, Paul & Storm, John Scalzi, Wil Wheaton, John Roderick, Marian Call, and a cool guy with a neck beard and glasses.

And here’s a bunch of us on stage.  I may even be one of us (although I’m pretty sure I’m not).

Afterward we did a signing.  Here are best-selling authors John Scalzi and Patrick Rothfuss, as well as show director Liz, who has more superpowers than the rest of us combined.

The next day I did my own signing in the Random House booth – and a gratifyingly large number of people showed up and had me … sign things!  I think it was because they thought I could introduce them to John, Patrick and Liz (I couldn’t).  I’m pictured here with Lori, who ran the show & helped me plot near-term conspiracies (thanks again, Lori):

I got to meet a number of my heroes at Comic Con, including Margaret Atwood, below.  We are not drunk.

By the way, almost everything at Comic Con is from the Future.  Why, even the hotels have power buttons!

And lest you fear that the comic folks are running out of highbrow ideas for new franchises, allow me to put those worries to rest:

And last but CERTAINLY not least, before I pass from this Earth I hope to get photos of myself with actual Year Zero readers who happen to bear the names of each of my major characters.  I’m in the market for a Nick, a Paulie, a Manda, a Frampton, a Carly, and a Pugwash.  BUT I ALREADY HAVE AN OZZIE!!!  OK fine, my character uses a Y and a couple of umlauts.  But Ozzie is close enough, and takes care of one of the “big three” names that I knew would be incredibly challenging (Frampton and Pugwash remain daunting).  Anyway – here I am with my new buddy Ozzie, as well as the Year Zero alien, who still lacks a name:

That’s it for now.  Off to the East Coast in mere minutes.

GREETINGS FARKERS!  And welcome to the Year Zero Giveaway.  Year Zero is my new novel about a bunch of aliens who are soooo into our pop music that they accidentally commit the biggest copyright infringement since the Big Bang, thereby bankrupting the entire universe (it’s a work of fiction, incidentally).  It just came out today, and we’re giving away five copies.  The following 2-minute trailer should give you a pretty good sense of whether this book’s for you:

The winners will be drawn randomly from the folks who answer the following eight multiple-choice questions correctly.  Enter by posting your answers to the comments section below.  Yes this means you can totally copy each other’s answers.

And by the way – sorry that this entails registering for my site, I know that’s a pain.  We tried to figure out a way to host this thing at Fark, and for a bunch of reasons this turns out to be the best way to do it.  YOU WILL NOT BE SPAMMED.  Having your address will just let us notify you if you’ve won the damn thing.

On to the quiz…

NOTE: The deadline has passed.

Thanks to everyone who participated!  

Here are the correct answers…

1 = B – Bryan Adams

2 = C – NSync Cover

3 = D – The Rolling Stones

4 = A – Gene Simmons

5 = B – Kelly Clarkson’s life

6 = C – Longview

7 = D – all of the above (creepy, huh?)

8 = D – Some other “It,” but not a Stephen King novel

1. What singer does a government minister say that his country has “apologized for on several occasion” in a famous 1999 movie?

a)    Ryan Adams

b)    Bryan Adams

c)    Adam Ant

d)   Adam Savage

2. Which of the following album covers features a young Justin Timberlake? (also – is it just me, or does the McKeithen on the right look an awful lot like a young Drew Curtis?)

3. What band can reasonably be described as “Forty-Hit Wonders”?

a)    Papa Roach

b)    Nickleback

c)    Incubus

d)   The Rolling Stones

4. What music world giant once claimed that he was “hatched in 1776”?

a)    Gene Simmons

b)    Jay-Z

c)    Thomas Jefferson

d)    Ronnie Van Zandt

5. According to a certain American Idol winner, what would “suck without you”?

a)    Nickelback

b)    Kelly Clarkson’s life

c)    The new Dyson vacuum cleaner

d)    Duke

6. What hit song is notoriously about auto-eroticism?

a)    Dancing with Myself – Billy Idol

b)    Stairway to Heaven – Led Zeppelin

c)    Longview – Green Day

d)   Yanking Out my Heart – Nickelback

7. What rock ‘n’ roll classic is about murdering one’s girlfriend?

a)    Hey Joe – Jimi Hendrix

b)   Down By the River – Neil Young

c)    I Used to Love Her – Guns ‘n’ Roses

d)   All of the Above

8. According to a canonical Rolling Stones hit, what’s a gas gas gas?

a)    A cross-fire hurricane

b)   Kelly Clarkson’s Life

c)    Stephen King’s hit horror novel “It”

d)   Some other “It,” but not a Stephen King novel

e)    Some other Stephen King novel, but not “It”

I’ll keep this brief, because the headline says it all.

Continue reading on Read Rob Reid »

I’ll keep this brief, because the headline says it all.  My novel is FINALLY OUT.  For a while there I thought this day would never come.  Random House/Del Rey bought the rights to it over a year ago, and July 10th has been etched into my brain ever since.

Amazon and Barnes and Noble are currently discounting it very heavily, which I’m told is a GOOD thing for a brand new book.  As I write this it’s $14.75 hardcover, and $12.99 on Kindle or Nook (as opposed to a $25 hardcover list price).

I’m also a HUGE fan of independent bookstores, and urge you to support yours.  They’re businesses, not charity cases – but they’re also community treasures, and our society will be sadly diminished if they go the way of dodo birds and record stores.  And you can probably buy Year Zero from your local independent bookstore online – check it out. 

I’ve posted it before, but here’s another look at Year Zero’s animated ‘trailer.’  It does a pretty good job of introducing the storyline.  If you’re intrigued or tickled, I’m pretty sure you’ll like the book.  If you’re just irked by it, you should probably stay away:

Last, it goes without saying that I’d love for you to buy my damn book!  No “normal” work ever has brought me as much joy as writing it, and I’d love to keep this up.  And if Year Zero just isn’t in your budget, I hope you’ll find a way to read it – either by hitting a library, or borrowing it from a friend.

Thanks lots.