Indie publishing gurus gaze into their crystal balls.
Happy new year, everyone! As the proud indie author of two self-published books, I thought it’d be fun to see what people closely involved in supporting and promoting indie publishing predict for book publishing industry in 2016.
“Most forms of publishing have dramatically changed in the past few years: it’s become incredibly easy to publish photos (Instagram), song tracks (Soundcloud), videos (YouTube), blog posts (WordPress), etc. In 2016, it’s book publishing that will become more mainstream than ever. Through books, more people will express who they are and communicate their vision of the world with others. With 2016 set to break all records with hundreds of thousands of titles pushed to the market, authors need to have a clear idea of what they can expect from publishing a book. In most cases, it will be a gratifying and enriching experience; but only those willing to work hard will find it lucrative.”
“I predict that Barnes & Noble’s eBook division will either be sold or auctioned off through bankruptcy proceedings and acquired by a tech startup that will reinvigorate B&N’s website and database and create a little more competition for Amazon.”
“Now that there are more and more quality books being published a day, largely due to self-publishing, you’ll see a rise of companies that provide marketing tools or services to help the best ones reach the top and get discovered.”
Meanwhile, Smashwords founder Mark Coker wrote an excellent post on his own 2016 predictions. I’ve quoted a few of his predictions below, but definitely read the full article!
The Hateful Eight, like its predecessor Django Unchained, is a western with taller-than-life characters filmed at epic scale. However, director Quentin Tarantino shows a nimbler hand in his eighth film.
When so much of the press has centered around Tarantino’s use of 70mm film for a super-wide screen presentation, you could easily be fooled into thinking that The Hateful Eight is a movie full of massive set pieces. On the contrary, most of the action takes place in Minnie’s Haberdashery, a cozy rest stop for bounty hunters and other wanderers of the wild west.
Boy, do you get to know that rest stop. It’s essentially one big room, and by the second half of the film I felt like I knew every corner of it. Point me in any direction and I could tell you which way to the bar, coffee pot, piano or Sweet Dave’s chair.
Like a good theatre production, the economy of the set puts the spotlight on the actors. Luckily, this is a talented cast with major presence. Samuel L. Jackson and Kurt Russell shine the brightest, making it look easy to portray an uneasy friendship. Jennifer Jason Leigh is positively despicable, while Bruce Dern delivers half his excellent performance just by the expression on his face.
And look, eight killers trapped in a room together during a blizzard might sound like an obvious premise, but it’s also a very effective one. It’s impressive how much tension can be created by the presence of a mere coffee pot in a snake pit like this. Also, while every person in this “Hateful Eight” may be a bastard, they all — in typical Tarantino fashion — deliver immensely enjoyable dialogue that drips with secrets and hidden meanings.
Of course, this is still a Tarantino movie, and he brings along the stylized gore and indulgent distaste he’s known for. On occasion, the conductor sends his picture off the rails.
Actually, the first scene where this happened wasn’t even violent. At the start of Chapter Four, or immediately following the intermission, Tarantino actually starts narrating. For me this broke the fourth wall. Up to that point, I felt like I was stuck inside with the Hateful Eight — a sort of “Objective Ninth,” if you will. Tarantino’s narrative reminded me it’s a movie. I’m glad he’s proud of what he wrote, but I’d rather hear why he thinks a given scene is clever on the Blu-ray.
This particular scene is, of course, almost immediately followed by the first real gross-out blood scene in the film. To be fair, for a Tarantino movie, the gore in this film is pretty restrained. It’s also used more often to comedic effect, as in Kill Bill or an episode of South Park. It is rarely hard to watch, like the dogs or wrestling slaves scenes in Django Unchained.
Speaking of Django, slavery and racism continues to be a theme for Tarantino in The Hateful Eight. However, I appreciated this movie’s approach in conveying that through the characters’ histories and personalities rather than making it the focus of the plot itself. For example, we know that Major Marquis Warren (Jackson) fought in the Civil War and carries a letter from President Abraham Lincoln. This builds the world and adds to the tension with other characters, especially the former Confederate General Sandy Smithers (Dern). It is not, however, the main plot. It’s a more subtle approach to addressing slavery than Tarantino took in Django Unchained, but works just as well.
I’ve always preferred Tarantino when he seems like he’s having fun — Kill Bill and Pulp Fiction are my personal favorites. While critically acclaimed, Inglorious Basterds and Django Unchained left me a little cold with their more realistic and hard-to-watch violence.
The Hateful Eight marks a return to the lighter, character-driven approach of Tarantino’s early days, but his characters’ discussion of race issues show more maturity than those first films’ chats about Burger King and how much to tip the waiter.
It’s engaging and also a whole lot of fun to watch. Pass the popcorn.
Note: I saw the “Special Roadshow Engagement” version of the film, which is a slightly longer cut presented in 70mm that includes a musical overture and intermission. This presentation was great fun and highlights Tarantino’s nostalgia for cinema. It’s definitely recommended if you have the option.
The novel and its sequel Divided We Fall are set in a dystopian nation in which the government keeps a Watched list of its own citizens. Citizens must be careful about what they say because there are surveillance cameras everywhere. Meanwhile, the Church has become as powerful as the State, and people who resist are called Heretics and face execution.
The books follow a young man called Seven who wakes with no memory in this surveillance society. His amnesia gives him a blank-slate perspective that helps him see through the propaganda, and he soon gets involved with a group of rebels called The Underground.
The new text adventure follows Chapter One of We, The Watched, in which Seven wakes up in the middle of a forest with no idea of where he is or how he got there. It’s a lot of fun and is a great introduction to my books for new readers! You can play the game below or in full-screen here.
You might not have known this, but my dad is a fantastic musician! While professionally he is an architect, he’s been playing guitar, banjo and other instruments my whole life (and most of his). Over the years, he has recorded many tunes for himself, family and friends, but has never released his music to a wider market.
Until now!
For quite a long time, I had been pushing him to release an album, and now it is finally available in CD from CreateSpace and Amazon, and MP3 download from CDBaby.com.
His first album, Terrain, is a bittersweet collection of original instrumental music that draws from baroque, ethnic folk, jazz and blues, featuring finger-picked guitar, as well as banjo, mandolin, ukulele, clarinet and harmonica.
Sample and/or purchase the entire album below! The digital version should also soon be available on iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, Google Music and other popular retailers.
Change! Innovation! Weirdness! These are all things that led me to buying a Steam Controller. My experience since then has been a mix of wonder, excitement and frustration.
For those who are unfamiliar, the Steam Controller ($49.99 at Amazon) looks like this:
The Steam controller with included batteries, USB wireless dongle and PC attachment.
That might look kind of flipped when compared to this Xbox One controller, which you’re probably a little more familiar with:
Credit: Microsoft
That’s because the front of the Steam Controller actually bends inward (concave for you geometry fans). This is to make it easier to access the signature feature of the Steam Controller — touch pads! Yes, touch pads have replaced traditional control sticks. (Except for that one stick they threw in at the last-minute when people freaked out … but it’s only one and most games use two.)
So do the touch pads they work for gaming? Yes … but it takes a lot of getting used to. I read in another review somewhere that this is like an “alternate universe” controller that decided against control sticks. Pads can work just as well, but the problem is our thumbs have become accustomed to the movements associated with pushing a stick.
As you might expect, then, the pads work best as a replacement for a mouse in games built for a keyboard/mouse setup. I found Valve’s flagship Portal 2 to work pretty darn well with this controller. However, in a game made for the Xbox controller–such as Batman: Arkham Knight–by default you have the pad simulating a control stick, and it’s kind of weird.
See, when you simulate a mouse with the pad, as in Portal 2, it acts a lot like a trackball. Keep rolling it in the direction you want. It even feels good thanks to haptic feedback. But when it’s simulating a game pad, you’re “holding” an imaginary stick in the direction you want the camera to turn, and then returning your thumb to the center of the pad when you’re done moving it.
After about a week of play, I did find myself getting better at this. I could definitely play Arkham Knight and do well. However, I always felt handicapped anytime I needed to make small, accurate movements such as aiming the cannon of the Batmobile, or checking on the position of unsuspecting criminals before making a sneak attack.
Gyros and customization to the rescue!
After more time spent with the controller and hanging out in the Steam community, I found two solutions. One that made me feel a little better about the Steam Controller, and one that makes me think it might even work better than an Xbox controller.
The truly cool thing about the Steam Controller is that you can customize just about everything with the controller. This includes more than what the buttons do in a game. You can adjust sensitivity of inputs, turn the touch pads into a keypad and much more. And if that’s all too technical, you can simply apply control schemes uploaded by either the game developer or other people in the Steam community. Meanwhile, Valve itself continues to add more functions to the controller as users provide feedback.
The first thing I discovered that made Arkham Knight play more easily was the ability to change the behavior of the right touch pad (which stands in for the right control stick and controls the camera) to work as a “mouse-like joystick.” This mode, Valve says, is built for games that don’t let you play with a gamepad and mouse at the same time (actually I don’t understand how a two-handed person would do that anyway). Through magical engineering (or something), this just lets you use the pad as if it’s a rolling trackball.
That feels far more intuitive, at least, but it still does not feel super accurate, especially when you’re under fire in a Batmobile and a helicopter keeps dive-bombing you.
That’s when I discovered motion controls. Or, I should say, the Steam community discovered them. Turns out the Steam Controller has a gyro sensor, much like the Nintendo Wii controller, which allows it to track physical movements of the hands. Well, what happened is that some genius (not sarcasm) in the Steam community got the idea to turn this feature on in addition to the mouse-like joystick behavior.
When I switched to this control scheme, I kid you not — it was like removing a neck brace
To turn this on, go to the controller customization settings and select the gyro icon under the center of the controller diagram (it looks a bit like an atom). Set this up as a mouse joystick and you’re good to go!
The motion controls let you adjust the camera (or your cross-hairs) by moving the entire controller up, down, left or right. To ensure you don’t do this accidentally, it only detects movement while your thumb is on the right touch pad.
This would never work by itself, because you’d basically have to turn away from the TV if you ever wanted to do more than 45-degree turn. But for small movements–lining up the cross-hairs or taking a quick peek at something peripheral–it feels very natural. When you do want to make a bigger turn, you swipe the touch pad like before … and to be honest it’s fine for that.
When I switched to this control scheme, I kid you not — it was like removing a neck brace. In fact, now I really can’t imagine going back to the old way.
Worth the trouble?
You might be thinking to yourself: “That sounds cool, and it’s great that you got the Steam Controller to work for you … but the Xbox controller already works for me. Why bother?”
Yes, I would agree that is a fair point. If you’ve got an Xbox controller already, and it’s working for you, and you have no desire at all to try something new, there really is little reason to get a Steam Controller.
Besides the pads, the Steam Controller’s other big issue for me is the placement of the A, B, X & Y buttons. While in reach, the placement of this diamond arrangement feels a bit low and could lead to some wrong presses until you get used to it.
Also, I should caution that I’ve only tested the Steam Controller in console-like action games. I’ve not tried it for mouse-intensive genres like real-time strategy. I’ve written this article from the perspective of someone who wants a controller for games made for controllers.
However, if anything about the Steam Controller intrigues you — perhaps the customization, or maybe just the fact that it’s not made by Microsoft or Sony — I am here to say that it is in fact a solid controller that can do a lot now and has promise to do a lot more in the future. Buying a Steam Controller is not the equivalent of buying a knock-off Mad Catz Xbox controller (sorry, Mad Catz) to save $10 off of the official brand.
You do have to go in knowing that it’s not necessarily going to work perfectly from the moment you start up a game. There will be fiddling. In the future, there will be more community control schemes available that will make this fiddling easier. But you’ll still have to fiddle to make the Steam Controller work for you.
Jeffrey Bruner, founder of The Fussy Librarian
“Now that there are more and more quality books being published a day, largely due to self-publishing, you’ll see a rise of companies that provide marketing tools or services to help the best ones reach the top and get discovered.”
