Category Archives: Blog

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How to Communicate More Effectively, Part 7 – Bringing it All Together

[How to Communicate More Effectively is a series of guest posts from Gareth L Powell. In case you missed ’em, here’s part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5 and part 6.]

As writers, bloggers, editors and publishers, we’re in the business of communication. Over the last week, I’ve outlined one strategy you might use to get your message across to your audience. There are other methods, and I suggest you check out as many as possible, which is why I’ve included a list of reference books at the end of this post.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this guide. Personally, I’ve found the discipline necessary to write good marketing copy has helped me in my creative writing endeavours.

In summary, some final advice for you:

  • Know your audience and write for them.
  • Start with a killer title that they can’t resist
  • Hook them in with the first sentence and don’t let them go.
  • Get them emotionally involved as soon as possible. Make it personal. Give them a reason to care.
  • Use as many short sentences as possible to create pace.
  • Use evocative words that conjure impressions in all five senses – smell, taste, touch, sound, and sight.
  • Avoid clichés.
  • Use positive, action-packed phrases to make your prose come alive.

In these times of dwindling magazine subscriptions and slumping book sales, we need to use every tool we can in order to attract and retain our readership. If we put a fraction of the care and attention we invest in our creative endeavours into marketing them, I’m sure it’ll do us all the power of good.

Further Reading:

  • Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins (Free download: http://pge.rastko.net/etext/100010)
  • Write To Sell by Andy Maslen
  • The Copywriter’s Handbook by Robert W. Bly
  • How to Write Sales Letters That Sell by Drayton Bird
Blog

The battle to build the definitive virtual London

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composite virtual LondonHere comes the latest iteration of the land-grab. Given that the metaverse offers theoretically infinite space in all four dimensions, no one need fight over lebensraum… but Victor Keegan points out the business value of having the definitive virtual version of a city like London:

Build a 3D London and you can rent out apartments and shops, get advertising, boost heritage sites and familiarise tourists with the capital before they arrive. And, of course, go out clubbing and meeting people.

During a recession, won’t people want to stay at home using broadband, already paid for, rather than going out? Won’t they want to shop without the hassle and parking problems of Oxford Street?

Keegan’s not the first to realise this – five different organisations are building or have already built a 3D version of the UK capital. The Second Life iteration of London is already up, running and renting out properties, but the proprietary versions (which will doubtless be bigger money-makers in the long run, and hopefully less frustratingly bug-ridden) are hot on its heels, including a yet-to-be-unveiled Microsoft offering that is apparently described by a rival as “phenomenal”. [image by *spud*]

What isn’t mentioned is what the City of London itself thinks about all this (although the Ordnance Survey people have already delayed one project by a few years by claiming exclusive rights on their maps, despite their bill being footed by the taxpayer). If there’s money to be made from a virtual London, I’m certain that the real London will feel it deserves a cut of the action; it’s no less ridiculous than a lot of current intellectual property lawsuits.

So, will the famous (and not-so-famous) cities of the world start selling exclusive licenses to metaverse developers? Will developers with less scruples build unlicensed replicas anyway? Will there be a panoply of Londons, Amsterdams, New Yorks or Belgrades – the X-rated versions, the Christianised or Islamicised versions, the simplified versions for school trips?

And once the bandwidth and bit-rates get high enough, will we ever want to trudge around the originals?

Blog, Does Not Equal

Does Not Equal merchandise store at Cafepress!

Does Not Equal button badgeGood news for fans of Futurismic‘s weekly webcomic, Does Not Equal: comic creator Sarah Ennals has set herself up with a Cafepress store selling Does Not Equal merchandise, which so far includes button badges and the ubiquitous T-shirts.

So click on over there to grab yourself an exclusive design, and show your support for hungry Canadian webcomic writers!

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Funny money – what might we use as alternative currencies?

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assorted currencyDavid Birch at kashklash has been thinking about alternative currencies. He’s decided that local currencies, while their hearts are in the right place, are not the solution their advocates claim them to be:

They’re wrong because their notions of locality are too backward-looking. So while I buy the idea that some form of localisation of money it might be part of an overall trend, a reaction against globalisation and so on, I think that localisation in the coming online world means something different from the slightly romantic, slightly unworldly, geographic notion of locality that is at the heart of many current schemes.

So what might we use as alternative currencies instead of localised money?

People don’t seem to have a problem holding World of Warcraft money, or iTunes’ money, in addition to money in their bank accounts. Given a free (or, at least, vanishingly small marginal cost) choice, what would they prefer? We’ve already touched on gold in the earlier discussion about alternative currencies and the price of oil. But I’m curious about other non-commodity suggestions: telecommunications bandwidth, mobile minutes…

As a commenter points out, bandwidth and mobile minutes are commodities to most of us… and the more I think about it, the harder I find it to think of anything that would make a practical currency that isn’t a commodity. Calories; water; kilowatt/hours… can you think of any more? [image by bradipo]

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The descent of phone

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lilypadsGlancing back in time at the evolution of electronic gadgets like mobile phones you realise what futurist Ray Kurzweil means by the intuitive linear perspective (described by Kurzweil here) – the difficulty we humans have with intuitively grasping the impact of exponential growth (as exemplified by the water lily story) and improvement, from 10 Great Geek Gadgets:

Cellphones have evolved so fast even last year’s models are already uncool. Go back a few more years – or watch most any 90s sitcom like Seinfeld – and you’ll be reminded of how things used to be. Rewind back to the beginning and behold the behemoths: how did we ever walk around with those things?

Kevin Kelly has some thoughts on the nature of the exponential growth of knowledge, most notably that as we learn more our ignorance increases (SRSLY check it out).

[via Bruce Sterling][image from BinaryApe on flickr]