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Cooking With Code Toiling In The Pixel Mines Write, Write, You Bloody Well Write

Attack of the Blipverts

1 min read

Ah, the imprecise voodoo of advertising on the web. Too much, and you lose people. Too little, and your site is running at a loss financially and then people lose you because you can’t afford to keep the domain name locked down or exceed your site’s monthly bandwidth or… you get the idea.

And then there’s the current trend, which is to have something which detects ad blockers and throws up a smoke screen to keep you from making use of a site, either partially or fully. I’m not installing anything like that here, ever. I hate that shit.

Still, I have been forming partnerships here and there to bring some new advertisers and affiliate programs to the site. This keeps all the eggs out of one basket (which proved disastrous when Amazon kicked all of its Arkansas affiliates to the curb about 10 years ago), diversifies what’s on offer (while still keeping it very much in theLogBook’s wheelhouse), and hopefully, will eventually add up to the site being financially self-sustaining again in the near future. … Read more

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Podcasting Write, Write, You Bloody Well Write

Whatever happened to the man of the funky future?

1 min read

PRESS PLAY ON TAPEIt’s been well over a year since I appeared on the (apparently, and very sadly, now-dormant) MarkWHO42 podcast, talking about upcoming book projects, including a book that would be all about ’70s sci-fi, fantasy and superhero shows in the United States, and another book that would cover British telefantasy series (that really turned out to be heavily weighted toward the same decade, covering the likes of Space: 1999, UFO, Blake’s 7, Sky, Raven, and so on). Mark Baumgarden and his cohorts (including international man of mystery Christian Basel, who is now heavily involved in the rapidly-expanding Krypton Radio podcasting network) were enormously enthused about the latter book, and it was a really fun show for me. (I could detour here into how much I wish I had a co-host for my own podcasting ventures sometimes, but that could take up a whole other blog entry.)

So…where are those books? … Read more

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Cooking With Code Gaming Toiling In The Pixel Mines Write, Write, You Bloody Well Write

Cyan Saturday

read!I’m declaring it Cyan Saturday. Not sure why, but it flows off the tongue way better than Black Friday, doesn’t it?

First off, I want to introduce a new tradition, wherein I point you toward books written by several of my closest friends. Somewhere between common interests and all of us being writers at heart, an awful lot of us have written and published books in the past few years. A fair few of the books fall into the same wheelhouse, subject-matter-wise…but not all of them! Anyway, peruse this fascinating list of Books My Friends Wrote and add their works to your bookshelf or the bookshelf of someone who needs a gift this holiday season. You really can’t go wrong – I vouch for all of them as writers and as people.

And my own books? They’re now available through a nice new digital delivery gateway right here at theLogBook.com, a long-needed improvement that finally happened thanks to a little bit of digital drudgery undertaken by my oldest. The new system is really neat, and unlike the old one…it just works. And to celebrate the “grand re-opening” of that component of theLogBook.com Store, I’ve added a couple of crazy bundle deals (they’re the ones with green buttons) that’ll save you…well…a bundle.

Books. They’re what’s for dinner. Go getcha some.… Read more

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Home Base Write, Write, You Bloody Well Write

The Raider Record, Vol. 22 #7

Raider Record Vol. 22 #7It’s time once again to dip into the ’80s and revisit another issue of the Raider Record, the junior high school paper of which I was copy editor between 1985 and 1987. As always, you can find every issue from that period scanned in PDF form here, or you can view or download this specific issue here. Going through and scanning these, lots of memories came bubbling up to the surface, so I thought it would be entertaining to record those for posterity here. … Read more

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Cooking With Code Write, Write, You Bloody Well Write

Contact re-established

Let's go Iron Man!In 2011, Amazon.com cut off all of its affiliation agreements with affiliates in several states, as a response to those states pushing for laws that would force Amazon to collect state sales tax in those states. This action was a calculated effort to get the affiliates to put pressure on their state legislatures to rescind the bills in question, but as many Amazon affiliates are either small businesses or sites run by individuals, Amazon didn’t get the result expected. If collecting the taxes in question made business impossible to do in those states, Amazon would’ve stopped shipping things to Arkansas and the other states in question, but of course they didn’t. That would affect the bottom line. Can’t have that.

theLogBook.com had been an Amazon affiliate since the late 1990s, which was really the point at which it went from “disorganized fan site” to “somewhat more focused site that can make a bit of money”. Then there came a tipping point at which the site was legitimately paying its own bills – the costs of hosting, the domain name, bandwidth, even my internet connectivity at home, were all being paid for by the site. This justified expansion of the site and the time spent on it, and led to a few “boom years” where content seemed to increase nearly exponentially. That had to slow down substantially when my first child arrived, but it was still worth spending time on. When Amazon cut all of its Arkansas affiliates off in 2011, myself included, it was like losing a limb. What point was there in generating more material for the site when it was no longer going to pay its own bills? Indeed, the money to buy the things frequently covered here – DVDs, music, and so on – ran out. The emphasis rapidly changed: it was time for that Doctor Who book I’d been working on at a slow burn for several years to come to the front burner in a hurry. The kind of content I could charge for was the only kind that there was any justification to work on.

Now, thanks to a change in federal law, Amazon is required to collect state sales tax nationwide…and without announcing it to anyone, they’ve re-opened the doors of their affiliate program to sites in those states they once spurned. Here’s what that means at theLogBook. … Read more

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Home Base Write, Write, You Bloody Well Write

The Raider Record, Vol. 22 #6

Raider Record Vol. 22 #5It’s time once again to dip into the ’80s and revisit another issue of the Raider Record, the junior high school paper of which I was copy editor between 1985 and 1987. As always, you can find every issue from that period scanned in PDF form here, or you can view or download this specific issue here. Going through and scanning these, lots of memories came bubbling up to the surface, so I thought it would be entertaining to record those for posterity here. … Read more

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Write, Write, You Bloody Well Write

Let’s talk books

Because that’s something I seldom bring up here, right? Except…there have been a few changes to the schedule.

VWORP!3With Peter Capaldi announcing that he is not only leaving, but his final episode will be this year’s Christmas special, VWORP!3 will be gaining a subtitle along the lines of “The Capaldi Years” and has slid back to January 2018. In line with the rethink of the WARP! series, VWORP!3 will be a thinner book that its predecessors, and it’ll cover four main topics:

  • The Peter Capaldi era on TV
  • Class
  • Big Finish audios featuring new series Doctors (10th Doctor stories, War Doctor stories)
  • Big Finish audios featuring other new series characters (UNIT, Churchill, Torchwood)
Read more
Categories
Home Base Write, Write, You Bloody Well Write

The Raider Record, Vol. 22 #5

Raider Record Vol. 22 #5It’s time once again to dip into the ’80s and revisit another issue of the Raider Record, the junior high school paper of which I was copy editor between 1985 and 1987. As always, you can find every issue from that period scanned in PDF form here, or you can view or download this specific issue here. Going through and scanning these, lots of memories came bubbling up to the surface, so I thought it would be entertaining to record those for posterity here. … Read more

Categories
Home Base Write, Write, You Bloody Well Write

The Raider Record, Vol. 22 #4

Raider Record Vol. 22 #4It’s time once again to dip into the ’80s and revisit another issue of the Raider Record, the junior high school paper of which I was copy editor between 1985 and 1987. As always, you can find every issue from that period scanned in PDF form here, or you can view or download this specific issue here. Going through and scanning these, lots of memories came bubbling up to the surface, like the fizz atop a freshly-poured glass of New Coke, that I thought would be entertaining to record for posterity here. … Read more

Categories
Home Base Write, Write, You Bloody Well Write

The Raider Record, Vol. 22 #3

Raider Record Vol. 22 #3It’s time once again to dip into the ’80s and revisit another issue of the Raider Record, the junior high school paper of which I was copy editor between 1985 and 1987. As always, you can find every issue from that period scanned in PDF form here, or you can view or download this specific issue here. Going through and scanning these, lots of memories came bubbling up to the surface, unbidden, that I thought would be entertaining to record for posterity here. … Read more