All posts by Mark

I’m the founder of The Hawaii Project, a new book discovery engine. Previously I was responsible for Product Strategy and Product Management at Telenav, after they acquired goby. Prior to that I was the ceo of Goby, since acquired by Telenav. Before that I did time at Endeca, PTC, Netezza, Evans & Sutherland in a variety of R&D, professional services and business development roles. When I’m not obsessing over work, I’m a proud husband and father of two great kids, love to play tennis, am a compulsive reader and book collector, and am really into way too many different kinds of music. (What’s with the Viking you might ask? While the vikings were known to split a skull or two, I mean more the verb than the noun, as in “to go adventuring” in the sense of the Old Norse fara í víking. I’ve always been interested in the vikings and started using viking2917 as a handle to avoid spammers way back when, and have just kept using it….)
Books, Music, The Hawaii Project

Diary of a Kickstarter – Day 8

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It’s day 8, the end of the first week of the Kickstarter. I’ve been typing continuously for the last 3 weeks, sending emails (5,000+, literally – of course many via mailing lists), writing journalists, mailing friends, twittering….my carpel tunnel (or RSI or whatever the catchy new name is), is back. wrists hurt and i have to break out the wrist braces again. (note to self: getting old sucks. type less.).

First job of the day is to send a mail to all my beta test users (~150 people) giving them an update on progress and rattling the tin cup. I.e., asking for donations 8). The rattling is becoming a dull roar…I also sent personal notes to all the new backers in the last few days (I always send a personal thank you to them!).

I spent an hour talking with old friends my “kitchen cabinet” for The Hawaii Project, Thomas Jensen (http://twjensen.blogspot.com/) & Lynn Thorsen-Jensen (https://twitter.com/lynnktj). Their assessment is similar to mine but more pointed: current course and speed on backing won’t fund the project. Their counsel – work Facebook and book bloggers more, stop sending bulk mails (aka spamming) and chasing publishers, which I’ve been spending time doing. Up my game on Twitter – so I’ve been doing more (Buffer is a great tool), and different kinds of tweets than I have been doing. And, write a daily diary about the Kickstarter and process and post it. So here we are.

I spent awhile working on trying to get coverage from the American Library Association – which would be good on its own, and would give me a good reason to be in touch with every librarian in the country, many of whose email addresses are available online. They are an important constituency for the project. Also got back in touch with Robert Scoble, who covered my last company. May or may not get his attention, as he’s back from a long break.

I continued a few refinements to the Founding Author page, and have seen some inbound interest from more authors about it. Yay!

Finally, I play some tennis around 9pm. When you’re cranking, physical exercise is important to blow of some steam, keep the body going, and give the brain some time to think about other things.

I’m also using Rescue Time to keep track of how my time is spent. Here’s what it looked like yesterday:

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Today’s Music: Al Di Meola. His jazz/rock/fusion keeps the neurons firing. https://player.spotify.com/artist/3bBWKHfpepPOychRNFzg4q

Books, The Hawaii Project

Diary of a Kickstarter. Day 7

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It’s day 7 of the Kickstarter for The Hawaii Project, April 8.

Early morning good news is we’re on TV! Hawaii news now covers us on the Kickstarter. This is a follow-on from Ryan Ozawa, with whom I had an on-air interview on Hawaii Public Radio the day before we launched.

I’m having a mild panic, as we’re at $6k out of $35k and the big rush at the beginning is over. Current course and speed, we don’t hit our goal. Need press. need donors. need Food. It’s 2pm and I forgot to eat!

More good news. A pretty well known literary agent who shall remain nameless for now, picks up one of the author rewards, which is a branded Author Page. I’m psyched. He’s forward looking and wants to be on the cutting edge. I scramble to implement the page which I’ve had in my head for awhile, it takes me the better part of yesterday and today to get it finished, but this seems like a great investment, as he’s a sounding board as I create something new, and hopefully he can influence his authors to go for it to.

I’m working various journalists I’ve been in touch with with. Following up with them on pieces they’ve written in the books space, or keeping them up to date on what’s happening with THP. Mailed the Wall Street Journal. again. Met with Marilyn Matz, the ceo of Paradigm4 and old friend. Didn’t know she was “bookish”. We had a great chat about why Amazon and Goodreads don’t work for her. She turned me on to the fact that renowned book reviewer James Wood lives in Cambridge not far from where I live, and that he’s married to famous author Claire Messud; I was ignorant of both.

I saw a Coyote in my back yard. Seriously. Hide the cats & dogs.

Researched a bit more on sources for Tshirts, so I can fulfill my rewards when time comes. Inventory issues on the shirt I picked out. Sigh.

Finally, I wanted to learn more about the publishing industry in Boston, so I went to a local publishing networking event. (Bookbuilders of Boston was having pizza, beer and bowling. It was interesting, fascinating, depressing, all at once. The publishing industry is contracting and a few folks had been out of work for almost 2 years. Very educated, smart Ph.Ds in literature are proofreading for a living. But the discussion was lively. Sometimes literary, sometimes quirky (lots of Corgi videos, for some reason). Lots of educational publishing, and some very bad bowling. Home at 9. more email, a stiff drink or 3, then off to bed. Rinse & Repeat tomorrow.

Today’s Music: Irish Music is great working music. Always moving. Today it’s Lunasa:

Books

The subscription books model starts to break down

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Oyster and Scribd have blazed a new trail in the books world by offering an “all you can eat” / “all you can read” pricing. Pay a flat fee and read any book in their library, Netflix style.

It was a promising way of opening up how much people would read – if you could read any book for a flat fee, why wouldn’t you, instead of buying them all?

The challenge was and is, that this isn’t in the economic interests of the publishers, who are protecting the margins on the most desired books by selling them (either in physical or ebook form). A sale of one book per month generates far more revenue for them than letting you rent them from Oyster. As a result, Oyster (and it’s competitor Scribd) have been hobbled because the publishers only give them the so-called “back catalog”, the less-desired books. And so people end up not subscribing, or (in my case) canceling their Oyster subscriptions, because they don’t have the books I want to read. All this has been clear to industry watchers for some time; the question was who would give first – the startups running out of cash, or the publishers as a bargaining chip in their on-going battle with Amazon?

Today we have some news on that. Oyster is now selling, not renting, books. Basically admitting defeat, as this article suggests:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-08/the-next-act-for-the-netflix-of-books-is-basically-a-bookstore.

The problem isn’t (and hasn’t been) that readers needed to ways to acquire books and lower cost. There’s so many options – Amazon (including many free/low cost ebooks), B&N (physical stores + Nook), Apple, Indie Bookstores, your local library (free for goodness sake!), and others I’ve likely forgotten.

The problem is finding great stuff to read. Which is why we started The Hawaii Project. Join us and Do Good by Reading Well. (also on Kickstarter now: The Hawaii Project on Kickstarter.

Books, Music, Startups, The Hawaii Project

Diary of a Kickstarter – Day 1

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“You will walk lighter after, when there is no looking back.”
                                        Mary Renault, The King Must Die.

It’s day 1 of the Kickstarter forThe Hawaii Project, April 2. Not April Fool’s Day. Thursday.

Up early this morning, gonna hit the Launch button early. I’m buzzing, ready to go, got the launch butterflies, but I’m also tired. I was up late doing an interview with Hawaii Public Radio, which was really fun and apropos, but 5pm their time is 11pm my time. And I needed to wait til the end at midnight to see if they played my friend Will Weston’s track – he’s a Maui native but I met him in SF in his bar one random Saturday. He gave me the music for my Kickstarter, and I want to return the favor. And I’ve been cranking for a month to get ready. Spoke yesterday with a friend-of-a-friend who’d done a successful Kickstarter, he had many tips, including, “launch early so you pick up European traffic”, and, “use KickTraq”, both of which I’m doing now.

“Fire in the Hole“!!! I shout as I start launching my barrage of emails. Friends, former co-workers, acquaintances, tennis buddies, former parents-watching-baseball together, and so on, ad nauseum. I think I literally sent 5000 emails today. More on my email strategy after the Kickstarter is done. I’ll cough up all my tips and strategies and stats and fails. Shit. Google Mail is blocking my “mail merge” on gmail. Gotta move it all to SendGrid. That takes an hour.

Seems like I am awash in twisty maze of emails, all alike. (That’s an Adventure  pun for you young-uns). Mails from people I haven’t seen in years. Invitations for coffee. “Who are you again exactly?” testy responses from vague acquaintances. Personalized Thank you notes to dozens of backers. Inquiry from a library that wants to pay for The Hawaii Project on their site (yay!). Need to get into my old goby email account for contacts, but it’s locked up for some reason. No Plan survives first encounter with the enemy. Frenzy. Forgot to eat. More press outreach. I’m loving it.

In the end I’m not doing this for the money, I’m doing it to raise awareness. So far, it looks promising.

Music: Last.FM tells me I spent most of the day listening to Irish Music, great for working, particularly Open The Door for Three:  (High Germany particularly).

In bed at midnight.

(note: this post was written after day 1. day 1 was too crazy to blog).

Books, Vikings

And in Viking News, The Vikings traded with the arab world

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Arab ring found in Viking hoard

Ring brings ancient Viking, Islamic civilizations closer together

Ancient find fingers ninth century connection between Vikings and Islamic civilization.

More than a century after its discovery in a ninth century woman’s grave, an engraved ring has revealed evidence of close contacts between Viking Age Scandinavians and the Islamic world.

Man, that’s a long way to sail in a longboat. Down the coast of Europe, across the Mediterranean and back….Reminds me of Michael Crichton’s Eaters of the Dead, where an Arab journeys with the Vikings…or Stephen Lawhead’s Byzantium, where an Irish monk turned Viking goes to the Mediterranean.