More Days Working

Been playing the promo game the last several days.  Finding a few more places to use for promo & filling packages for the Moodring & Lost Kisses promos.  I also sent the last (& I really mean last this time) batch of follow-up emails for the July batch of mini-comics.

I got out the copies of Lost Kisses & Moodring out for the majority of my distros, so you should be able to get them in stores next Tuesday.  All of the copies for press & international radio have gone out.  Still working on getting the domestic radio stuff out & then contacting all of the opt-in & digital download promo folks (which also means making the digital promo version).

I talked to Dan at Tonevendor/Clairecords for a couple hours about the state of the music industry & the current problems & changing business models.  It’s always nice when a collegue is willing to be honest instead of thinking it’s a sign of weakness to say sales are low.

Silber intern Ben Collins is going to be taking charge of this year’s Christmas compilation.  It’s the first time I’ll be letting someone else takes charge of something like this, but hopefully it will work out & it will help the Silber empire be able to expand without me carrying quite as much weight.

Speaking of Christmas, I got a lead for selling a track from one of the Christmas comps for television placement.  We’ll see what happens.

I also got a contact about some song placements in a video game.  We’ll see what happens about that as well.  Placements are always a bit of a mystery because people want to play as little as possible (meaning literally nothing) while I want to get as much money as possible without getting the deal cancelled.

I got in the artwork for Marked #1.  So yeah, another series.  I guess I should start making the avatar versions as they do seem to be the way most people end up reading them.

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More Talk, Less Work

Going to the 919Noise show tonight, so I figured I’d blog a little early.

It seems like everyone I know in the music industry is calling for conversations about trying to get the business models going.  Today I was talking to Shane of North Pole Records about the new Rollerball that he’s putting out.  I feel kinda weird having that conversation because if I knew how to market Rollerball as a financially viable release I probably would still be putting out their albums.  There’s nothing that makes you feel worse than taking an established band & not doing as well as their previous label.

The mood rings (literal rings) finally came in today.  So some of the domestic radio folks will be getting some.  Not sure who all else.

Prepped the artwork for Marked so I can do the layout for printing it in a day or two.

Oh, the Aarktica & Vlor CDs came into the house, so now I have more work I need to do even though I haven’t finished the last batch yet.  Maybe one day I’ll be wishing for work….

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Too Old for Rock & Roll/violence

Hmmm, just noticed MySpace gobbled up a couple of my posts again.  I really need to get the self-hosting going.

Had a Remora show last night.  Out until 2am & then driving an hour home to unload the car just isn’t as fun as it used to be.  Maybe it’s that I’ve let myself get out of shape or maybe I’m getting too old for rock & roll.  I couldn’t do much today.  So I need to try to get a lot done tomorrow.  If I can pull my act together & get six uninterrupted hours of work in then I’ll be doing good.  When’s the last time that happened?

So here was my big problem with the show last night.  The one band had a guest list of 20 people!  & all 20 of those people stood outside while the first band played, came in for their friends, & then took off before the band even put their equipment away.  That is not cool.  If you are on a guest list you should have to sit through all the lousy music & if you want to leave early you should need to pay an extra fee.

I randomly found one of my notebooks from when I was writing a lot (I used to write at least two pieces of really short fiction everyday), & I’m thinking about trying to get my head back in that space of creating tons of intellectual property.  It was strange, because I didn’t remember the stories I read at all & it felt like I was reading someone else’s journal.  The kind of thing that makes me feel like I’m an alien in my own skin, which is interesting & neither pleasant or unpleasant as much as factual.

ultra-short-fiction installment 1 (apologies to m gira (like an infant i still worship him))
I’m weak & powerless.  I remember it didn’t wasn’t always this way.  I once was a real & actual man.  A man who could let his violence do the talking so that his mouth could rest.  The threat of violence was in every motion from a single step to drinking a sip of water.  The violence was pure & clean & real.  The violence solved everything.  It was what made the world turn.  Life was simple & dumb & good.  Now I’ve been sucked into the machine.  Blinded into believing in civility.  Believing in emotion over action.  Thinking about things instead of doing things.  So my body has atrophied as well as my real mind & real self.  So I am not even a ghost of myself, but a counterfeit image.  I’m erasing my real self by staying alive.  But I remember once wishing on a star for this.  Wishing to not be unique or special.  Wishing to be an expendable part of society.  Wishing for less instead of more.  I hold on to this memory because it makes me think my new found weakness is somehow good.  That weakness is better than strength & apathy is better than violence.  I will hold onto this memory that I am great & good & strong because through acts of my will I have made myself weak & useless.

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A Good Day Means Work is Done

So I spent several hours updating Silber’s international radio contacts.  There seems to be a popular vegan cooking show in Canada called Let’s Get Baked.

I got an email that my new mini-comic Marked is almost done.  I’m happy to finally get to see it happen even though it might not be as well written as a lot of my current stuff.  I think it is on its eighth artist!

I also got unanticipated volunteer art from a famous fan of Lost Kisses for the new issue.  So no stick figures in this one.  I’m curious how it will be received.

I got a ton of the Moodring/Lost Kisses out for promo today.  Still a ton more packages to make.  & it’s already time to start sending them out to the distributors.

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Back to Work

I took a couple days off to re-energize.

Did some work today promoting the Moodring album & this Friday’s Remora show (in Greensboro) on MySpace.  It’s interesting when some band with 10,000 friends who clearly friended me with a robot complains that I use a robot to tell them about a new release.

For unknown reasons I spent way too long writing a comment on an article about music piracy.

Catching up on some emails & orders from taking a couple of days off & this week I should get the Moodring/Lost Kisses promo train rolling.

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Getting Stuff Done

Got the blurb stickers for Moodring, Remora, & Lost Kisses done.

I also printed out all the promo addresses for sending out the promos.

I added four guitar lines to the Aarktica song “Young Light” that I’m remixing.  It was probably the most I’ve played guitar in a month or so.  I couldn’t get my right hand to move as fast it was supposed to & it was only a three minute song.  I need to practice a bit before my show next Friday so I don’t get surprised by something like that in front of an audience.

Registered the Lost Kisses DVD for distribution with FilmBaby which I think means it goes to Amazon & iTunes & all that.  Surprisingly they asked for the release date, I don’t know if that means they will respect the release date; but I like the idea of them asking.

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Print, Fold, Research

Spent quite a bit of time trying to decide who was getting which promos today.  I only have about 30 copies of Remora’s Derivative to spare & Moodring the first pressing was 500 so the promo is scaled back a bit & the Lost Kisses DVD isn’t really going to get reviewed in a lot of music magazines.  But I think I have everything figured out.

I printed out the press releases & folded them up, I still need to make the promo blurb stickers so I can start getting the discs out.

Started contacting some of the people who’ve traditionally ordered from Silber about the new stuff.

I tried to update the Silber MySpace page to have the two new releases for sale & it was a lot more work than it should’ve been because I guess there’s some character count limit that made it keep glitching when I would try to post stuff up.

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More Radio Work

Did a bunch more work on the radio front today & even got a few volunteers helping now, so the ones that absolutely need to be done should be completed soon.

I got an artist who is working on the new/old comic of mine Marked.  I’ll let you know if it comes to fruition.

I’m going to start packaging up some promos tomorrow.  Things should be starting to pick up soon.

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I could use some help

If anyone has a couple of hours of internet time that they’d be interested in donating to help me with some Silber stuff, please let me know.  This plea for help easily segues into me mentioning that I spent 14 hours on radio research today.  I’m planning a fundamental shift from having music directors as the sole contacts at the radio stations to contacting individual DJs as well.  Of course the problem with this is it changes 1000 contacts into maybe 5000 or so, but I think it might help Silber to be able to have a push more similar to the bigger indies.

I filled a few orders today of comics.  One day I’ll get those things to make money.  Speaking of comics, Disney bought Marvel today for $4 billion.

More news tomorrow.

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Getting Ready to Push

Spent about 8 hours today updating the press contacts from the work the Silber interns had done over the past month & trying to figure out who to cut from the promo list.  It’s sad because there were some radio stations that I remember being Silber favorites from ten years ago (I’m really that old?) that were basically on from that legacy.  Radio stations that have not really been in touch or playing the music for five years.  From here on out I’m planning to do a lot more with asking reviewers & radio stations to opt-in to receive releases to save some money on shipping & get a higher amount of the promos into appropriate hands.  So hopefully I’ll still send out a couple hundred promos but increase effectiveness.  We’ll see what happens.

I sent emails to about 50 DVD reviewing outlets about if they wanted to review Lost Kisses, so far exactly one response back & they said they didn’t do indie stuff.

Did another remix of the Aarktica song.  Jon seems to want me to add some more typical Remora elements to flavor it (meaning my guitar &/or bass).

Last night I saw a band that received four stars in Rolling Stone.  Even if I wasn’t into their music I would expect something super-tight, but I felt like I could’ve sit in with them never having heard their music before & the set wouldn’t have been much worse.  It reminded me of seeing the Linkin Park performance where the drummer couldn’t hear the samples guy & the timing was off.  Maybe those were just individual bad performances & not indicative of the professionalism in more popular music.

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