#industry stuff

[missmeltycat]

I ever show you guys this piece of history?

1'm 50 |_337. P|-|33r 73|-| |_337 |-|4><><0rzz! ETC ETC.

As someone dubbed the 'keeper of Henry' for some interesting reason which is out of my control, I suppose I thought it important to show you this from my collection of nostalgia, personal items and deliciousness.

[sonnet009games]

Can I ask a more "industry" question? You've done both visual novels (I LOVED Aloners and Wilder!!) and interactive fiction (Flea is one of a kind) so I was wondering, if you had thoughts on the pros/cons of VNs vs IF. Like if VNs are more popular/get more attention or if IF do and so on, just in your experience.

Popularity-wise, we can take a look at my stats on itch.io for a general idea. (You can see that Incubus Chapter 8 took a huge hit thanks to the paypro bullshit, but a lot of that was made up for in Patreon store purchases--thank you so much, everyone who jumped over there!)

My visual novels are all currently leading, showing perhaps a slight audience preference for the genre? However, they have had many more years to accumulate those numbers, and Incubus is both marked "adult only" and is an episodic release, meaning there may be potential players holding off from purchasing before the project is fully complete. Honestly, there's not that much in it.

Development-wise, IF is cheaper and easier to do as a one-person team, without having to budget background art, character art, etc. That's definitely a consideration. My biggest one, however, is what I feel like writing. When I've made visual novels, it's because I was playing a lot of visual novels at the time and my creative brain translated things into dialogue-heavy, character art-reliant expression. Now I'm biiiiig back into reading novels and when I get the creative itch it's usually to write prose--so IF is my current focus.

(Disclaimer that these stats and conclusions are very specific to my experience and don't necessarily correlate with another dev's statistics. I basically do no marketing that isn't on this blog, so my small numbers absolutely do not reflect the incredible boom that IF has seen in recent years.)

[sp-by-april]

man, these Teen Vogue layoffs are especially disheartening. I don't even have the words.

"As of today, only one woman of color remains on the editorial staff of Teen Vogue"

Laying off your entire political correspondents the day before an election, too... I genuinely can't explain how good Teen Vogue's staff are and how important their reporting has been.

We need to do something about how these companies are all allowed to buy each other and consolidate power for like the same 5 billionaires who's only interest is in dismantling society and hoarding resources.

[dearweirdme]

I've been missing BTS and decided to binge a few of their docu content like Break the silence, memories DVD etc. It's glaringly obvious the focus is on jkk interactions the most. Consistently across all content! If I was a fan that only viewed these videos, I would also make the judgement that JKK are the closest duo coz they are playful on stage and then always together backstage - eating,walking,traveliing in same car etc. Add to the mix when Jm said in the vminkook live as well as recent PTD docu that Jk spends hours in his room and seeks him out. That's what birthed this ship I guess.

For Tk i feel Ch 2 solidified it more for me based on personal tidbits shared by Tae and Jk on how much time they spend outside group activities. These focus hardly have Tae focus content, forget about Tk 🙄

Don't you think it's weird to reconcile the way the company content shows relationships/bonds and outside those? Like we barely see any Tk interactions on hours of this footage shown for so many years? Jkk the glued together duo didn't hang out much in Ch 2 until this travel docu for which Jm selected Jk.

Any cutesy clingy interaction shown will always be jkk in these content and it's been the same across years and diff docus. Look at the recent Beyond the star trailer and you'll again see Jk cooking and Jm beside him and then Jm clinging on to Jk. Don't see any other duo interactions like that tbh. Do you think this is done purposefully to establish a narrative?

Hi anon!

People hate when I talk business strategies, but I’m gonna 🙈.

During Suchwita recently, Tae and Yoongi mentioned how about 90 percent of footage doesn’t make the cut in In the Soop. That’s basically true for all content. What we see is what BH wants us to see. I feel BTS has some say about the kind of projects they take on, some say on what activities they do, probably a lot of say about their music, but not as much say on how things are edited after they have filmed stuff. That’s basically up to the editors, and it gets done according to pre-decided goals/lines/rules/whatevers. A company as big as BH, and especially a band as huge as BTS has a whole team of marketing, pr, image-advisors behind them, and those are the people who sit around and come up with what they want to put out. That doesn’t mean that BTS members fake the way they interact or that what we see is set up and dishonest, but there’s people deciding what we see.. so it’s filtered content. Talking about Jm and Jk, they do actually spend all that time together and they do actually enjoy their time together, it clearly shows. But it’s BH’s choice to show us them and relatively speaking less other duos.

Why more Jkk than other duos? They measure fandom reactions. They know which duos get the desired reactions and ofcourse that is what they will put into content more. Every member has their role, so you’ll get Yoongi and Namjoon for the serious stuff a lot, you get Tae being cutesy, you get Jin being funny, and you’ll get Hobi being the enthousiast… and Jk and Jm for the banter. It’s not as if those roles are fake, but they are played out a bit more. Jm and Jk are the main singers, which will also play a role. Jk and Tae cannot be shown too much, so there’s that.

Official content is always edited the way it is for a reason. There’s hours going into it, and it’s a serious matter because it is directly linked to BTS’s image.

[what-eats-owls]

Feel free to not answer this bc there’s obviously a lot that could affect this and you can’t promise anything but do you have a rough timeframe of how long we’ll have to wait for book three? In the next couple years maybe?

This is actually a cool opportunity to illustrate how this particular flavor of sausage gets made in traditional publishing, so I'm happy to dig into it!

tl;dr: Ideally it'll come out next summer, but it may be pushed to fall or winter.

THE LONG VERSION:

Ideally, you want to stick with a book a year. We are doing everything we can to keep LT3 from having to release in Fall '24, because a) Fall tends to be when a lot of publishers release their anticipated heavy hitters, so it's a crowded field, and b) the election's going to be monopolizing everyone's attention.

However.

There are a number of factors in play, some I'm not even party to, but others I am, uh, uncomfortably involved in, haha.

First of all: I haven't finished drafting yet! I'm a little over the halfway mark. I wound up taking a less-than-voluntary six week break from the manuscript, first because Painted Devils came out and I was on tour, then shortly after I got back from tour I had a health issue that landed me on brain-scuttling meds for a week, only to have Grimoire release after I finished those, and then went out of town for four days after that, and only now are things settling enough for me to catch up on cleaning. Unfortunately, a six-week break also means I've had to make my brain fall back in love with this manuscript.... in the midpoint.... so. The engine's warming up.

Another factor is the title, weirdly enough. I've had a title in mind for years, but my publishing imprint (an imprint is a subdivision of a publisher, with its own name, editorial team and budget) announced an upcoming book with an extremely similar title, and that technically comes first. The author and I are both fine with having similar titles, but my publisher's sales team is apparently not thrilled. It may be a situation where they say, "If you absolutely have to have this title, you'll have to wait until January 2025 to release the book, so there's enough space between the two."

A third factor is my publisher's schedule itself! I may turn in the book with just enough time for it to come out, say, next June. But they could have an enormous book launching that month that they want to focus on, so, LT3 would be moved to July, or the schedule would be accelerated and we'd drop it in May. Or they just say "go with god" and release both books in June! Who knows! It also depends on how similar the other scheduled books are—releasing two comedic YA second-world fantasies in the same couple of weeks absolutely will cannibalize sales, for example.

And a fourth factor: This is the third book in a trilogy. Only the first two titles in a series are eligible for the NYT bestseller list (which drives more of publishing than we'd like to admit.) After the first two, the series as a whole can be considered for the Children's Series Bestsellers, but it's a lot harder to, say, collectively outsell the entirety of Harry Potter on a given week. Which is to say, my publisher may also be less rigid about what to do with LT3, since it's got long odds of being a blockbuster anyway.

*jazz hands* PUBLISHING!

[onesweetworld18]

So now that we know that whole box was pretty much all BMG employees and higher ups, I’m glad it was them. The whole box was into it and singing and dancing. It now makes more sense why Oli was interacting with them and chatting. Bottom line, they had a good time themselves and they clearly got to see two strong fan showings and hopefully realize how lucky they are to have Louis and us.

[cryptidlarry]

How awful, I’m proud of her for fighting so hard

[lovingstheantidote]

“It’s dark. You have to be a strong person to let all that shit roll off your shoulders. I would not want my kids to get into it.” -Lance Bass on the industry