“
I like wearing a blindfold while watching movies, so that I can focus on the dialogue. My favorite flicks are the silent movies.
”
”
Jarod Kintz (This Book is Not for Sale)
“
Do you have someone watching her house?” (Stephanie)
“That kind of surveillance only happens in the movies. We’re so underbudgeted we’re one step away from
holding bake sales to pay for toilet paper. (Morelli)
”
”
Janet Evanovich (Finger Lickin' Fifteen (Stephanie Plum, #15))
“
But the things that make a woman feel good inside and out—and make those around her feel good and happy to be with her—are not for sale. Things like kindness, self-discipline, purpose, humility, grace, confidence, hospitality, and peace cannot be marketed in a slick magazine ad or in a movie.
”
”
Candace Cameron Bure (Kind is the New Classy: The Power of Living Graciously)
“
I like movies that keep me guessing until the end. I always guess flowers, because no matter what type of movie, whether romance, mystery, or horror, nobody suspects the flowers.
”
”
Jarod Kintz (This Book is Not for Sale)
“
He had a collection of science-fiction films on DVD and Blu-ray discs, and although he said he’d seen most of them before, Caitlin was surprised to discover how many of the cases were still shrink-wrapped. “Why’d you buy them if you weren’t going to watch them?” she asked. He looked at the tall, thin cabinets that contained the movies and seemed to ponder the question. “My childhood was on sale,” he said at last, “so I bought it.
”
”
Robert J. Sawyer (Watch (WWW, #2))
“
When someone wants to demonstrate a new feature they’re working on at 37signals, often the easiest way is to record a screencast and narrate the experience. A screencast is basically just a recording of your screen that others can play back later as a movie. It can be used in several ways, including for presenting the latest sales figures or elaborating on a new marketing strategy.
”
”
Jason Fried (Remote: Office Not Required)
“
I want to end my life by eating so much Viagra that I go out like that movie and Die Hard. If you want to watch, I just made popcorn.
”
”
Jarod Kintz (This Book is Not for Sale)
“
Katanya, jodoh adalah mereka yang memang akan selalu dipertemukan, sekeras apapun mreka saling menghindar.
”
”
Karina Ayu Pradita (This Movie is You)
“
Dating is all about getting to know somebody, without wasting a lot of time or money. What is the price of love? You’ve got the cost of dinner, a movie, and cab fare for you and your date, as well as the entire film crew documenting your evening. So you add all that up, and subtract various coupons and bulk discount rates you might qualify for. But what about time? You can make more money, but you can’t make more time if you waste it. That’s why you have to be efficient with your dating. Don’t date one on one. Take 10 women out at once, assembly line style, and forget the small talk. Focus on hard-hitting topics, and give them all questionnaires to fill out. I think the women will appreciate your honest and novel approach. Of course it’s possible that nine out of ten women might be offended. But who cares? All you need is one.
”
”
Jarod Kintz (This Book is Not for Sale)
“
and like in a movie I appear in front of the D'Agostino's, sale's clerks beckoning for me to enter, and I'm using an expired coupon for a box of oat-bran cereal and the girl at the checkout counter--black, dumb,slow-- doesn't get it, doesn't notice the expiration date has passed even though it's the only thing I buy, and I get a small but incendiary thrill when I walk out of the store, opening the box, stuffing handfuls of the cereal into my mouth, trying to whistle "Hips to Be Square".
”
”
Bret Easton Ellis (American Psycho)
“
Sometimes I give automated responses to people without even listening to what they say. For example, someone might tell me, “Enjoy the movie,” and I’ll say, “Thanks, you too.” Or, someone will say, “Enjoy your meal,” and I’ll reply, “Thanks, I wish I were eating your pussy.
”
”
Jarod Kintz (This Book is Not for Sale)
“
the things that make a woman feel good inside and out—and make those around her feel good and happy to be with her—are not for sale. Things like kindness, self-discipline, purpose, humility, grace, confidence, hospitality, and peace cannot be marketed in a slick magazine ad or in a movie.
”
”
Candace Cameron Bure (Kind is the New Classy: The Power of Living Graciously)
“
I saw a mummy in a movie once, and I’ve got to say I love George Harrison’s style.
”
”
Jarod Kintz (This Book is Not for Sale)
“
Making a product is just an activity, making a profit on a product is the achievement.
”
”
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
“
The students tend to stick close to campus. There is nothing for them to do in Blacksmith proper, no natural haunt or attraction. They have their own food, movies, music, theater, sports, conversation and sex. This is a town of dry cleaning shops and opticians. Photos of looming Victorian homes decorate the windows of real estate firms. These pictures have not changed in years. The homes are sold or gone or stand in other towns in other states. This is a town of tag sales and yard sales, the failed possessions arrayed in driveways and tended by kids.
”
”
Don DeLillo (White Noise)
“
New York city wasn't yet the post-Giuliani, Bloomberg forever, Disneyland tourist attraction of today, trade-marked and policed to protect the visitors and tourism industry. It was still a place of diversity, where people lived their lives in vibrant communities and intact cultures. Young people could still move to New York City after or instead of high school or college and invent an identity, an art, a life. Times Square was still a bustling center of excitement, with sex work, "adult" movies, a variety of sins on sale, ways to make money for those down on their luck".
”
”
B. Ruby Rich (New Queer Cinema: The Director's Cut)
“
She wondered what it was about storytelling that made people want it almost as much as food and water, even more so in bad times than good. Movies had never drawn more patrons than during the Great Depression. Book sales often improved in a recession. The need went beyond a mere desire for entertainment and distraction from one's troubles. It was more profound and mysterious than that.
”
”
Dean Koontz (Mr. Murder)
“
The psychic said I would have two children. This makes me shake my head. I know you are not supposed to leave a baby alone. Not even for a minute. But after a while I think, What could happen to a baby in the time it would take for me to run to the corner for a cappuccino on the go? So I do it, I run to the corner and get the cappuccino. And then I think how close the store is that is having the sale on leather gloves. Really, I think, it is only a couple of blocks. So I go to the store and buy the gloves. And it hits me--how long it has been since I have gone to a movie. A matinee! So I do that, too. I go to a movie. And when I come out of the theater it occurs to me that it has been years since I have been to Paris. Years. So I go to Paris, and come back three months later and find a skeleton in the crib.
”
”
Amy Hempel (The Collected Stories)
“
I don’t have a tan because I only come out at night. The only sun I get is reflected off the moon. I make love like a vampire, only entirely different and without completely filling up movie theaters with spectators.
”
”
Jarod Kintz (This Book is Not for Sale)
“
Listen, if you are an entrepreneur who is passionate about your product, but you never ask anyone to buy what you are selling, it will never get sold. Sure, there’s a possibility that you can deliver your best sales pitch in your best Sunday suit and they will still say no. But so what? Do you know how many times I’ve been told no for movie scripts, television shows, and comedy specials? A whole hell of lot more times than I heard yes.
”
”
Steve Harvey (Act Like a Success, Think Like a Success: Discovering Your Gift and the Way to Life's Riches)
“
I want to direct a movie called “Sleep” that’s sure to put everybody to the title. The whole movie will look like an extended blink. That way, if anybody asks if you’ve seen it, and you say No, you fell asleep halfway through, the other person can say, So you have seen the whole thing.
”
”
Jarod Kintz (This Book is Not for Sale)
“
Hee-hee-hee. I'm fine, reeeeally. Wanting to die is starting to be a habit for me. Don't worry about it, okay? Next week there's a sale I've been looking forward to, and I promised some friends that I'd go see a movie with them, and I haven't even used my half-price ticket for griddled monja cakes yet, so I can't die.
”
”
Mizuki Nomura
“
Let’s say that you have committed to running every day for two weeks, and at the end of those two weeks, you “reward” yourself with a massage. I would say, “Good for you!” because we all could benefit from more massages. But I would also say that your massage wasn’t a reward. It was an incentive. The definition of a reward in behavior science is an experience directly tied to a behavior that makes that behavior more likely to happen again. The timing of the reward matters. Scientists learned decades ago that rewards need to happen either during the behavior or milli-seconds afterward. Dopamine is released and processed by the brain very quickly. That means you’ve got to cue up those good feelings fast to form a habit. Incentives like a sales bonus or a monthly massage can motivate you, but they don’t rewire your brain. Incentives are way too far in the future to give you that all-important shot of dopamine that encodes the new habit. Doing three squats in the morning and rewarding yourself with a movie that evening won’t work. The squats and the good feelings you get from the movie are too far apart for dopamine to build a bridge between the two. The neurochemical reaction that you are trying to hack is not only time dependent, it’s also highly individualized. What causes one person to feel good may not work for everyone. Your boss may love the smell of coffee. When she enters a coffee shop and inhales, she feels good. And her immediate feeling builds her habit of visiting the coffee shop. But your coworker might not like the way coffee smells. His brain won’t react in the same way. A real reward — something that will actually create a habit — is a much narrower target to hit than most people think. I
”
”
B.J. Fogg (Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything)
“
Consider that the original Star Wars movies—some of the highest-grossing films of all time—required more than forty years to amass $3 billion in revenue. It took Ambien just twenty-four months to amass $4 billion in sales profit, discounting the black market. That’s a large number, and one I can only imagine influences Big Pharma decision-making at all levels.
”
”
Matthew Walker (Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams)
“
The long gray two-story box was the newest structure on the property, having been built in the 1970s. The buildings up the hill had accumulated one by one since the 1920s, most of them incorporating bits salvaged from various torn-down hotels and movie sets. Their aunt Amity, affluent from the sales of her series of popular novels, had added to the architectural clutter after
”
”
Tim Powers (Medusa's Web)
“
The switch from sales ladies behind each counter in five-and-dime stores to checkout lines, from waiter-served to self-service and fast-food restaurants, from full-service to self-service gasoline stations are among the responses to higher labor costs. So, too, are the absence of movie theater ushers and the wide use by restaurants of plastic utensils and paper plates, because they do not require dishwashing.
”
”
Walter E. Williams (Race & Economics: How Much Can Be Blamed on Discrimination? (Hoover Institution Press Publication Book 599))
“
When I was a kid an older guy sat out front of a gas station in Old Town, FL. His favorite story involved roughing up a couple of guys because "you could tell they weren't from around here." The gruesome details were implied as he'd pull out a straight razor and a plastic bag containing Red Devil lye. "Deliverance", the end of "Easy Rider", and every "wrong turn" horror movie would later make more sense because of those childhood stops for gas and a Yoo-hoo.
”
”
Damon Thomas (Some Books Are Not For Sale (Rural Gloom))
“
A landmark 2007 report by the American Psychological Association (APA) found girls being sexualized--or treated as "objects of sexual desire... as things rather than as people with legitimate sexual feelings of their own"--in virtually every form of media, including movies, television, music videos and lyrics, video games and the Internet, advertising, cartoons, clothing, and toys. Even Dora the Explorer, once a cute, square-bodied child, got a makeover to make her look more svelte and "hot.
”
”
Nancy Jo Sales (American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers)
“
New York city wasn't yet the post-Giuliani, Bloomberg forever, Disneyland tourist attraction of today, trade-marked and policed to protect the visitors and tourism industry. It was still a place of diversity, where people lived their lives in vibrant communities and intact cultures. Young people could still move to New York City after or instead of high school or college and invent an identity, an art, a life. Times Square was still a bustling center of excitement, with sex work, "adult" movies, a variety of sins on sale, ways to make money for those down on their luck".
”
”
Ruby Rich
“
I'm living in a horror movie, all right. Only the horror doesn't have anything to do with necrophilia or black masses or crosses hung upside down, or with vampires who can't swim or zombies who work in sugar cane fields and can't stop shambling off cliffs when some guy with a jawbreaker accent says so, No, this is real life. It was running out all around him. the footprints of assassins and neo-fascists and government officials with secret closets full of tutus, private armies training in ships named after the wives of oilmen, of drunken presidents in bed with the mob and the cartels that slice up the world and stick FOR SALE signs on the pieces; while the real kings of earth lie moldering in their graves, their brains stolen away in the night and their bullet wounds altered to match storybook plots that would be laughed out of any preschool classroom. And all this while the billions sweat and grow old like the living dead, their lifeblood sucked dry by the takers of souls who need our labor to feed a hunger for power without end. The undead? What a cheapjack explanation for so much misery. There is more than enough to account for it all without falling back on the unnameable. It's already here. The trick is to see it and not flinch- there's no future in denial. It's as simple, and as enormous, as that. The truth, however bleak, was almost comforting.
”
”
Dennis Etchison (California Gothic)
“
Sitting at the edge of his bed those days, weaving and watching television movies – movies themselves, mostly made from the seasickness of misguided creative endeavor.
Normalization of commercial compromise had left his medium as one of dominantly irrelevant fantasies adding nothing to the world, and instead providing a perfect storm of merchanteering thespians and image builders now less identifiable as creators of valued products than of products built for significant sales. Their masses of fans as happy as hustled, bustled, and rustled sheep. A country without culture? Nothing more than a shopping mall with a flag? Still, business is branding buoyantly, leaving Bob to yet another bout of that old society-is-sinking sensation.
”
”
Sean Penn (Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff)
“
How about I tell you what I don’t like? I do not like postmodernism, postapocalyptic settings, postmortem narrators, or magic realism. I rarely respond to supposedly clever formal devices, multiple fonts, pictures where they shouldn’t be—basically, gimmicks of any kind. I find literary fiction about the Holocaust or any other major world tragedy to be distasteful—nonfiction only, please. I do not like genre mash-ups à la the literary detective novel or the literary fantasy. Literary should be literary, and genre should be genre, and crossbreeding rarely results in anything satisfying. I do not like children’s books, especially ones with orphans, and I prefer not to clutter my shelves with young adult. I do not like anything over four hundred pages or under one hundred fifty pages. I am repulsed by ghostwritten novels by reality television stars, celebrity picture books, sports memoirs, movie tie-in editions, novelty items, and—I imagine this goes without saying—vampires. I rarely stock debuts, chick lit, poetry, or translations. I would prefer not to stock series, but the demands of my pocketbook require me to. For your part, you needn’t tell me about the ‘next big series’ until it is ensconced on the New York Times Best Sellers list. Above all, Ms. Loman, I find slim literary memoirs about little old men whose little old wives have died from cancer to be absolutely intolerable. No matter how well written the sales rep claims they are. No matter how many copies you promise I’ll sell on Mother’s Day.
”
”
Gabrielle Zevin (The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry)
“
The public offering occurred exactly one week after Toy Story’s opening. Jobs had gambled that the movie would be successful, and the risky bet paid off, big-time. As with the Apple IPO, a celebration was planned at the San Francisco office of the lead underwriter at 7 a.m., when the shares were to go on sale. The plan had originally been for the first shares to be offered at about $14, to be sure they would sell. Jobs insisted on pricing them at $22, which would give the company more money if the offering was a success. It was, beyond even his wildest hopes. It exceeded Netscape as the biggest IPO of the year. In the first half hour, the stock shot up to $45, and trading had to be delayed because there were too many buy orders. It then went up even further, to $49, before settling back to close the day at $39. Earlier that year Jobs had been hoping to find a buyer for Pixar that would let him merely recoup the $50 million he had put in. By the end of the day the shares he had retained—80% of the company—were worth more than twenty times that, an astonishing $1.2 billion. That was about five times what he’d made when Apple went public in 1980.
”
”
Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
“
Like,” he repeats with distaste. “How about I tell you what I don’t like? I do not like postmodernism, postapocalyptic settings, postmortem narrators, or magic realism. I rarely respond to supposedly clever formal devices, multiple fonts, pictures where they shouldn’t be—basically, gimmicks of any kind. I find literary fiction about the Holocaust or any other major world tragedy to be distasteful—nonfiction only, please. I do not like genre mash-ups à la the literary detective novel or the literary fantasy. Literary should be literary, and genre should be genre, and crossbreeding rarely results in anything satisfying. I do not like children’s books, especially ones with orphans, and I prefer not to clutter my shelves with young adult. I do not like anything over four hundred pages or under one hundred fifty pages. I am repulsed by ghostwritten novels by reality television stars, celebrity picture books, sports memoirs, movie tie-in editions, novelty items, and—I imagine this goes without saying—vampires. I rarely stock debuts, chick lit, poetry, or translations. I would prefer not to stock series, but the demands of my pocketbook require me to. For your part, you needn’t tell me about the ‘next big series’ until it is ensconced on the New York Times Best Sellers list. Above all, Ms. Loman, I find slim literary memoirs about little old men whose little old wives have died from cancer to be absolutely intolerable. No matter how well written the sales rep claims they are. No matter how many copies you promise I’ll sell on Mother’s Day.
”
”
Gabrielle Zevin (The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry)
“
The Ten Ways to Evaluate a Market provide a back-of-the-napkin method you can use to identify the attractiveness of any potential market. Rate each of the ten factors below on a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 is terrible and 10 fantastic. When in doubt, be conservative in your estimate: Urgency. How badly do people want or need this right now? (Renting an old movie is low urgency; seeing the first showing of a new movie on opening night is high urgency, since it only happens once.) Market Size. How many people are purchasing things like this? (The market for underwater basket-weaving courses is very small; the market for cancer cures is massive.) Pricing Potential. What is the highest price a typical purchaser would be willing to spend for a solution? (Lollipops sell for $0.05; aircraft carriers sell for billions.) Cost of Customer Acquisition. How easy is it to acquire a new customer? On average, how much will it cost to generate a sale, in both money and effort? (Restaurants built on high-traffic interstate highways spend little to bring in new customers. Government contractors can spend millions landing major procurement deals.) Cost of Value Delivery. How much will it cost to create and deliver the value offered, in both money and effort? (Delivering files via the internet is almost free; inventing a product and building a factory costs millions.) Uniqueness of Offer. How unique is your offer versus competing offerings in the market, and how easy is it for potential competitors to copy you? (There are many hair salons but very few companies that offer private space travel.) Speed to Market. How soon can you create something to sell? (You can offer to mow a neighbor’s lawn in minutes; opening a bank can take years.) Up-front Investment. How much will you have to invest before you’re ready to sell? (To be a housekeeper, all you need is a set of inexpensive cleaning products. To mine for gold, you need millions to purchase land and excavating equipment.) Upsell Potential. Are there related secondary offers that you could also present to purchasing customers? (Customers who purchase razors need shaving cream and extra blades as well; buy a Frisbee and you won’t need another unless you lose it.) Evergreen Potential. Once the initial offer has been created, how much additional work will you have to put in in order to continue selling? (Business consulting requires ongoing work to get paid; a book can be produced once and then sold over and over as is.) When you’re done with your assessment, add up the score. If the score is 50 or below, move on to another idea—there are better places to invest your energy and resources. If the score is 75 or above, you have a very promising idea—full speed ahead. Anything between 50 and 75 has the potential to pay the bills but won’t be a home run without a huge investment of energy and resources.
”
”
Josh Kaufman (The Personal MBA)
“
Like,” he repeats with distaste. “How about I tell you what I don’t like? I do not like postmodernism, postapocalyptic settings, postmortem narrators, or magic realism. I rarely respond to supposedly clever formal devices, multiple fonts, pictures where they shouldn’t be—basically, gimmicks of any kind. I find literary fiction about the Holocaust or any other major world tragedy to be distasteful—nonfiction only, please. I do not like genre mash-ups à la the literary detective novel or the literary fantasy. Literary should be literary, and genre should be genre, and crossbreeding rarely results in anything satisfying. I do not like children’s books, especially ones with orphans, and I prefer not to clutter my shelves with young adult. I do not like anything over four hundred pages or under one hundred fifty pages. I am repulsed by ghostwritten novels by reality television stars, celebrity picture books, sports memoirs, movie tie-in editions, novelty items, and—I imagine this goes without saying—vampires. I rarely stock debuts, chick lit, poetry, or translations. I would prefer not to stock series, but the demands of my pocketbook require me to. For your part, you needn’t tell me about the ‘next big series’ until it is ensconced on the New York Times Best Sellers list. Above all, Ms. Loman, I find slim literary memoirs about little old men whose little old wives have died from cancer to be absolutely intolerable. No matter how well written the sales rep claims they are. No matter how many copies you promise I’ll sell on Mother’s Day.” Amelia blushes, though she is angry more than embarrassed. She agrees with some of what A.J. has said, but his manner is unnecessarily insulting. Knightley Press doesn’t even sell half of that stuff anyway. She studies him. He is older than Amelia but not by much, not by more than ten years. He is too young to like so little. “What do you like?” she asks. “Everything else,” he says. “I will also admit to an occasional weakness for short-story collections. Customers never want to buy them though.” There is only one short-story collection on Amelia’s list, a debut. Amelia hasn’t read the whole thing, and time dictates that she probably won’t, but she liked the first story. An American sixth-grade class and an Indian sixth-grade class participate in an international pen pal program. The narrator is an Indian kid in the American class who keeps feeding comical misinformation about Indian culture to the Americans. She clears her throat, which is still terribly dry. “The Year Bombay Became Mumbai. I think it will have special int—” “No,” he says. “I haven’t even told you what it’s about yet.” “Just no.” “But why?” “If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll admit that you’re only telling me about it because I’m partially Indian and you think this will be my special interest. Am I right?” Amelia imagines smashing the ancient computer over his head. “I’m telling you about this because you said you liked short stories! And it’s the only one on my list. And for the record”—here, she lies—“it’s completely wonderful from start to finish. Even if it is a debut. “And do you know what else? I love debuts. I love discovering something new. It’s part of the whole reason I do this job.” Amelia rises. Her head is pounding. Maybe she does drink too much? Her head is pounding and her heart is, too. “Do you want my opinion?” “Not particularly,” he says. “What are you, twenty-five?” “Mr. Fikry, this is a lovely store, but if you continue in this this this”—as a child, she stuttered and it occasionally returns when she is upset; she clears her throat—“this backward way of thinking, there won’t be an Island Books before too long.
”
”
Gabrielle Zevin (The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry)
“
Dear KDP Author,
Just ahead of World War II, there was a radical invention that shook the foundations of book publishing. It was the paperback book. This was a time when movie tickets cost 10 or 20 cents, and books cost $2.50. The new paperback cost 25 cents – it was ten times cheaper. Readers loved the paperback and millions of copies were sold in just the first year.
With it being so inexpensive and with so many more people able to afford to buy and read books, you would think the literary establishment of the day would have celebrated the invention of the paperback, yes? Nope. Instead, they dug in and circled the wagons. They believed low cost paperbacks would destroy literary culture and harm the industry (not to mention their own bank accounts). Many bookstores refused to stock them, and the early paperback publishers had to use unconventional methods of distribution – places like newsstands and drugstores. The famous author George Orwell came out publicly and said about the new paperback format, if “publishers had any sense, they would combine against them and suppress them.” Yes, George Orwell was suggesting collusion.
Well… history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.
Fast forward to today, and it’s the e-book’s turn to be opposed by the literary establishment. Amazon and Hachette – a big US publisher and part of a $10 billion media conglomerate – are in the middle of a business dispute about e-books. We want lower e-book prices. Hachette does not. Many e-books are being released at $14.99 and even $19.99. That is unjustifiably high for an e-book. With an e-book, there’s no printing, no over-printing, no need to forecast, no returns, no lost sales due to out of stock, no warehousing costs, no transportation costs, and there is no secondary market – e-books cannot be resold as used books. E-books can and should be less expensive.
Perhaps channeling Orwell’s decades old suggestion, Hachette has already been caught illegally colluding with its competitors to raise e-book prices. So far those parties have paid $166 million in penalties and restitution. Colluding with its competitors to raise prices wasn’t only illegal, it was also highly disrespectful to Hachette’s readers.
The fact is many established incumbents in the industry have taken the position that lower e-book prices will “devalue books” and hurt “Arts and Letters.” They’re wrong. Just as paperbacks did not destroy book culture despite being ten times cheaper, neither will e-books. On the contrary, paperbacks ended up rejuvenating the book industry and making it stronger. The same will happen with e-books.
Many inside the echo-chamber of the industry often draw the box too small. They think books only compete against books. But in reality, books compete against mobile games, television, movies, Facebook, blogs, free news sites and more. If we want a healthy reading culture, we have to work hard to be sure books actually are competitive against these other media types, and a big part of that is working hard to make books less expensive.
Moreover, e-books are highly price elastic. This means that when the price goes down, customers buy much more. We've quantified the price elasticity of e-books from repeated measurements across many titles. For every copy an e-book would sell at $14.99, it would sell 1.74 copies if priced at $9.99. So, for example, if customers would buy 100,000 copies of a particular e-book at $14.99, then customers would buy 174,000 copies of that same e-book at $9.99. Total revenue at $14.99 would be $1,499,000. Total revenue at $9.99 is $1,738,000. The important thing to note here is that the lower price is good for all parties involved: the customer is paying 33% less and the author is getting a royalty check 16% larger and being read by an audience that’s 74% larger. The pie is simply bigger.
”
”
Amazon Kdp
“
I enjoy reading books by way of subtitles from the movies they got made into.
”
”
Jarod Kintz (This Book is Not for Sale)
“
El éxito no es fama, dinero o poder. El éxito es despertar cada mañana tan emocionado por lo que tienes que hacer que sales volando por la ventana, es estar con los que quieres, es conectarse con le mundo y que los demás lo sientan, es dormirte cada noche sabiendo que hiciste lo mejor que pudiste. El éxito es dicha, libertad, amistad y sobre todo amor.
”
”
Fame Movie
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Why are you so into Pinot?” 2 Maya asks. In the next 60 seconds of the movie, the character of Miles Raymond tells a story which would set off a boom in sales of Pinot Noir. It’s a hard grape to grow. It’s thin-skinned, temperamental, ripens early. It’s not a survivor like Cabernet, which can just grow anywhere and thrive even when it’s neglected. No, Pinot needs constant care and attention. In fact it can only grow in these really specific, tucked away corners of the world. And only the most patient and nurturing of growers can do it, really. Only somebody who really takes the time to understand Pinot’s potential can coax it into its fullest expression. Its flavors are the most haunting and brilliant and thrilling and subtle and ancient on the planet. Miles is describing himself in the dialogue and using Pinot as a metaphor for his personality. In this one scene moviegoers projected themselves on the character, feeling his longing and his quest to be understood. Sideways was a hit and won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. It also launched a movement, turning the misunderstood Pinot Noir into the must-have wine of the year. In less than one year after the movie’s 2004 fall release date, sales of Pinot Noir had risen 18 percent. Winemakers began to grow more of the grape to meet demand. In California alone 70,000 tons of Pinot Noir grapes were harvested and crushed in 2004. Within two years the volume had topped 100,000 tons. Today California wine growers crush more than 250,000 tons of Pinot Noir each year. Interestingly, the Japanese version of the movie did not have the same “Sideways Effect” on wine sales. One reason is that the featured grape is Cabernet, a varietal already popular in Japan. But even more critical and relevant to the discussion on storytelling is that Japanese audiences didn’t see the “porch scene” because there wasn’t one. The scene was not included in the movie. No story, no emotional attachment to a particular varietal. You see, the movie Sideways didn’t launch a movement in Pinot Noir; the story that Miles told triggered the boom. In 60 seconds Maya fell in love with Miles and millions of Americans fell in love with an expensive wine they knew little about.
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Carmine Gallo (The Storyteller's Secret: From TED Speakers to Business Legends, Why Some Ideas Catch On and Others Don't)
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JOURNALIST— (3) TERRIFIED TO DISAPPOINT MISS HABER AND HER
READERS, WE WILL TRY TO ACCOMMODATE HER
“FASCINATING RUMORS, SO FAR UNCHECKED” BY
BUSTING UP OUR MARRIAGE EVEN THOUGH WE STILL
LIKE EACH OTHER. JOANNE & PAUL NEWMAN This was a stunner, and it got folks talking. The Newmans’ marriage, then eleven years along, was considered stable: all those kids, the famed Connecticut home, the films they’d worked on together, the collaborative success of Rachel, Rachel. It didn’t seem right. Gossipy movie fan magazines had often tried to goose a few sales out of articles speculating that the Newmans were at odds with each other (“Shout by Shout: Paul Newman’s Bitter Fights with His Wife”; “Strange Rumors About Hollywood’s ‘Happiest Marriage’”) or that forty-three-year-old Newman was feeling randy and seeking consolations outside the home (“Paul Newman’s Just at That Age”; “Is Paul Newman’s Joanne Too Possessive?”). Invariably, they all stopped short of actually announcing real trouble or accusing Newman of adultery. The Newmans were supposed to be examples. But this strange advertisement didn’t so much squelch rumors as give people reason to wonder about them. They didn’t have to wait long for a fuller story. Later that year a gossip magazine
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Shawn Levy (Paul Newman: A Life)
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SOUVENIR I would like to take something with me but even one chair is too awkward too heavy peeling paint falls off in a suitcase hinge sounds betray a theft cheeses won’t keep the clothespin without its surroundings would be mediocre the big thunder rolled elsewhere the umbrella is for sale but in a desert what you want is a soaking the do not disturb sign is tattered I have many times taken some café’s small packets of sugar so that in Turkey I might sweeten my coffee with China, and in Italy remember a Lithuanian pastry but where is the coffee hands left and right useless knees clattery heart finally calm as some hero at the end of a movie squinting silently into the sun you can’t hold an umbrella there anyhow and what would he hang from the clothespin
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Jane Hirshfield (The Beauty: Poems)
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I grew up—as most women do—believing that the world was inherently dangerous. These narratives were most often pushed by people who had never truly gone out to see for themselves. Why would they? They had been traumatized by the nightly news and the horror movies and the wide-eyed stories whispered from one woman to another. It’s a profitable business, the business of fear. For every terrifying scenario, there is a strategically placed antidote for sale alongside it. I spent many nights alone in the van beneath streetlights or blackened desert skies wishing that I could snap my fingers and erase all the stories I’d been told, but I couldn’t. If I was going to do these things alone, I was going to have to do them afraid. I would not let societally induced fear be a placeholder for the kind of life I wanted to live,
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Brianna Madia (Nowhere for Very Long: The Unexpected Road to an Unconventional Life)
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Do not manhandle me. My answer is no. I'm not for sale."
"But you don't have any family left," said Nicolas, raising an eyebrow.
The next few moments blurred together into one messed-up vision. A fist flying into Nicolas's nose. A loud crack. Blood splattering on Camille's dress. Rémi putting his arm around me. Jane, Phillipa, and Marie racing up to see what the commotion was all about. The clicks of cameras. A nightmare.
"This is private property. You're no longer guests of the château. Leave now," said Rémi as Nicolas scrambled up from the ground. "And stay away, far away from my fiancée, or I'll hunt you down."
Jane, Marie, and Phillipa flanked my sides, supporting my shaky body. Phillipa hissed to Nicolas. "You're wrong. Sophie has a family. She has all of us. And her dad."
I couldn't help but smile. What Phillipa said was true. I had everything.
"He broke my nose," said Nicolas, holding his hand up to his face, blood pouring down like a waterfall. "I'm going to press charges against you, all of you, you pieces of merde."
"Go ahead," said Rémi. "We may not be as wealthy as you are, but we're not doing so bad. You can try to destroy us, but if you know Sophie as well as I do, you know she fights back. And hard. Believe me. Nothing, not you, not me, will stand in her way. You're the only one with a reputation to lose---and from what I've read, most people think you're the scum of the earth."
Camille walked up the steps. "I'm out of here." She stopped and looked over her shoulder. "I'm sorry, Sophie. I should have known. Small dick, small mind."
"I do not have a small dick," screamed Nicolas, his face turning red.
The guests from the Sunday lunch clasped their hands over their mouths. I felt like I was the star of a B movie. Who were these people? Cartoon characters?
"Oh, yes, you have a small penis. The smallest one I've ever seen," said Camille, winking at me. "And you think with it. Now, take me back to Paris so I can get rid of you. That is, unless you want my Instagram to blow up. Don't forget. I have pictures of your cornichon."
Nicolas raced after Camille. "You salope, those pictures are private."
Camille placed her hands on her skinny hips. "For now," she said.
I had to give Camille credit when it was due; she wasn't a brain-dead model, she was fierce.
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Samantha Verant (Sophie Valroux's Paris Stars (Sophie Valroux #2))
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I’m underwater on my mortgage, and I have a flooded movie theater for rent. Scuba tank and popcorn not included.
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Jarod Kintz (This Book is Not for Sale)
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It would just be like a movie makeover montage, pop music scoring the ugly girl's transformation from bespectacled duckling to cheerleader swan.
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Leila Sales (This Song Will Save Your Life)
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The movie marketing paradigm says throw an expensive premiere and hope that translates into ticket sales come opening weekend. A growth hacker says, “Hey, it’s the twenty-first century, and we can be a lot more technical about how we acquire and capture new customers.” The start-up world is full of companies taking clever hacks to drive their first set of customers into their sales funnel. The necessity of that jolt—needing to get it any way they can—has made start-ups very creative.
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Ryan Holiday (Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising)
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Between the carnival barker nature of our society—in which the winner, winner, winners are pronounced and paraded about with great fanfare so as to perpetuate the dream—and our overt obsession with wealth as a society, it appears as though more than half the people in our lives are rich. And yes, clearly, we can consciously separate the reality of those that we interact with personally from those whom we merely watch from a distance. But make no mistake, the American Dream appears alive and well when half of the people that you can name are millionaires, and it doesn’t matter whether you know any of them personally.
Really, this illusion is probably worse now than ever, because we live in a world in which Facebook allows us to hoard past acquaintances like trinkets in the junk drawer. These people have about as much direct interaction with us as the millionaires who are trotted before us on the newsstands, on the radio, on the television, at the stadium, in the movies, in the bookstore, and of course, in Congress. The fact of the matter is, you can almost certainly name more winners of the American Dream than you can personal friends, even if you include all of your acquaintances.
This means, every time we see yet another famous person on TV, we are likely watching someone who is the beneficiary of the American Dream. And some of those Dreamers may even have a good story about how they rose from poverty to achieve their accomplishments, which is often held up as evidence that you, no matter who you are, or from whence you came, with hard work, can become a bona fide multimillionaire.
No, you really can’t. It’s a mirage. A charade. A farce. An illusion, in which a long shot is presented as if it’s even odds.
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Mixerman (#Mixerman and the Billionheir Apparent)
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Do you actually hear confessions in your church, Father, actual spoken confessions? For that matter, does any priest anymore, at least as the movies depict them, the little lattice between confessor and penitent, its delicate chiaroscuro screening the priest's profile and veiling the lips of the sinner? Surely Freud himself, when he positioned himself behind and out of sight of his recumbent patients, sought a similar partial anonymity. How we analysts must envy you, your belief in redress, in the promise of absolution and redemption. How clean the words sound compared to our own impure remedies: recollection, interpretation, speculation, suggestion. Strange, isn't it, how we have both sealed ourselves in small, half-lit chambers, both in the service of gods who share nothing but the name of Love.
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DeSales Harrison (The Waters & The Wild)
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While most men would prefer no other environment on a warm spring day, I could list a number of destinations more pleasurable to me than a golf course. The first row in a movie theater, a surgeon’s table, a family reunion—all of these would please me more than eighteen holes of expensive boredom.
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Patrick Lombardi (Junk Sale: Stories & Essays)
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Each of the men Mohammed would meet in the United States had some vision for how he could use a huge Saudi investment and little to say about putting his own money into the kingdom. The studio chiefs hoped Mohammed would back new movie projects. Silicon Valley wanted capital to further inflate bubbles like WeWork and the dog-walking app Wag. Even the curious magazine that showed up across the United States celebrating the prince’s visit seemed to be a sales pitch.
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Bradley Hope (Blood and Oil: Mohammed bin Salman's Ruthless Quest for Global Power)
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If you feel like you need to behave like a famous salesperson in a movie to be a great salesperson, you are wrong. Especially in our current world where people want truth and authenticity, showing up as yourself is the best sales advantage.
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Jason Marc Campbell (Selling with Love : Earn with Integrity and Expand Your Impact)
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Ruth stayed in Los Angeles that evening, and, armed with articles in the Times and News, she went back to the jail Thursday morning with Arturo, Daniel, and Barraza, showed Richard the articles, and read him the details. He realized that Gallegos’s credibility had disappeared with the publication of his run-in with the prostitute. “No judge will respect this guy,” Ruth said, and the Hernandezes agreed. Like Gallegos, they said, they would work on the case with no money up front in exchange for the book and movie rights sales for payment. They insisted Richard fight the case and go to trial. “I haven’t seen anything substantially connecting you to the crimes,” Daniel said. Arturo agreed. “It’s all circumstantial. We can win this case!” “I agree with them,” Barraza added. “You really think you can win?” Richard asked. “We will win,” Daniel told him.
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Philip Carlo (The Night Stalker: The Disturbing Life and Chilling Crimes of Richard Ramirez)
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Line 4 - Sales (Director) Throughout the Golden Path Program we have gotten to know the 4th line as the great ‘friendmaker’. This gift comes from a truly genuine heart, and an easy warmth with people and community. This is the kind of person that emerges through the Venus Sequence, as those 4th lines release some of their inner restrictions and fears. To have a 4th line Vocation is to be a spokesperson. Such gifts are given to us to serve the whole, and although the 4th line wound may feel reluctant to engage at this level, they do have to overcome the fear that they inherited in their very early years. When we say that the 4th line is the most natural salesperson of all the lines, it does not mean only in business. The open 4th line is always selling their heart. They are here to create more openness, to help others overcome their fears, and to be examples of open-hearted communication. Like the 4th line, the 3rd line can be hugely successful in a business context. However, the role and style of the 4th line is very different. Their role is more like the director of the movie. They have to work closely with people, which involves diplomacy, conviction, and focus. The 4th line knows what the movie should look like, and their one-pointed drive will ensure that everyone else comes into harmony around that direction. The 4th line is comfortable taking control and guiding others to work towards a collective vision or ideal. This is where the notion of sales comes in - the 4th line can diffuse difficulties through the sheer strength and goodwill of its character. The 4th line also has a strong theme of aloneness as a counterbalance to its communal warmth. The inner strength and commitment of these people is rooted in this ability to stand alone and remain committed to one’s ideal, despite the odds. If you have a 4th line Vocation, then you are here to influence humanity. You are here to use your considerable gifts to open people’s hearts. If you happen to be selling a specific idea or product, then at the deepest level it is really an excuse to share your spirit with others. Sometimes you may also be here to deliver a rousing message that shakes people out of their comfort zones, and brings them to a new place inside themselves. Since the 4th line is so good at convincing people about things, it is for a very good reason. When this reason is for a higher purpose, then your whole life moves onto a higher level. There is nothing more powerful or authentic than when one of us stands alone in the world and expresses the love in our heart - whatever creative form that may take.
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Richard Rudd (Prosperity: A guide to your Pearl Sequence (The Gene Keys Golden Path Book 3))
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In the spring of 1935, an editor at the New York publishing house Macmillan, while on a scouting trip through the South, was introduced to Mitchell and signed her to a deal for her untitled book. Upon its release in the summer of 1936, the New York Times Book Review declared it “one of the most remarkable first novels produced by an American writer.” Priced at $3, Gone with the Wind was a blockbuster. By the end of the summer, Macmillan had sold over 500,000 copies. A few days prior to the gushing review in the Times, an almost desperate telegram originated from New York reading, “I beg, urge, coax, and plead with you to read this at once. I know that after you read the book you will drop everything and buy it.” The sender, Kay Brown, in this missive to her boss, the movie producer David Selznick, asked to purchase the book’s movie rights before its release. But Selznick waited. On July 15, seeing its reception, Selznick bought the film rights to Gone with the Wind for $50,000. Within a year, sales of the book had exceeded one million copies. Almost immediately Selznick looked to assemble the pieces needed to turn the book into a movie. At the time, he was one of a handful of major independent producers (including Frank Capra, Alfred Hitchcock, and Walt Disney) who had access to the resources to make films. Few others could break into a system controlled by the major studios. After producing films as an employee of major studios, including Paramount and MGM, the thirty-seven-year-old Selznick had branched out to helm his own productions. He had been a highly paid salaried employee throughout the thirties. His career included producer credits on dozens of films, but nothing as big as what he had now taken on. As the producer, Selznick needed to figure out how to take a lengthy book and translate it onto the screen. To do this, Selznick International Pictures needed to hire writers and a director, cast the characters, get the sets and the costumes designed, set a budget, put together the financing by giving investors profit-participation interests, arrange the distribution plan for theaters, and oversee the marketing to bring audiences to see the film. Selznick’s bigger problem was the projected cost.
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Bhu Srinivasan (Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism)
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Building a Blockbuster How to write compelling content that sells The term “blockbuster” has unsettling military origins, but is now used to mean a film that has blown the box office away. It usually has high production costs and budget, but (hopefully) earns it all back and more with ticket sales. Blockbusters are usually BIG movies, large in scope, scale, and budget. They tell a big story, and reach a big audience. They’re also usually “high concept,” meaning that they can be described in a single sentence. (The most famous high concept pitch was for the movie Alien which they pitched as, “Jaws in space.”)
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Lacy Boggs (Make a Killing With Content: Turn content into profits with a strategy for blogging and content marketing.)
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The late American collector Robert H. Taylor said that a rare book is “a book I want badly and can’t find.” On the occasions that people answer seriously, they all agree that “rare” is a highly subjective moniker.
The earliest use of the term has been traced to an English book-sale catalog in November 1692. But it wasn’t until the early eighteenth century that scholars attempted to define what makes a book rare, with bibliophile J. E. Berger making Monty Python-esque distinctions between “rarus” and “rarior” and “rarissiumus.” A book’s degree of rarity remains subjective, and the only qualities of “rare” that collectors and dealers seem to agree on is some combination of scarcity, importance, “and condition. Taste and trends play roles as well, however. When a movie adaptation is released, whether Pride and Prejudice or Nancy Drew, first editions of the book often become temporarily hot property among collectors. While Dickens will almost certainly be a perennial choice, Dr. Seuss’s star has risen as the children who were raised on his books have become adults with the means to form their own collections.
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Allison Hoover Bartlett (The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession)
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The number one thing a good logline must have, the single most important element, is: irony. My good friend and former writing partner, the funny and fast-typing Colby Carr, pointed this out to me one time and he’s 100% correct. And that goes for whether it’s a comedy or a drama. A cop comes to L.A. to visit his estranged wife and her office building is taken over by terrorists – Die Hard A businessman falls in love with a hooker he hires to be his date for the weekend – Pretty Woman I don’t know about you, but I think both of these loglines, one from a drama, one from a romantic comedy, fairly reek of irony. And irony gets my attention. It’s what we who struggle with loglines like to call the hook, because that’s what it does. It hooks your interest. What is intriguing about each of the spec sales I’ve cited above is that they, too, have that same ironic touch. A holiday season of supposed family joy is turned on its cynical head in the 4 Christmases example. What could be more unexpected (another way to say “ironic”) for a new employee, instead of being welcomed to a company, to be faced with a threat on his life during The Retreat? What Colby identified is the fact that a good logline must be emotionally intriguing, like an itch you have to scratch. A logline is like the cover of a book; a good one makes you want to open it, right now, to find out what’s inside. In identifying the ironic elements of your story and putting them into a logline, you may discover that you don’t have that. Well, if you don’t, then there may not only be something wrong with your logline — maybe your story’s off, too. And maybe it’s time to go back and rethink it. Insisting on irony in your logline is a good place to find out what’s missing. Maybe you don’t have a good movie yet.
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Blake Snyder (Save the Cat!: The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need)
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digital sales exceeded physical sales for movies in 2008,26 for books in 2012,27 and for music in 2014,28 powerful online retailers are causing major headaches for all of the entertainment industries.
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Michael D. Smith (Streaming, Sharing, Stealing: Big Data and the Future of Entertainment)
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Video-on-demand rentals and digital downloads helped a bit as the years went on, but the movie business never fully recovered. Annual home-entertainment revenue, and the studio profits that follow from it, fell by nearly half between 2004 and 2016, from nearly $22 billion to $12 billion. At the same time, Americans became much less important to the American movie business. As the economies of developing nations throughout Latin America and Asia grew, theater construction surged and the rising middle class spent their newfound wealth on what was to them the novel and luxurious experience of a night out to see the latest Hollywood flick. International box office exploded, from $8.6 billion in 2001 to $27.2 billion in 2016. The biggest driver of growth in recent years has been China; its box office grew from $2 billion in 2011 to $6.6 billion in 2016 and is expected to surpass U.S. box office before the end of the decade. Domestic box office, meanwhile, grew by only 40 percent between 2001 and 2015, to $11.4 billion—reflecting a slight decline in attendance, once you factor in ticket price increases. Both trends were like a siren’s wail to studio executives, urging them to make fewer, bigger, louder movies. DVD sales declines were smallest for movies with budgets of more than $75 million, and as studios tried to cut costs in response to plummeting home-entertainment revenues, risky original scripts and adaptations of highbrow books were the first to go. Annual movie releases by major studios were 139 in 2016, down 32 percent
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Ben Fritz (The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies)
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When Hollywood studios greenlight movies, they typically make a box-office projection that will create an acceptably big profit, after considering all the revenue expected to follow from DVD, digital, and television sales. Such projections are based on comparisons to similar movies with similar budgets released at similar times of the year, and they always include some level of subjectivity. (Is the remake of Ghostbusters most similar to other Melissa McCarthy comedies? To buddy comedies? To generic summer action films? To the first two Ghostbusters films in the 1980s?) But because executives are judged on whether their movies hit the projections made at greenlight, not whether the movies are simply profitable or not, the projections are supposed to be made as objectively as possible. That was always challenging at Sony, because when Pascal really wanted to make a movie, she sometimes rejected projections she deemed too low. She certainly wasn’t the only studio chief who bent others to his or her will, but it was telling that some executives referred to greenlight meetings at Sony as “enablement sessions” for Pascal. That’s how 2004’s dour James L. Brooks dramedy Spanglish, for instance, was greenlit, with a projection that it would make more than $100 million domestically (it ended up with $43 million).
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Ben Fritz (The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies)
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The secret of great movie trailers – and of great sales copy – is something I call the Dominant Story Idea, or “DSI” for short.
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Ray Edwards (How to Write Copy That Sells: The Step-By-Step System For More Sales, to More Customers, More Often)
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The best and most successful movie trailers do three things without fail: • Give you the Dominant Story Idea (DSI) • Offer a sample of the feelings you’ll get from the movie itself • Provide proof that the movie “works
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Ray Edwards (How to Write Copy That Sells: The Step-By-Step System For More Sales, to More Customers, More Often)
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Proof the movie “works:” we’re shown Kevin Spacey, Kathe Bosworth and Laurence Fishburn (proven actors we love)... some very compelling scenes (tightly edited)... and in the background we’re anchored by the sound of the Doors singing “Break
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Ray Edwards (How to Write Copy That Sells: The Step-By-Step System For More Sales, to More Customers, More Often)
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So, just for the moment, let’s think of your product as the movie. And let’s think of your sales copy as the “trailer.
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Ray Edwards (How to Write Copy That Sells: The Step-By-Step System For More Sales, to More Customers, More Often)
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More specifically, watching movie trailers.
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Ray Edwards (How to Write Copy That Sells: The Step-By-Step System For More Sales, to More Customers, More Often)
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Showcase Your Dominant Story Idea: Imagine you’re making a Hollywood Movie Trailer... how would you sum up your DSI? Look at the movie examples above for some clues.
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Ray Edwards (How to Write Copy That Sells: The Step-By-Step System For More Sales, to More Customers, More Often)
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Sample feelings: Again, looking to our movie trailer examples, can you show – in your copy – some scenes that will help the reader feel the feelings they want to get from your product? You do this by telling stories, and directing the reader’s imagination so that they see themselves in the end state your product provides (financial freedom, quitting their job, being a best-selling author, enjoying their new car, or whatever your product does for them).
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Ray Edwards (How to Write Copy That Sells: The Step-By-Step System For More Sales, to More Customers, More Often)
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There's an urban myth, still popular in some quarters, that the Glock can't be detected by X-ray machines. The myth was spread by a Bruce Willis line in the 1990 movie Die Hard 2: "That punk pulled a Glock 7 on me. You know what that is? It's a porcelain gun, made in Germany. Doesn't show up on your airport X-ray machines." Every bit of the line was false: there was no such thing as a "Glock 7"; Glocks are made of polymer, not porcelain; it was made in Austria, not Germany; and they do show up on X-ray machines. But in a strange twist, the firestorm of controversy triggered by the false rumors may have helped goose publicity and aid Glock sales.
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Chris Kyle (American Gun: A History of the U.S. in Ten Firearms)
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By 2008, storm clouds were gathering over Microsoft. PC shipments, the financial lifeblood of Microsoft, had leveled off. Meanwhile sales of Apple and Google smartphones and tablets were on the rise, producing growing revenues from search and online advertising that Microsoft hadn’t matched. Meanwhile, Amazon had quietly launched Amazon Web Services (AWS), establishing itself for years to come as a leader in the lucrative, rapidly growing cloud services business. The logic behind the advent of the cloud was simple and compelling. The PC Revolution of the 1980s, led by Microsoft, Intel, Apple, and others, had made computing accessible to homes and offices around the world. The 1990s had ushered in the client/server era to meet the needs of millions of users who wanted to share data over networks rather than on floppy disks. But the cost of maintaining servers in an ever-growing sea of data—and the advent of businesses like Amazon, Office 365, Google, and Facebook—simply outpaced the ability for servers to keep up. The emergence of cloud services fundamentally shifted the economics of computing. It standardized and pooled computing resources and automated maintenance tasks once done manually. It allowed for elastic scaling up or down on a self-service, pay-as-you-go basis. Cloud providers invested in enormous data centers around the world and then rented them out at a lower cost per user. This was the Cloud Revolution. Amazon was one of the first to cash in with AWS. They figured out early on that the same cloud infrastructure they used to sell books, movies, and other retail items could be rented, like a time-share, to other businesses and startups at a much lower price than it would take for each company to build its own cloud. By June 2008, Amazon already had 180,000 developers building applications and services for their cloud platform. Microsoft did not yet have a commercially viable cloud platform. All of this spelled trouble for Microsoft. Even before the Great Recession of 2008, our stock had begun a downward slide. In a long-planned move, Bill Gates left the company that year to focus on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. But others were leaving, too. Among them, Kevin Johnson, president of the Windows and online services business, announced he would leave to become CEO of Juniper Networks. In their letter to shareholders that year, Bill and Steve Ballmer noted that Ray Ozzie, creator of Lotus Notes, had been named the company’s new Chief Software Architect (Bill’s old title), reflecting the fact that a new generation of leaders was stepping up in areas like online advertising and search. There was no mention of the cloud in that year’s shareholder letter, but, to his credit, Steve had a game plan and a wider view of the playing field.
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Satya Nadella (Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone)
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You hired for the generic position. There is no such thing as a great CEO, a great head of marketing, or a great head of sales. There is only a great head of sales for your company for the next twelve to twenty-four months. That position is not the same as the same position at Microsoft or Facebook. Don’t look for the candidate out of central casting. This is not a movie.
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Ben Horowitz (The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers)
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27 Places Where You Won't Find Love
1. The spoon with which you measure salt
2. Plastic plates stacked neatly on a shelf
3. Flowers - marigolds and chrysanthemums and roses - and the shop that sells these
4. Earrings lost in the backseat of a tuktuk while looking for the Malayalam translation of "I love you" in the dark
5. Bookshelves with borrowed books, never read
6. Fifty watches, three of which were for sale
7. Coffee whose flavor was slightly off
8. A red bridge that goes by gold, which has replicas everywhere
9. The replicas themselves
10. The rearview mirror of a car
11. The burnt sienna pavement where you hurt yourself
12. A protein shake whose taste grew on you thanks to someone else. With eggs and coconut and toast
13. An island untouched by civilization
14. Another ravaged by war
15. A declined invitation to brunch
16. Dinner gone cold after a long wait, and thrown away the next day
17. An unacknowledged text message
18. Laughter ringing through a movie hall during a scene that didn't warrant it
19. Retainers stored in a box next to baby oil in the medicine cabinet
20. A gold pendant
21. A white and red cable car
22. A helmet too small for your head and another too large
23. Dreams with their own background score
24. Misplaced affection
25. A smile between strangers, with you standing on the outside looking in
26. Your bed
27. The future
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Sreesha Divakaran
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THE SECRETS OF WRITING BLOCKBUSTER COPY BY WATCHING MOVIES
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Ray Edwards (How to Write Copy That Sells: The Step-By-Step System For More Sales, to More Customers, More Often)
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WHAT MAKES A BLOCKBUSTER MOVIE TRAILER?
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Ray Edwards (How to Write Copy That Sells: The Step-By-Step System For More Sales, to More Customers, More Often)
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Our first example is for the movie 21, starring Kevin Spacey.
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Ray Edwards (How to Write Copy That Sells: The Step-By-Step System For More Sales, to More Customers, More Often)
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Ask yourself this question... if your product were a movie, what movie would it be? And then see if you can “theme” your product around that idea.
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Ray Edwards (How to Write Copy That Sells: The Step-By-Step System For More Sales, to More Customers, More Often)
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The definitive guide for beginning one’s own exciting tomato odyssey. —Chef Claud Mann, host of Dinner & a Movie on TBS (from the Foreword)
It’s been over twenty years since the infancy of Tomatomania. Scott and I have worked hard to continue the excitement each year providing seedling starts, conducting educational lectures and Tomato Tastings. This continued energy has made Scott and Tomatomania the talk of the town. The hundreds of tomato varieties Tomatomania provides creates a hysteria among gardeners who can’t wait for Tomatomania events to open near their homes. As one of their original suppliers I learned and watched this hysteria grow to where it currently is today. The responses that Tomatomania received during the plant sale demanded multiple deliveries of fresh seedlings each day. —Steve Goto, expert tomato nurseryman, consultant, and lecturer
Fruit geeks and tomatomaniacs rejoice! This lovely book has managed to capture the excitement, passion and deep understanding of all things tomato in its pages, going well beyond the 'how-to’ and into 'hell-yeah!' territory. For those of us who have held close the special tradition of springtime Tomatomania outings across California, we can now share their joy and subsequent bounty in all their glory. —Rick Nahmias, founder/executive director, Food Forward
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Scott Daigre
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If businesses approached their customer interactions in the same way movies approach their audience interactions—figuring out the emotions a customer should have every step of the way—the entire world of business would change.
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Joey Coleman (Never Lose a Customer Again: Turn Any Sale into Lifelong Loyalty in 100 Days)