Though it’s only been a day since I made my last post it feels like longer. I’ve been learning by “Shouldn’t have done that. Damn” for the past couple of days but finally - almost in time for Halloween (almost), SugarBank’s redesign is online and ready to go.
The blog should be easier to read and use, quicker to load and simpler to navigate. If you think so - I’m glad you appreciate what’s been done, if you don’t - be careful what you say, I’m a bit sensitive right now.
Things aren’t perfect yet (I know the comments feed isn’t working for instance) but email me with any ‘WTF!’ discoveries and I’ll deal with them.
Normal blogging service will resume tomorrow - thanks for bearing with me while I did less serious posting in favor of working behind the scenes . If you’re reading this via RSS today’s a good day to check the site.
(NB: If you’re finding links to old articles are broken don’t worry yet. They should be re-directed soon. If you want to point to the URL’s - please do.)
UPDATE: I’ve taken a stab at fixing the layout for IE 6 (damn - that’s a piece of shit browser people, try Firefox - equally free, much, much better. If you have IE 6 and can check the site for me please do and let me know. Their should be three columns at the top of the page, not just one on the far left. I can’t do this myself being Mac-bound (forced to use browsers that meet standards…)
A few days ago I mentioned my friend, Craig Clevenger’s, new book and encouraged you to seek it out. A few trusting souls did, and today I received my first email from someone who’d found the book via this blog. One new reader - job done.
My wheels have been turning. In years of meetings with ‘mainstream’ companies, the recurring theme has been a desire to reach an audience of people interested in sex, dissuaded by fears of reprisal (”Sugar - how dare you suggest people who buy SUV’s/live in Washington/go to movies visit pornographic websites!”) It would be a good thing for the general acceptance of sexuality, and the bottom line of websites like this, if sex wasn’t assumed to be of interest only to idiots, perverts and weirdoes.
So why don’t we prove that assumption wrong?
(NB: I am an idiot, weirdo-pervert, but can’t be held up as an example of normality.)
If you run a blog on any topic, and it’s been going a couple of months, email me your URL, name, and address, and I’ll send you a free copy of Craig’s first book ‘The Contortionists Handbook’. You don’t have to promise to write about it or, if you do, say anything other than what you feel. I think the quality of his writing will speak for itself. I just want you to read the book.
Hardback copies of Craig’s new book Dermaphoria are expensive, so I’ll share any I can scrounge with bloggers who love ‘The Contortionists Handbook‘, and ask Craig to sign copies bought by bloggers who I can’t get a freebie for.
Can a few free paperbacks change the way the publishing industry (and the mainstream media) thinks about people who read sex-blogs?
If I’m right in my thinking, I can add a few bloggers to the unofficial ‘Craig Clevenger Fanclub’ and, while my endorsement doesn’t mean much, the endorsement of a group of us might. We could help win Craig a seat on the Amazon bestseller list and change the pre-conceptions of the entire publishing industry. We might just find something cool to share with our readers. It’s all worthwhile because you can’t keep good down.
I’m sorry we can’t afford send free books to non-bloggers but, if there’s sufficient demand for copies, I’ll arrange a bulk purchase and get Craig to sign them. (I’ll ask about this again when there are more bloggers on-board and we can make the same offer to all our readers simultaneously.)
I’m doing the legwork on this for free and the books are being funded by Craig himself. My reward is helping one friend get noticed and helping many friends with something good to read and a little potential blog fodder.
Craig can be our guy so, when the movie of his first book comes out, you’ll be able to casually refer to him as ‘…a guy I know,’ like I do. (Actually don’t do that, dropping names will make you sound like a wanker - trust me, people tell me all the time.)
Can a few free paperbacks change the way the publishing industry (and the mainstream media) thinks about people who read sex-blogs? Can a great writer compete with the traditional marketing establishment thanks to the aid of a few enthusiastic bloggers? Will you think the sex scene in Dermaphoria is as hot and edgy as the gorgeous woman I was discussing the book with yesterday? Let’s find out…
With your movie finished, you’re faced with the hard, final, stage of the process - turning your epic into money. However good your movie is, it’ll only provide an income, and something for you and the other monks to do between services, if you can get it noticed. I suggest:
Give it away. Getting people to pay for things is harder than getting people to talk about them. Your first objective should be to get your movie into the hands of people who like the sort of thing you’ve made - bloggers, reviewers, store owners, or anyone else with an audience. Everyone likes to break a story, if you send a professional package, with a compelling explanation of who you are and what you’re trying to do, it’s unlikely that you’ll be ignored.
Build buzz. Even if your aim is to sell out to the first studio that offers you a directing gig, understand that your power to negotiate is directly linked to your profile. The more work you do building an audience, the more you’ll be offered for your movie.
Blog. This is really about building buzz. If I’d made a movie myself today I’d give it away free, in pieces, via a videopodcast. As far as I’m aware it’s not been done yet so, in addition to giving people a taste of your film, it’s also newsworthy. Making DVD’s available for sale to people who enjoy the film as clips is a great way to start selling units. There are a thousand similar and better ideas than that. Content is king, exploit it. When people are excited about your material you can find a way to sell it to them. Other bloggers always need stuff to talk about. Be that stuff.
Hold an event. This needn’t be complex or expensive. If it was me, I’d do a deal with a stripclub to hold a launch event. I’d promise to publicize a slow night for them (Tuesday or Wednesday) and they’d get to sell dances to the people I brought in. Call it a Premiere and invite all the local bloggers down along with anyone else you’d like to know about your production and all the stars. It’s an easy way to look serious about what you do. Sell autographed copies of the movie at the event and you should recoup anything you spend on it.
Sam’s Swollen Tip: Packaging design is key to your success. People won’t think to watch your DVD/clip if the packaging doesn’t draw them in. Conversely you can sell almost anything if the box it comes in is nice enough. Spend time and money on making your website/blog/box look good. Don’t be forced to tell people ‘…it’s a lot better than it looks.’
(NB: Bloggers, please note a small change in the bloggasm rules. Unfortunately some people haven’t been posting the bloggasm links to their blogs in a timely manner. Leeching traffic from other blogs goes against the whole mutual collaboration idea. Therefore, from here forward, I’ll check to see when each blog is posting. Any blog who hasn’t reposted the bloggasm links by Monday will be removed from the bloggasm and the other bloggers who have posted informed of who’s leeching. Mistakes can be explained, but repeated mistakes will be considered intentional exploitation and killer robots will be assigned and targeted.)
You should check out Jenna Fatigue - a blog devoted to cataloguing every appearance of Jenna Jameson in the public eye. It’s funny, an interesting study in the media’s (and Jenna’s) exploitation of porn, and it might be the cleverest piece of stealth marketing Vivid/ClubJenna’s come up with yet…
Sunday. Getting up late, a gaufre at the local Belgian café and sexblogging in public. Damn it’s good to be a gangsta.
In the coming week I have a number of things I want to do and, as usual, a few things I must. My first priority is SugarBank 2.5.
The site you’re looking at might be the shortest lived redesign in history. The major elements will stay the same but, after a week of trying to devise ways to get Internet Explorer to do what it should, I’ve decided to take the opportunity to make a series of subtle tweaks which will make the blog closer to how I’d like it to be. Until then, if you’re trying to read the site through IE I’m sorry that things don’t look right. They should – trust me they should. Soon they will and, until then, thank Xemu for RSS.
I’ve also been thinking about networking. As I move my blogs to their new home, and to a new publishing system simultaneously, I’m putting together a hub which will allow people to see what else exists in the Sugarverse without having to list each site by name. It dawned on me that this will be the root of an internal network of sexually related blogs and so, I’m interested in finding out who might be interested in joining me (no surprise to regular readers of course…)
I’d be interested in networking blogs which fit the following formula:
Are sexually focused or regularly cover sexual issues
Established 90 days or more
Read by more than their author, mom and dad
And the biggie…
Established on their own URL (i.e. not myblog.blogspot.com)
The reason for wanting to work with blogs established on their own URL is simple (though probably controversial – comment away). Unless your blog has its own URL you’re totally at the mercy of the company who provides your hosting. If and when they go bankrupt, change their model or decide that they want to purge their system of sexblogs, you’re going to be lost. It’s highly likely that the name of your blog won’t be available to buy, and that means you’ll be faced with establishing a new identity, in a new place, from the ground up. In a network blogs that go through that will stop contributing to the network and become a drain on all the other network members until they’re re-established. It could get ugly.
More practically, the systems offered by free blogging systems (who are most likely to prevent you from hosting at mydomain.com) simply aren’t flexible enough to accommodate the features that the network I imagine will come to include. Finally I think it’s a mark of ambition and dedication to establish a domain. I understand why you might start blogging at a subdomain, but don’t see it as compatible with someone who seriously thinks their blog will be around in five years time.
I know some of you will disagree – please let me know how and why. I’m a grown-up, I might even change my mind. Try not to use the word fucktard – it hurts.
If your interested in affiliating yourself with other blogs, like mine, please let me know. I have a lot of ideas about what a network can, and should, be. Rather than impose those ideas, and risk turning off bloggers I’d be proud to be associated with, let’s see who’s interested and then talk about what we’d all be happy to do.
I seem to have caught the Zeitgeist when I made this post about sex and video games. Today I found this list of links to sexually themed games which should help satisfy anyone who thinks’s they’ve been forced to wait too long to get their digital freak on. This is an area that’s going to explode. I can forsee women making money as virtual partners in thses games. Oh my God - I’ve just invented digital pimping…
If this ad is un-broadcastable in the US on the basis of content, movies which show pre-pubescent girls in swimsuits are indecent, and toddlers should be prevented from running around naked on public beaches.
A friend sent me this ad for IKEA yesterday. It’s hilarious, beautifully put together, and running on TV in Europe which, for American readers, must be hard to imagine.
Whereas the people who made this ad saw a funny situation which hinges on a child’s naïveté and imagination, making for the kind of anecdote parents would tell at dinner parties till the end of time; in the US it’s increasingly taboo to acknowledge children exist in a world that includes the sex which created them.
If this ad is un-broadcastable in the US on the basis of content, movies which show pre-pubescent girls in swimsuits are indecent, and toddlers should be prevented from running around naked on public beaches. A totally logical chain of thought if you’re a pedophile, totally bizarre if not. When are we going to accept sexuality as normal, vital and healthy and when are we going to stop people who think like sexual predators from setting standards of acceptability?
Yesterday, according to my Feedburner stats, Podnography’s RSS feed was read by more than 1,000 people in 24 hrs for the first time ever. It’s taken three and a half months but, as the only remaining podcast on earth not listed in the iTune’s directory, it’s something of an achievement. 7,000 downloads a week, 30,000 downloads a month and 365,000 downloads a year. Not bad at all. Thank you.
To celebrate, until I’m informed otherwise, I’m claiming the title ‘World’s most popular sex podcast’. Not because there aren’t sex podcasts that have more listeners within iTunes, but because I don’t know of any who have more outside it and I don’t care who I upset. As I become more eccentric look out for me suing Apple for deformation of character, marrying Hillary Duff and breaking down on Oprah.
Seth Finkelstein "Well, I can’t prove a negative, but it’s hard to see the trademark dispute being treated as any sort of secret or private matter. If it were the cause, Xeni Jardin could just...…" on Violet Blue [more]
B&K "The author, real name Wendi Sullivan, did not warn the actress, it appears, but did brag to friends that she was going to do this. Wendi has pro-bono legal representation, and the actress could not...…" on Violet Blue [more]
Tom B "I would have thought that if it was the full reason Boing Boing took the action they did they’d be public about it as their stance on copyright/etc. seems to be their rallying call. Oh well....…" on Violet Blue [more]
Seth Finkelstein "While for a while I thought the trademark case might indeed be the reason, it doesn’t hold up on further investigation. The “unpublishing” ; took place late July? August?...…" on Violet Blue [more]
rich "I’m confused - why wouldn’t the dissimilar industry clause kick in and allow one Violet Blue who was a writer and another who was a sex performer?…" on Violet Blue [more]
