It’s Saturday so I’ll plug something. Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein have a show launching January 21st on IFC about life in Portland. The trailers have gone viral so you’ve seen them, but I wanted to remind you it starts next week, at 10:30PM. Ill be setting my DVR because unlike my fellow Portlanders I get up before noon and therefore go to bed early. Two things happen in Portland: Hipsters act stupid and people make fun of hipsters. So that’s what the show is about. But it looks like it’s also about consumers posing as creators, which is also funny. Here’s an official blurb from IFC:
14Jan, 2011
Forgive me for being judgmental, because I am about to be judgmental. This past Christmas season, I visited a church in Houston. It was a large, mega-church on the outside of town. I liked the service very much. The music was simply incredible, and the people were very friendly. I have family friends who attend the church, so I was excited to go. It was a Christmas Eve service. When the pastor and his wife came up to deliver the sermon, they were amiable people, attractive, intelligent, very good communicators. They sat at a table and just kind of talked about the Christmas story from the Bible. What struck me as they talked, however, was that they were speaking to the audience, literally thousands of people (the church sat thousands and had several Christmas Eve services to deal with the traffic) like they were a group of nine-year olds. That sounds like a judgmental comment, but I don’t mean it to be. I am trying to be accurate. As they spoke to the congregation, I tried to decipher how old a person would need to be to understand what they were saying, and the age I came up with was [...]
13Jan, 2011
A couple days ago I told you I ran a publishing company here in Oregon during my mid-twenties. It was a fun few years for me. I fell in love with books during the time, and am grateful to still be in the industry, these days as a writer, of course. I don’t know what led me to do it, but one day I decided the company would become more grateful. I bought several boxes of thank-you cards and gave one to each member of the staff (we were tiny, so this was no big deal) and asked if we’d be willing to write a thank-you card to somebody every day until our boxes were empty. The staff loved the idea. We wrote cards to our customers, to our vendors, even to our delivery guys. I wasn’t expecting anything to happen, except maybe to let the people who supported us know how grateful we were, but to my surprise, we saw a fairly significant boost in our business. No kidding. I don’t know if our business increased because we sent out thank-you cards, but it certainly didn’t hurt. There’s something inherently powerful in saying thank you to somebody. Most good [...]
12Jan, 2011
I got a little bit of work done on my book today, but not as much as I’d hoped. Yesterday I wrote five times as many words as I did today. And I’d even argue yesterdays words were better. I doubt anything I wrote today will be published. And yet I feel fine about it. It’s been a long time coming for me to view a relatively unsuccessful writing day as a victory, but I’m glad this is now my perspective. What I mean by this is writing is not an exact science. It’s not like screwing bottle caps on bottles, in which each day you can measure your accomplishments. There are too many mysterious forces in writing. It’s more like playing basketball, I’d say. Some days you’ve got a jump shot and other days you don’t. Who really knows why. But like in basketball, there are things you can do to increase the chances of a ball going in. You can practice, for example, and you can stay in shape. In writing, it’s all about routine. My job is not to get up every day and write two-thousand words. My job is to do this: 1. Go to bed [...]
11Jan, 2011
A long, long time ago I ran a very small publishing company here in Oregon. Part of my job was to create a database and sales system to chart our orders. I noticed that, while we had about a thousand customers, only a hundred or so of them were supporting our business. Initially, I wanted to expand the business, to grow our customer base even larger. We spent thousands of dollars in this attempt, visiting trade shows and printing expensive catalogs. But sooner or later I realized it wasn’t working. I mean we did see an increase in business, but it brought in about as much profit as our marketing efforts cost. So I changed our strategy. We began to focus on the one-hundred customers who were already faithful and familiar with our products. I created a monthly newsletter that I printed right off my desktop and sent it to these hundred customers each month. I also made a call list and called as many as twenty or thirty, personally, every month. And I noticed our business increased, while our overhead stayed the same. These customers gave us more prominent positions in their catalogs and in their stores. I’d say [...]
