by john | Oct 25, 2015 | Writing
I’m making a big push right now to be more consistent with my newsletter, add value for subscribers, and increase the readership. To that end, on Halloween (October 31 – next Saturday) I’ll be giving away a free ebook of Grits, Guns & Glory, Bubba the Monster Hunter Season 2, to one lucky mailing list subscriber. All you have to do to enter is go here, fill out the form, and then you’re on the list!
Now I’m not the first author to make a mailing list push in recent months, and I won’t be the last. The reason is, Facebook has changed their algorithms again to make it more difficult for us to stay in touch with fans. I certainly don’t begrudge FB the monetizing of their site – that’s their job. I’m simply reacting to the market and finding better ways for fans to stay in touch with me, and me to stay in touch will y’all. So please take a minute to sign up for the mailing list, I promise your name won’t be sold, and if it’s used for any big marketing thing, it’ll be something that I’m directly participating in, like a multi-author swag giveaway.
For more info on the multi-author swag giveaway, go here.
There’s also NEW Bubba coming this week, I promise!
by john | Oct 21, 2015 | Magic:the Gathering
So a lot of folks who stop by here know that I play Magic: the Gathering. A lot. Like several times a week I’m at a local game shop playing cards, and pretty much every day I’m reading articles about the game, tweaking my deck lists, checking the value of cards, swapping out good stuff for bad stuff in my trade binder, etc.
You could say I’m into the game. Just like I was into poker before this. Yes, I understand that part of my nature and continue to posit that it’s better than drugs. But really, it’s just like drugs – I spend all my money on magic and therefore I don’t have any money to buy drugs.
Since I’m only a mediocre player of the game (leave me alone, the game is complex, and I’m not really all that bright), one of my favorite things to do is trade magic cards. I also will often buy collections from people and resell them for money, or sell cards when money is tight. This post is intended to help you maximize your fun and profit without being a dick to the people you’re trying to trade with. We’ll talk a little about buying and selling, too, but mostly about trading. If you follow these simple rules, you don’t have to worry about getting ripped off, and you’ll have a better time trading.
1) Tomorrow/yesterday/next year/last year values don’t matter – In most cases, it makes no damn difference if Bonfire of the Damned was a $50 when it was legal in standard, it’s a $5 card today. Nobody cares that Snapcaster was $20 when Innistrad was in print, it’s $60 today. Prices fluctuate, and you’re trading based on the current value of the card, not the recent value or the possible potential value. Live in the now, trade in the now. The possible exception is when you’re trading new cards for old cards. Depending on how bad your trade partner wants an Unlimited Chaos Orb ($100), you might be able to get 2 Snapcaster Mages ($120) for it, because there are fewer Chaos Orbs in print that there are Snapcaster Mages. So you may be able to get a premium for older, more rare cards, but that’s typically part of what determines the market price anyway, so it’s unlikely except in extreme cases. And don’t get butthurt when you trade away a card that goes through the roof the next weekend. Yeah. maybe somebody had extra information that gave them an edge, but you’ve probably been on the other side of that experience, too. Or you will one day. It’s all one big cycle, like my buddy Richard and my Circle of Cinder Glade, where we traded the same land back and forth four times in a weekend because we needed filler for different trades.
2) It doesn’t matter what site you use for pricing. Ever. I use Star City Games because I find it easier to navigate. If you want to use TCGPlayer, that’s fine, but I’m going to make you look everything up because I find their interface clunky. As long as you are on the same page, literally, then it doesn’t matter if you use SCG, TCG, eBay or the kiosk in the local game store. Just make sure you are both on the same site, because you don’t want to be valuing your cards from a notoriously lowball site and have your trading partner value their cards from a notoriously high-dollar site. That ends in drama. And nose punching.
3) It’s okay if you don’t want anything in my binder. My binder is small, and eclectic, and it won’t hurt my feelings if you don’t want anything there. But I also do a lot of trades just for value, so if you find something, don’t be shy about asking to trade for it. We’ll find a way to get there. Last night I wanted a foil Windswept Heath ($40) off a guy at the shop. He wanted a bunch of Unglued basic lands off me ($60), so when we locked in the deal for the foil Heath, I just poked around his trade stock until I found an extra $20 to get the rest of the deal done.
4) Don’t be a dick. Don’t be that guy haggling over a quarter. Nobody cares that much over a quarter. Don’t be the guy making fun of what’s in somebody else’s binder. They might only have enough money to draft once a week, and this is their draft rares. Or maybe they just put a binder together and don’t really care about trading (I don’t understand this mindset). But basically, trading is an opportunity for social interaction, often with new people. Take the time to be nice, to be welcoming, to say something nice about their binder or cards, point out something unusual or cool that they have – a funky foil that looks really cool, or something. Make a friend. Trading is a chance to interact with other players when you’re not actively trying to beat them in a competition, so make it pleasant. And really, don’t be that guy who haggles over quarters. Usually, if I get within a dollar or two on a decent-sized trade, I’ll let the difference slide. It makes it easy, it keeps the trade from getting bogged down, and prevents a lot of hurt feelings.
5) Don’t expect retail for your shit. This is a strictly selling thing, not a trading thing, but you’re not a store, so don’t expect to get the same price as a retail store for our cards. Retail stores have overhead – rent, lights, employees, taxes, inventory and much more – that you as an individual don’t have. So most normal people, when they look to buy a card from an individual, are going to expect a discount. A steep one. Personally, if I’m paying cash for a card, I look to pay about half what I could get it from a store at. So if I’m buying Snapcasters for cash, I’m looking to pay about $30. Snapcaster is in high and consistent demand, so I’d pay $40, but that depends on the card. I’m looking for a 30-50% discount if I’m paying cash, and that will move your cards quickly and without complaint. At the very least, and this will still take you a while to move, you should be cheaper than the cheapest place to buy singles online – eBay. If you aren’t cheaper than eBay, be prepared to trade at retail, or sit on your card for a while.
There are a few tips to help you trade magic cards more effectively and enjoy the process more, and move your cards for sale more quickly. Feel free to tell me how wrong I am in the comments, I don’t really read them. 🙂
by john | Oct 17, 2015 | Writing
New Bubba is coming soon, here’s a little tiny taste that I thought was funny.
“What happened?” Skeeter asked, his voice going all high and panicky. This time I didn’t blame him. I was starting to think pretty strongly about cutting and running myself.
“Eddie just showed up.”
“Eddie the voodoo priest from last night?”
“In his butt-nekkid glory with a dozen other necked folk walking behind him chanting and glowing.”
“Did you say they were glowing, Bubba?”
“Yes, and before you ask, I only had three Hurricanes, they were half-strength and it was a couple hours ago, so yes I am sober, and yes, there are necked voodoo people walking through the cemetery glowing like somebody shoved a million candlepower flashlights up their hoo-has. Now if you will excuse me I am going to go talk to a nekkid houngan about how to get two hundred zombies back in their graves where they belong without having to shoot each and every damn one of them in the face. Wish me luck.”
“Good luck,” Skeeter said, and I clicked off my comm to go deal with the weirdest damn thing I’d seen since coming to New Orleans, and that bar was getting higher by the minute.
by john | Sep 25, 2015 | Book Spotlight, Reviews
I don’t do many book reviews. The reason is simple – I read mostly in the genre in which I write, and if I don’t like a book, I still work with these people, so I’m keeping my fucking mouth shut. Also, if I don’t like a book, I seldom finish it. There’s a lot of shit on my TBR list, and it’s gotta be pretty good to make it to the top.
But I had a long road trip this week, from Charlotte to Nashville and back, so I decided that a new audiobook would be just the thing for my trip. I’ll go ahead and apologize to all my Tennessee and Nashville friends for not visiting – but here’s the schedule for the trip. I left Charlotte at 11AM Wednesday. Got to Nashville around 4:30 PM, had dinner at 7PM with a couple of guys from work (BTW, I also started a new day job, which I’ll talk more about later, and I’m starting a small publishing company later this year, which I’ll talk more about later as well). Then I slept, got up and was at Skyway Studios in Nashville at 11AM for an Arri Lighting LED demo from 11-4, then drove home, arriving home a couple minute before midnight last night. So I didn’t really have any time to stop and say hello. I’ll catch you next time, I promise.
But anyway, the book I chose for the trip was Yes! My Improbable Journey to the Main Event of Wrestlemania by Daniel Dryan with Craig Tello. And while I enjoyed the story, and much of the narration, there are some bits I wanted to talk about.
First off, the structure of the book was strange, and disjointed. The odd-numbered chapters were a third-person narrative, I assume written by Tello, detailing the events of the week leading up to Wrestlemania 30 in New Orleans. It was a fairly close look at the activities of a WWE superstar leading up to the biggest event of the year, but it was dry as toast. It was written in very much AP reporting style, which is fine for newspapers and internet articles, but over 20,000 words is kinda like listening to paint dry. Then there’s the narrator for those sections of the book, who I hated. Peter Berkrot would be a fine narrator for fiction, but a guy with a moderately strong Southern accent narrating the actions of a Pacific Northwest wrestler working in New Orleans was jarring every time his voice came on. And his inability to pronounce some of the wrestler’s names was just sloppy and shoddy work on the part of the producers. I know how the deal works – you either give your narrator a pronunciation guide, preferably recorded, or they get in touch with you and ask how they pronounce names.
OR THEY GO ON YOUTUBE AND LOOK UP HOW TO PRONOUNCE “MARYSE,” BECAUSE SHE WAS ON TV FOR YEARS, YOU JACKASSES!
Sorry, but there’s zero excuse for getting the pronunciation wrong on a WWE diva’s name. She’s famous, for fuck’s sake.
Then there was Bryan’s part of the book. The even-numbered chapters were Daniel Bryan telling his life story leading up to Wrestlemania 30, and it was okay. Bryan admits early on that he’s not a writer, and isn’t comfortable talking about himself, and that shows. His prose is pretty dry and workmanlike, and could certainly have used the help of a good ghost writer to punch it up a little, but it was fine. He reads well enough, and if he never gets too excited about anything, it just goes to emphasize the things he says about his real-life character, that he’s pretty even-keeled. His narrative bits are totally bland, but harmless, like mashed potatoes.
The most jarring part of the book was at about the one-third mark, when suddenly Bryan was narrating one of the third-person sections, and talking about himself in the third person. I don’t know if the chapter was missed when the other guy was recording, or if it was recorded and sounded like crap, so they just had Daniel do that chapter, but after alternating for several hours, suddenly there were three DB-narrated chapters in a row, and they weren’t the first-person narrative that we were used to from him. So that was a production thing that I found really jarring.
So I give it only two stars for production, and really only three stars as a book. I’d give it more if Daniel’s sections had been longer, and the reporting sections had been much shorter, because listening to him talk about his career, his setbacks, his love for Brie, the loss of his father, his family life, his frustrations at WWE, his love for the indies – all that stuff was gold. I wanted twice as much of that stuff and less than half as much of the shit surrounding WM30. That story has been recounted over and over so many times that any wrestling fan is sick of hearing it, and let’s face it – a casual fan isn’t buying a Daniel Bryan autobiography. The stuff that was there, in Bryan’s words, is gold, there just needs to be more of it.
My final verdict – 2.5 stars out of a possible 5. It’s worth it if it’s on sale or you have some Audible credits, but don’t waste full retail on this one.
Narration – Berkrot – 2/Bryan 4
Production – 2
Story – Tello – 2/Bryan 4
by john | Sep 14, 2015 | Appearances, Travel, Writing
I hate starfucker conventions, and I hate most of what they stand for.
There you go, kids, career suicide by a barely midlist genre fiction writer. Just what you wanted for your reading entertainment.
But it’s the truth. I hate the conventions, and you know the ones I mean, where the main focus is getting as many people run through lines to have autographs and photo ops as possible, with the least possible interaction with the people you’re there to “meet.”
For the record, Dragon Con is not what I consider a starfucker con, nor are any of the cons I attend as a guest. That’s not always been the case. Fandom Fest is definitely a starfucker con, with some programming glommed onto the side of it, and a horror con tacked on for good measure. Mad Monster Party is a starfucker con with a badass party attached, and people seem to love it.
I just don’t. If it’s your thing, that’s awesome. If you can actually manage to connect with someone for the ten seconds you get to talk to them, or if you want to support them and thank them with your dollars for the joy they’ve brought into your lives with their work, that’s your choice. For me, I want people to enjoy my work, not the spectacle of meeting me (and God knows meeting me sometimes turns into a goddamn spectacle).
There’s gotten to be a lot of talk all over the place about everybody charging for autographs, all kinds of folks from writers, to comic artists, to Magic:the Gathering Artists, to actors, etc.
Here’s my promise to you – I will never charge money for an autograph on a book that I’ve worked on unless you’re obviously just getting it autographed to increase the value of it. If you’re a fan, and you’ve spent money on my book, or even if you got it as a gift, or just happen to have it, I promise I’ll sign it for free. Personalized or not, your call.
Now if I ever convince someone to hire me to write comics and you show up with a stack of twenty copies of Issue #1 and want them all signed, none personalized, then the first one’s free and we’re gonna have to talk about the other copies you want for eBay.
Because I understand that sometimes people are just in it to monetize a signature, and that’s not cool to the artist/actor/writer/musician. When I did Mad Monster Party a few years ago, I think Corey Feldman was only personalizing thing, he wouldn’t do just a signature. Because he wanted to sign things for his fans, not for eBay. And I respect that. And I understand that people have costs to recoup associated with travelling to cons. God knows I understand, I just dropped almost $2K to go to Dragon Con.
But if you’ve bought something of mine, and aren’t looking to monetize it, then I’m not going to charge for an autograph. I just don’t think it’s right. I also will not charge for photos taken with me, because if you want my ugly mug in your camera, you must really be a fan. And I sure as hell will never charge just to come up to my table and meet me, that to me seems the height if hubris. I do admit that if I’m ever famous enough to where a convention pays for me to be there, and I’m working for the con all weekend, I may not be in charge of what the convention charges for those things. But I won’t ever do it, personally.
This is inspired by a bunch of things that I’ve seen this past year – a blog post by a dad who paid almost $300 to have his kids’ picture taken with the Weasley family from the Harry Potter movies, a comic artist at Heroes Con charging for signatures on anything you didn’t buy from his table, a Magic artist charging for signatures on cards he did the art for, and a general growth across all parts of the creative industry of a desire to get as much out of the fans as we can, all because somebody else is milking them, and they’re willing to pay it.
Well, maybe, just maybe, you should give something back to the fans who allow you to have the life you have. I’m not saying give away free shit, but certainly if someone who loves your work enough to carry a heavy-ass hardback all the way across a convention center to get it signed, give them a little personal attention and a moment of your time, instead of trying to get a couple bucks out of them for the minute and a half you spend with them. You’ll make more in the long run by modeling yourself after folks like Mark Poole, Brandon Sanderson, Pat Conroy, Orson Scott Card and others I’ve seen or heard of staying long after signings to make sure everyone’s stuff is signed, or just folks that are super-accommodating to their fans.
I know this is long, and I know there are parts where I seem to contradict myself, but it’s a complicated issue. At the end of the day, being at a convention is for the fans, and we’re all fans, too. It does us well to remember that, and to wonder how we’d feel if we walked up to a creator with our favorite book, comic, or Magic card, only to be greeted with a sign telling us it’s $3 for a signature.
So before you try to squeeze more blood from the stone of fandom, maybe ask yourself if you’re giving enough back. A lot of you are, but maybe a few could look outside their wallet a little more.
