Podcasting with The Rorschach Test
Last week, I was the guest on The Rorschach Test podcast. Hosts Chris Marshall and Andy Tom brought me on to talk about my “The Inevitable Direct Market Implosion” article from a couple weeks back.
It runs an hour and a half, but I do recommend listening to it if you liked that article. We go over the article section by section. I also talk about a lot of things I haven’t written up here yet. That includes everything from what the Amazon Kindle Book market might have to show us about producing material for the internet to why the Franco-Belgian model might be a possible survival method.
And, of course, I recommend subscribing to The Roschach Test on general principals anyway. It’s an entertaining show that, though it does veer off into pop culture stuff a lot, provides a different viewpoint from the “accepted standard” that we see on so many of the social networks these days. I appreciate that.
Leaving the Door Open
As always, a reminder: If you have a podcast and are looking for a guest, contact me. If schedules can be worked out (mine is particularly nutty), I’d be happy to chat.
I just listened to the podcast. It does elaborate a bit on some of the points of your original piece, but for something that lasts one hour and a half, not as much as I thought it would. I guess it’s a great way to branch out for you and get more potential readers. I’ll try another one of their podcasts, out of fairness, just to get an idea of the stuff they normally do when you’re not around, but all in all, my general impression of podcasts is that the same ideas could be conveyed more efficiently in one tenth of the time. so unless you guys have really sexy voices, it’s mostly a waste of time.
Anyway, I think that one point I haven’t heard much on the subject so far is that maybe the future of comics is the Netflix model, you read anything you want for ten bucks a month, for the masses, like your public library of yore, and for the old rich collectors like me who are still alive, paper collectibles/limited editions with gimmicks, to satisfy our tactile urges. Now the real question for me is how long will the transition take; as you said wisely, some people have been predicting the death of the direct market for decades already but it’s still here, so… Who knows. Maybe some new technology will come along and change the landscape again. Mind implants, anyone?
One point that wasn’t really discussed in the podcast is how the European market really works. And when I say European I mean French. The reason why Amazon hasn’t killed everyone else here is because books live under socialist law. In 1981, a law proclaimed that no book could ever be discounted by anyone, there is a fixed price defined by the publisher that regardless of how big a seller, you have to comply to. At the time, it was set up to protect bookstores from supermarket bargain bins and aggressive sales methods. This is what protects us from Amazon “smother the competition” business model today. Comics fall under that umbrella. I don’t see that ever happening in the US.
Also, our children here still kinda know how to read. That also might be going away somewhere down the line.