Very interesting that he didn't become a full-time author until 20 years after his book was published. I'm always interested in how successful people became that way.
Mr. Patterson was born in 1947, published his first book at 29 years old (1976) and didn't become a full time writer until 49 years old (1996). He's been writing an average of 2 novels per year since then (!) and is getting more prolific with age. Considering that some people never get around to "finishing their novel", I find these data points amazing.
What are you doing today that will be news worthy 20 years from now?
> What are you doing today that will be news worthy 20 years from now?
Writing a novel. :)
Seriously though; for every successful writer there are 10's of failed ones. Most get "found" some time after they are first published (fad's like Harry Potter et al tend to be exceptions).
If you have a reasonable amount of writing talent and the spare time to put it down into a book then it's worth doing as a bet against being noticed at some time in the future.
I believe that there is a "heuristic" to become a successful fiction author, but it is not easy at all. Just write books (not just one) and keep marketing them until you find an audience. Notice that this is based on the idea that for every author there is always an audience, the problem is finding it.
Once your audience knows about you, they will buy more and more of your books (that is why you need to have several books in order to make money this way).
The big problem is that most authors will just stop before writing even the first book. Or, after the first or second book, if they don't find success, they will stop altogether -- they never achieve the critical point after which they are successful.
It is not different from writing non-fiction and market to a niche, but it takes much more effort, because readers in fiction are not so easy to reach as in non-fiction.
Ditto. I've worked in writing, and I've been trying to hone my writing skills with novels. Consistency is a key issue in writing. My goal in life is to publish a novel, not a short story so I never practised short stories. I'm now looking to sell some short stories to qualify for SFWA while I'm working on the book I hope is my debut.
I'm 21 and I've worked in writing since ~16. I fail to see how I can become a successful author unless I try to get myself out there. Perhaps my work will click and I'll hit the big time, however that's an aim for later in the game.
Very useful, but the :: separators are distracting. I think that most first-time visitors are looking to scan your collection for a particular technology (that's what I did).
This view [http://devcheatsheet.com/?view=tag] is more readable. How about using the 'tag' view layout, but add categories to make browsing easier.
Another suggestion: add 3 or 4 'similar cheat sheets' to each cheat sheet to facilitate browsing and reduce bounce rates.
For those who don't want to read this all, some bullet points. Read the entire piece for in-depth description and analysis, but these bullet points are the main, stark differences between Project 880 and Avatar
- Earth and its environmental problems are explored
- We see Josh Sully's Avatar being born
- It's revealed the Avatar program exists to train Na'vi to be an indigenous workforce for the Corporation, since it's so expensive to send human workers
- There are more humans, including a bioethics officer on the take, a video journalist, a head of the Avatar program and a second military dickwad
- There is an Avatar controller who is burnt out because his Avatar died with him in it. He committed Avatar suicide because he had fallen in love with a Na'vi girl who had been killed by the military
- The Avatars have a Na'vi guide named N'Deh, who is sleeping with Grace
- Grace survives the soul transfer
- Josh Sully gains the Na'vi trust by being a member of the community. He also excels in a major hunt
- Josh Sully shows his leadership not by taming a dragon but by leading a raid on Hell's Gate to rescue prisoners
- Josh Sully isn't the only Na'vi to ride a big dragon
- Pandora is a living entity and it sees the humans as a virus; it has been mobilizing the plants and animals to attack all along because it wanted to force the humans out
- There is no unobtainium beneath Hometree. The military just wants to wipe out the local Na'vi to send a message to all the tribes that they must be obeyed.
- Some of the humans and the Avatar controllers rise up in the final big battle
- Josh Sully tells the Earth that Pandora will give any humans that return a disease that will wipe out humanity
After the company was purchased by Live Current Media, the team was split up to work on various other projects (Cricket.com, Perfume.com) while Auctomatic was left to languish.
Eventually the servers and services got shuffled around, and at some point stopped working, but since it wasn't profitable and there was no engineering time to work on it, it was left broken and unusable. Now, all the employees that knew anything about it have left (save one), so there's no one to make it work again.
This is pretty nice I would like to see the interface
enhanced so I could enter several math problems at once (for
example: Chapter 7, problems 1-19 (odd)) and have the output
in a printable / customizable format (ie a script font that
looks like my handwriting).
I don't have a lot of experience in selling software online, but as a consumer, these are the places that I'd be looking to find niche software.
1. Your own website (with Google AdWords campaign)
2. CNET Downloads (if you have a free trial version)
3. snapfiles.com (if you have a free trial version)
4. eBay store
5. Amazon store
Really, it seems that you'd want to push ALL traffic to your own domain where you can completely control prices, offers, wording, etc.
EDIT: I just checked out your site [http://www.watermelonexpress.com] and it seems like you've already done a lot of the leg work. The problem that I see is that this market (test prep software) is saturated. I think an aggressive AdWords campaign would be your best bet.
Thanks for the info. Trial versions for desktop app are currently being developed and we will upload them on the websites you mentioned once they are done.
I was trying to figure out Amazon store for software, but it seems to be not working for everyone at this moment. The list you provided is good. It seems like there is no complete list for these stores. We will make one, once we are done with finding all and post a link on HN for everyone to use.
When you run that adwords campaign, split test. I have a suspicion you are going to make how a user can download an app from your site far more obvious.
It's been two days, so I'm not sure if this will be seen by the OP, but I was really trying to make the point that even though popurls/alltop may not have the features you are looking for, you may find that some of the sources that feed these aggregators may have those features. You can use popurls/alltop to find more sites that have the features you're looking for.
I was searching for a way to enable/find the chat logs for Microsoft Communicator which we've recently switched to at work.
Google was basically filled with dead end forum postings and SEO spam.
DuckDuckGo was more helpful and brought me to the MS TechNet article with full documentation on MS Communicator Policy configuration.
Bing was surprisingly the most helpful and brought me to the Communicator Team posting from 2008 which shows me where I should have been able to find the logs.
It looks like my work has blocked/disabled this feature on a global setting even though I haven it enabled locally.
I agree with your point. I had to do some digging to get more concrete information.
When a friend’s link from YouTube or flickr arrives, your messaging client should be able to show the video or photos near or as part of the message, rather than rudely kicking you over to a separate browser tab. Notifications from computers and mailing lists should be organized for you, not clutter your Inbox or require tedious manual filter setup. It should be easy to smoothly integrate new web services into your conversation viewer entirely using open web technologies.
I read that far too, but it wasn't very compelling. Getting videos in my IM instead of clicking on a link is revolutionary? They may proove me wrong, but it didn't make me want to download it.
Mr. Patterson was born in 1947, published his first book at 29 years old (1976) and didn't become a full time writer until 49 years old (1996). He's been writing an average of 2 novels per year since then (!) and is getting more prolific with age. Considering that some people never get around to "finishing their novel", I find these data points amazing.
What are you doing today that will be news worthy 20 years from now?