Chris Howard's Writing & Art

Books and movies mostly

My son and I spent most of the weekend--the last weekend before school starts up again--watching movies and reading books. I read a couple good books, including Joe Abercrombie's Best Served Cold along with a bunch of non-fiction research stuff for my next book.

We watched Pan's Labyrinth, V for Vendetta, and all three Jason Bourne movies (Identity, Supremacy, Ultimatum).  I had somehow missed it the last time I watched The Bourne Identity, but I've stood right where the final scene takes place, a taverna just below the famous windmills, which in the movie had been turned into a scooter rental business run by Marie.

Here's a pic from that side.  You can see all of this in the background when they shot the final scene:

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Does FREE work?

To narrow that down a bit, does the posting of stories, novels, and art for free downloading, reading, viewing, and even sharing, make any difference in print book sales, in attracting more traffic to an author's or illustrator's blog, in doing anything to help that artist's career?

I give away a lot.  I have a whole blog dedicated to some of my Creative Commons licensed content.  I post my art regularly here on theophrast.us, on Flickr, deviantArt, and other art forums and presentation sites.  I posted an SF novel Nanowhere almost four years ago under Creative Commons license.  I post 3 to 5 panels for my web comic Saltwater Witch every week. 

Free, all of it.  Free to download, to read, to share, some of it out there for years. 

Does it work, giving all of this away if you're just starting out?  (I know it works if you're an established author, celeb, marketing guru, so I don't need the Doctorow, Scalzi, Anderson, Godin, etc. cases). 

I'm curious to hear what other writers, illustrators, and readers think.  Maybe you can guess what I think by what's on my blog or the Saltwater Witch site.  I'm considering posting my entire novel Seaborn, which came out last July.  And I'm wondering about the effectiveness of free.  I completely get Tim O'Reilly's aphorism that the problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity.  Maybe my real question is does giving things away solve that problem?

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ChrisCommons
Saltwater Witch Web Comic.

"Of course I speak whale"

"Who are you looking for?"

This week's Illustration Friday topic is "flawed" which I'm taking as unsuitable and improper rather than defective--although not going to pretend this one's not.

I was doing some underwater sketching with Kassandra, getting ready for a new set of panels for Saltwater Witch this weekend, and...Dory just sort of swam into the scene and started asking questions.  Dory, if you don't already know, is the coolest character from the movie, Finding Nemo (played by the wonderful Ellen DeGeneres).

Please click the image for the full view:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finding_Nemo

Twilight...

Chloe went to see Twilight last night with her friends.  I asked her what she thought when she got home: "Beautiful" and "followed the book well, lots of recognizable dialogue right out of Meyers' story."--which she particularly liked.  Apparently there was also a lot of oohing and aaahing every time Edward walked on the scene.  Crazy vampire lovers.

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Old Book Images

Free for non-commercial use.  I posted a batch of book images on Flickr, closeups, edge shots, stacked, pages, a couple with USB cords sticking out of the pages. 

These four books are from my Aristotle collection, not all the oldest, but my faves in the group, including a 1550 Madius edition of Aristotle's Poetics, and the big volume below, Operum Aristotelis Tomus II Guillelmo Laemario edition published in Lyon in 1597--I think this is really cool:  the front cover is stamped with the crest of the Duke of Saxony, and the back is stamped with the crest of the Holy Roman Emporer.  Here's the colophon.  The interior shot on the left is from the oldest book in my collection, a Latin trans. of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Politics, printed in Venice on June 25th 1516.  More about this edition here.

Here's the thumbnail block.  Click here to go to Flickr to check them out full-sized.