Saturday morning and media literacy

Saturday, hm? Yeah, guess so.

Have a lot of writing and other creative projects to finish this weekend, I'll be giving more details and a progress report later today, for now I have some personal business to attend to.

Monday I have some pretty critical decisions to make, but for now I am buffering the stress with creative catharsis. I have also been reading text books. Yes, I know, that's strange. But I have always appreciated the higher info-to-effort ratio in a text book or almanac than in a novel.

My current book I'm plowing through? "Introduction to Mass Communications: Media Literacy and Culture (Third Edition)" by Stanley J. Baran of Bryant College, published in 2004 by McGraw-Hill. Interesting perspectives on many things, including his view of the publishing industry, which so closely coincides with my own as to be a bit spooky (he points out that the publishing industry is not really about the virtue or literary merit of the material published, even in the most prestigious publishing houses, as they have been co-opted by corporate profit mentality). He even says kind things about the POD publishers (while pointing out that many of the larger ones are owned by mainstream publishers and bookstore chains, perhaps creating a "farm team" aspect to the POD houses). I even learned about the Dogme film movement.

I have decided I need to increase my media literacy to help understand the marketing angle of my books, as it has always been a failure of mine: To not understand how to sell things. It's a critical flaw in me, in a competitive capitalist economy, that I can't motivate myself to subvert people's wills to buy something they may not need. This creates a generalized inhibition against any form of marketing...self limiting, to say the least. I can't even pimp myself, dammit.