Not my thoughts, for once - I subject you to more than enough of those in the Tuesday blog posts. No, this Saturday I wanted to share with you an article Brandon Sanderson wrote in response to his recent, and unprecedented, Kickstarter campaign.
The Infinite Game Review
That being said, this book does have its place. The synthesis it provides is thorough and insightful, and it provides a robust terminology with which to simplify the approach to what is really an incredibly complex concept - the concept, in fact, that Adam Smith attempted to communicate in Wealth of Nations and never quite managed to clarify. The concept of the infinite game is really a question of taking a long view or a short view. Finite games are about short views, infinite games are about long views.
Too Many Ads?
I have recently learned that to other readers, there are significantly more advertisements, and that they are taking away from the reading experience. I would still like to be able to monetize my story-telling using low-impact advertisements, so I will be spending some time in the coming weeks attempting to clean up the site and figure out why there are advertisements showing up on places I didn’t explicitly put them. Hopefully, I will be able to soon provide a cleaner experience for all of you readers, with the focus being far more on the stories being told, and less on the distracting advertisements.
Statistics
Humanity's fascination with numbers can be traced back to the Sumerians, and the ancient language, cuneiform. In some of the species' earliest cities, written communication was invented as a means of keeping track of numbers. Census data, to be specific, which was used to levy taxes on the populace. Aside from showing that both writing, and math, were developed in order to facilitate taxation, this is arguably the start of humanity's fascination with using numbers to explain the world around it. As we developed new mathematics and new techniques for recording information, the unique capabilities of statistics were leverages for wider ranging applications. Geometry, for instance, which oddly enough has the same root word as geography or geology, geo, which means earth, is called geometry because the Egyptians invented it to measure out parcels of land.
Business Musings
There is a reason that this site is called "IGC Publishing." Despite the online format, I'm largely modeling my efforts after traditional publishing methods, wherein I go through the steps of writing a story, advertising it, formatting it, building the front and back matter, and then selling the story as a stand-alone piece of work, available for download at a prescribed price point. That is, I am treating my stories as products.
Ads
I need to initially sell 15 copies of a short story to recoup the ISBN cost. I'll further need to sell 50 additional copies of short stories a year to fund the website in its current form, or 150 additional copies of short stories a year for the plan that would let me set up a nicer storefront.
IGC Publishing 