The 10,000 Hour Rule In Context

Posted on April 22, 2014 by GuitArchitecture

There was research and then there was Gladwell..and then the Gladwell acolytes…and then the Gladwell detractors and then we were left with a number.

10,000 hours.

You need 10,000 hours to master something….or do you?

Here’s another opinion. From the trenches, based on no scientific data whatsoever, but operating solely in the area of personal experience.

First off – mastery as a term is deceptive at best.

I’m highly suspicious of anyone who calls themselves a master musician, because I’ve never seen anyone who operated at a level of mastery that identified themselves as such. The people who play at the highest levels are often the ones who can tell you exactly what they can’t do and still struggle with the demands of whatever instrument they have.

Yes you need time – but it has to be focused time

I know a lot of people who started playing guitar when I did. They’ve easily put 10,000 hours in on their instrument. They’re marginally better than they were when they first started. There are several reasons why:

They got one thing down and never expanded upon it. If you ever listen to me practice, it rarely sounds very good. There’s a reason for that – when you’re practicing you’re supposed to push yourself beyond your current capacity. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve walked by a practice room where someone was just playing all the stuff they already knew how to do and were convinced that they were really getting better. If you ever go to a blues jam – you will always find that guy who’s playing the same thing over and over again on every tune. Come back next week and you’ll hear it again. It’s like you’re listening to a human sampler. If you never push yourself – you will never get better.

10,000 hours needs both focus and context. What are you spending 10,000 hours working on? The person spending 2,000 hours on focused goals that integrate skill sets will generally run laps around the person who put an unfocused 10,000 hours in.

It’s daily work – often on fundamentals. Really. It’s putting consistent focused time in every day that yields results. Itzhak Perlman still practices scales 4-5 hours a day. Trust me, he knows those scales everywhere there is to play them on the violin – but mastery is in going deep into areas that few other people are willing to commit to.

You’ll need models and or mentors. No one is an island. You’ll need to emulate other people to get to the unique combination of influences and skills that will create your unique artistic stamp.

A big portion of the time required for mastery goes into developing aesthetic. I can teach you the technical aspects of guitar playing in a relatively short period of time, but it’s going to take me a lot longer to teach you how to play well.

A musician was once relating to me the story of how pedagogy was handled in the part of India he was from. “If you wanted to learn tabla. someone would make an introduction and that person would handle all elements of the terms of study (payment, etc). That was never discussed between teacher and student. Then, you would go to the guru’s house and you might not touch a tabla for a year. You would be cutting wood and doing all sorts of manual labor around the house – but the lessons would be going on around you and subconsciously the sounds and rhythms would be working their way into your ear.

Then one day you might get a lesson and learn some basic rhythms. It might be a three hour lesson to get some basics together and then there would be some follow up spot checks to see how you were progressing. Once you were ready you’d get another lesson and that would eventually become a regular event – but all during that time you’d be absorbing what was happening around you and starting to develop a sense of how things are supposed to sound – that way you know what sounds you are trying to create.”

A Rag is a DEEP thing. If you’re just running the notes up and down, you’re not playing a Rag. It’s not just a collection of notes, each one is a world that contains melodies, phrases and even times of day that they’re to be played that define it. You can learn some of the phrases relatively quickly but really knowing the Rag is a whole different thing, and a whole different time frame.

Aashish Khan once told me that his grandfather made him stay on one particular Rag for a year. To put that into context, imagine practicing C major scales and phrases for 12 hours a day for a year and at each stage having your teacher tell you, “You’re not ready yet.” Could you keep pushing forward in the face of that adversity?

Here’s the thing:

Very little is impossible. The amazing thing about acquiring any skill set is that it’s about breaking complex motions down into its simplest components, mastering each one of them in a vacuum and then integrating them into a larger context.

Bukowski once said, “Endurance is more important than the truth.” What I think he meant by that was that no one starts off as a brilliant writer/guitarist/anything. There’s a long period of time that you’re going to be bad at something when you take it on, but the people who keep at it eventually get better. Some of them even get to be great and become the very thing they were trying to be.

Mastery is largely about learning how to acquire a skill set. If you’ve gotten good at playing guitar, it will probably not take you as long to get good at say, mandolin. I’d argue even further that if you’re a great instrumentalist, you’ll probably pick up something like cooking at a high level much faster than someone who has not acquired mastery in a specific area.

Finally, I’d argue that mastery is a reflection of self. It’s not about being able to play a scale the fastest or having the hippest lines over a chord progression. It’s a cumulative process that uses something (playing guitar for example) as a means for getting to the best version of you that’s possible. It’s not about mastering a Rag for example, it’s about your individual expression within that Rag. It’s about where you are in a given moment of time and about what you have to say within that medium.

Mastery isn’t about guitar. It’s about you.

To master anything

You’ll need time.

You’ll need focus.

You’ll need challenging things to work on.

It’s best to get crackin’ now!

As always, thanks for reading!

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As You Gaze Into The BabyMetal The BabyMetal Also Gazes Into Thee

Posted on March 26, 2014 by GuitArchitecture

BabyMetal

Earlier this month on Facebook, I put up a link to a video that a friend of mine hipped me to called BabyMetal.

I loved it for a number of reasons.

As someone who was familiar with J-Pop and Metal, it was a bizarre juxtaposition of two musical styles that at first glance appear incompatible, but actually works in an indescribable way.

I may have been amused watching the video up to the verse of the tune but I was dumbfounded when it got to the chorus. It completely surprised me, and I can’t tell you the last time that happened to me in a popular song.

I dug the production. I dug the concept. I dug the band in skeleton costumes. I dug that SO MANY people were there to see the show. (And it is most definitely a show – based on the audio in the video – I doubt that much of that performance is “live” in the same way that a Britney Spears performance is more about being a live show/event than a musical concert).

On repeated viewings, it made me smile ear to ear regardless of whatever mood I was in before I heard the tune. It’s high energy and fun and if given the chance I’d do that gig in a heartbeat.

However, when other people posted about this on FB, it appears that 3 young girls fronting a metal band, singing about loving chocolate and dancing synchronized steps to it can shake some people’s delicate sensibilities to the core.

There were people that were outright angry at having been exposed to this. Comments like “This is cancer for metal” or “I don’t find this funny at all” or a dozen other sentiments of people who were annoyed or outraged that this existed in the world and that they saw it.

And then I had a realization about strong opinions to art.

Art can be a Rorschack test.

It’s not the inkblot on the paper, but what you see in the inkblot that’s important to what’s happening with you.

If you have strong opinions about something it’s because it challenges or conflicts with beliefs and/or aesthetics that you have. However, that’s what art is supposed to do. It communicates and challenges. It exposes you to things you haven’t seen/heard/experiences before so you can expand your horizons and develop your own aesthetic.

I heard a quote on The Wednesday, March 12th show of @ Midnight (a gameshow riff on Comedy Central) from staff writer/contestant Matt Mira that resonated with me. When asked to help define the internet he started his punch line with:

“The Internet is actually a place where non-content creators go to complain about content that’s been created….”

For many guitarists, YouTube has become a delivery device for an endless pissing contest of this guitarist’s solo being better than that guitarist’s solo and this gear being better than that gear but do any of those comparisons challenge anything other than your opinion?

“As you gaze into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into thee.”

I posit that if the BabyMetal video makes you angry, it’s because you’re already angry. If metal as a genre is so fragile that 3 girls (and a talented producer) combining J-Pop with it ruins it for you, then it’s probably time to move on.

Here’s what I see.

This video inspires me. It has over 4,200,000 views on YouTube. They had the number 2 album on iTunes and their cd’s are selling for $40 on Amazon! In the video, it looks like they’re playing to a crowd of at least 5,000 people if not more – and the crowd is into it!

If a concept this weird can get traction, then what’s my/your/anyone else’s excuse for not getting things out into the world?

When asked by an acolyte how to make the world a better place Lord Basho replied something to the effect of, “Just be the best person you can and then there will be one less rascal in the world.”

It’s well documented that goal setting is a critical element in getting things accomplished, but in the best tip I gotten in a while – reverse engineering goal setting by looking back from the future is a great way to keep yourself on track with achieving goals.

Instead of looking at where you are right now, take a moment and write down today’s month and day on a piece of paper and add in the year 5 years from now.

Then write down all the things you accomplished in your life by that date.

Finally, write down today’s month and day and one year from now.

Now the question is, what are you doing right now to achieve those 5 year goals?

I’m going to go watch the video again, and then get my sounds together for a show next week, and put things in place for getting things done this year in meeting those goals.

What are you going to do?

I hope this helps and as always, thanks for reading!

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Philip Seymour Hoffman – Beyond The Cautionary Tale

Posted on February 2, 2014 by GuitArchitecture

As I write this, it’s been announced that Philip Seymour Hoffman was found dead at age 46 in his Manhattan apartment with a syringe in his arm.

I expect that there will be the usual reactions to celebrity passings. The sadness of a death that could have preventable…the lament of being cut down so young in his prime and of future work that might have been done.

There will inevitably be the epitaph of a life lived as a cautionary tale. A commentary on drugs and the danger of addiction.

But, what is often missing from these visceral and superficial observations is broader inquiry. For example,

What makes Philip Seymour Hoffman’s passing noteworthy?

People die every second of every minute of every day. Why is his death announced with any more gravity than the passing of your Aunt Millie? Do we have some kind of cultural hierarchy or caste system that acknowledges celebrities lives as having a different value than our own?

I don’t think so.

I think people will make a big deal out of this because they feel a connection to his work.

He moved people. He helped them feel something, and people associate that loss with that memory. They may have never met the man, but they have a strong opinion about his work.

There’s a lesson there.

I don’t know if art makes one immortal, but it builds connections to people. It creates conversations and exposes people to other ways of seeing the world.

It makes the world a better place.

As an artist, I recommend that you get past the obvious lesson of the ravages of addiction and the trappings of the celebrity lifestyle, and use this opportunity to be introspective about what you are doing.

What am I putting out into the world?

How am I connecting with people?

How do I make the world a better place?

I don’t know if Philip Seymour Hoffman ever asked himself these questions. I know that he was a true artist, and that as an artist he had to face dark nights of the soul and if he didn’t ask these questions, he asked questions that were very similar.

Yes, he died tragically and young. But the very nature of life is terminal.

You have a finite amount of time to get something done.

To make a connection to the world.

To impose your meaning on what can be a meaningless world.

To help make this place better than what you found it.

Going beyond the cautionary tale, life is always short – make the most of it while you are here and follow the actionable example of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s life.

be a life long student.

work hard.

do the best work you can

to the very best of your ability

work constantly and

make each new project better than the last one.

Let’s not use this moment as a simple lecture about drugs, let’s use it as an unfortunate inspiration.

As always,

Thanks for reading.

-Scott

Working With Limitations

Posted on January 19, 2014 by GuitArchitecture

There is a Stravinsky story I find myself telling often.

Allegedly, when he went to compose, the first thing Stravinsky would do is put a time and key signature on a piece of manuscript paper to limit himself. Without that he would look at the piano and, seeing an almost infinite number of possibilities, get overwhelmed and shut down.

A key part of the process to learning anything is overcoming limitations. By expanding one’s knowledge and skill set things that were impossible become possible or even easy. As a musician, when I find an obstacle to something that I need to be able to do, I often practice playing that thing to add it to my abilities.

But what about other strategies for dealing with limitations?

Instead of assuming that limitations needed to be eliminated, what if, limitations were embraced and worked with to reach your goals?

Kang Yana Mulyana

I know very little about this Indonesian guitarist other than the fact that he has some very real physical impediments that make playing the guitar in a “traditional” manner impossible.

Check out his workaround!

What’s technically amazing to me about this is that the fretting hand is only using the thumb and pinky (!?!) to get those notes out of the guitar!

How did he do this?

1. He had a why.

Again Victor Frankl, “He who has a why can bear almost any how”

2. He worked with his limitations rather than try to overcome them.

If he had gone to a guitar store to take a lesson, he probably would have been told that his physical limitations would prevent him from playing and that he’d have to do something else. But his numerous work arounds (putting the guitar on the floor, finding alternate ways to fret and pick notes), allowed him to get the same end result.

Do you.

Let’s not get this twisted, I’m not saying that you should be lazy. Kang Yana Mulyana spent an unimaginable amount of time working on guitar to get the end results he wanted (and that’s some real physical and mental obstacles to overcome).

What I am saying is that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to achieving your goals. What worked for one person will not necessarily work for you. The important things are to have an end goal that you’re trying to achieve and to work with your attributes and limitations to achieve them. Learning what works for you is a lifelong lesson and it’s definitely one worth taking on.

Here’s one more video to help keep you inspired.

As always, thanks for reading!

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The Power Of Negative Example or How NOT To Network Part 1

Posted on January 4, 2014 by GuitArchitecture

The Power Of Negative Example

Years ago, I had helped some friends of mine organize a music festival at CalArts. I was originally brought in because they “thought I’d be good with money”, but pretty quickly I ended up taking on a co-leadership role and helping to organize an event that had 40+ acts in three performance spaces for a full day. It was exhilarating and exhausting and in many ways worth all of the work that went into it.

After the festival, one of the co-organizers way kind enough to say the following to me.

“You know I learned an incredible lesson from you. I kept thinking about how we were going to do something and your approach was, ‘It’s fine that we want to do that but this is what I don’t want to have happen…’ and just making sure a few things didn’t go wrong made it much easier to get the things we wanted to go right done.”

Success can be due to a myriad number of factors but when things fail, they typically only do so for one or two reasons.

Therefore, if you set up the basic conditions for your desired outcome to occur and then actively work against things that could go wrong, it’s much easier to troubleshoot than trying to create all of the conditions for success.

In other words, the “don’t do this” list is usually much shorter and more actionable than the “do this” list.

With that in mind, I’m going to detail some serious pitfalls that I’ve seen and experienced in networking. Networking is a vital component to artistic survival in the 21st century. If you don’t build communities with people you’re going to be relegated to creating things in isolation and for most people that’s unsustainable.

Look for the deeper lesson

My recommendation with this approach is in looking at what goes wrong with networking look for the deeper lesson and see what you can do right.

How NOT to network

1. View networking as an end goal.

I could have also said, use networking as an intransitive verb. “We are going to network with that person…” is something that I heard come out of more than one music business major’s mouth while I was at Berklee.

Networking is a process of building a mutually advantageous relationship with other people, not a way to manipulate people into getting what you want from them.

Go to a music business conference and you will see the people who are there solely to network a thousand miles away. Everyone else will as well. There’s a stench of desperation that will clear a room out faster than a pungent fart.

2. Be insincere.

Some of the more Machiavelli-insprired readers may take a page from The Prince and try to “network” and hide their self-serving intentions. I would advise you to just be honest and transparent when dealing with people, but even if you were approaching this from the most Machiavellian perspective, I would say that there is no advantage to being insincere. Most people are not good enough actors to pull this off, and there’s no reason to. Even if you were to fool people at the offset, they’re going to figure it out eventually.

3. Try to capitalize on a non-existant relationship at the get-go.

I had someone contact me out of the blue from CalArts who wanted me to help him promote his release. He wrote the e-mail like we hung out all the time or had a personal connection and in truth, I only vaguely knew who he was from his dealings with another person. If this was a really good friend of mine, or someone that I knew it would be fine but it just came across as shallow manipulation.

I never think of networking as such. I think of it as making friends and acquaintances. I ask people I know for favors, and give favors to friends who ask me for them. THAT’S networking. If you approach networking with the same approach as you’d have in making new friends it will take you much further in getting you to the end result.

4. Make it all about you.

No one likes a parasite. If you don’t have a symbiotic relationship with people they won’t help sustain you in the long run. Also, being really needy and constantly asking people for things is another way to get people off your radar.

5. Don’t pay it back.

Ask for a favor and then be too busy to help people with something when they need it. See how long that sustains you in the industry.

6. Do poor work.

This one isn’t so obvious but you have to have something to offer to a relationship. If you don’t play particularly well and you’re billing yourself as a performer that’s going to be a problem. If you’re a singer songwriter and you neither sing or play well there’s not going to be a whole lot of reason to recommend you. Building relationships is easier when you are that person people go to for things.

7. Be irresponsible and/or don’t follow up.

This one boggles my mind. The number of times that people don’t show for things or don’t do what they say they’re going to do is astounding to me. Those people tend to move to the periphery of the scene or become absent entirely.

Related to #6, if you’re the best at what you do people may cut you a little slack, but if you flake out on things, people just won’t deal with you.

An Illustrative Story

There’s a lot more about networking that I’ll cover in part 2, but in the meantime here’s an illustrative story that will cover much of what I’ve talked about.

I got an email from a student at Berklee who read my bio and wanted to talk with me about being a guitarist in New York City and wanted to know if we could meet up. Even though I never got any assistance from anyone (much less alumni) when I went to school, I thought I’d help this guy anyways by paying it forward even though I knew that this meeting would fall into a professional guitarist/life-coaching area that I am generally compensated for.

We met at a Pret A Manger. He asked a lot of random questions about what I did and about the scene and wrote down all of my answers. I was shocked at how little research he had done. He had been in the city for 3 days and hadn’t even picked up a copy of the Voice to see what was going on. I gave him the best answers I could and helped him identify a specific niche that he could serve for his teaching and gave him a number of contacts. He had a small journal and took about 5 pages of notes. I gave him a card (which he left on the table) and wished him well. I never heard from him again.

The sad thing is that I’m sure someone in a music business class told him to try to network with people already in the scene and while it really couldn’t have gone much worse for him from a networking angle, I’m also sure he thought the meeting went really really well.

There’s so much to learn from the mistakes above! But let me put the scenario in a different light that may affect how you approach networking in the future.

Other than a story, what do I get out of this interaction?

You have to give people something if you’re going to continue a relationship with them. Even if it’s nothing more than a thank you or offering to get them a cup of coffee.

If he had bought a book, or directed people to my website, or even sent a follow up e-mail that simply said, “thank you for your time” it might have given me something.

Do I regret helping him? Absolutely not, but that door is closed for him in the future.

I’ll never hear from that guy again and it’s too bad for him because if he had handled that interchange better, I could have really helped him get the pieces in place that he needed to relocate and do what he wanted to do.

The golden question of networking then isn’t, “What’s in it for me?” but instead is, “What’s in it for us?”

In part 2 of this post, I’ll talk about how not to network with regards to getting reviewed.

Hope to see you there. As always thanks for reading, I hope it helps!

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There’s Value In Ritual

Posted on December 28, 2013 by GuitArchitecture

It starts with Santa

I must have been a good boy this year, because Santa was unbelievably generous to me this Christmas. In addition to gear, books and films, this

Photo taken from the ROK website.

made it’s way to my door (courtesy of Mrs. Collins).

“You say tomato I say espresso.”

The Rok Espresso maker is a hand pumped espresso maker that requires no electricity. In theory, you simply add ground espresso to the portafilter and pour boiling hot water in the top chamber. Lifting the handles up pushes water into the chamber and pulling them down creates about 9 bars of pressure to make an espresso shot.

I say “in theory” because it turns out that there are a lot of factors that go into espresso quality. Traditional espresso machines have boing water going through them which keep the portafilter hot and makes for a more uniform shot – so I started soaking the portafilter in boiled water in the cup to pre-heat both of them. The roast and grind of the coffee play a role so I experimented with pre-ground and full bean blends. This lead me to a hand cranked ceramic burr grinder:

Which works aesthetically with the powerless espresso maker and provides a uniform grind. Experts will tell you that there are a near endless number of factors that will go into the flavor even down to the tamper (a stainless steel 49mm tamper for me – but the plastic tamper works fine).

Getting a shot of espresso now requires:

heating boiling water
hand cranking the burr grinder for about 115 rotations to get the proper amount of coffee
putting the portafilter in a cup and pouring the boiling hot coffee in
waiting about 10-15 seconds for the filter to heat up
pouring out the water
scooping the coffee into the portafilter
tamping it down
attaching the filter
pouring the water into the espresso maker
lifting the handles all the way up
pulling the handles down about an 1/8″ to infuse the espresso
lifting the handles back up and pulling them down to extract the espresso

then dumping out the portafilter.

in other words – it’s a few more steps than loading coffee into my Aeropress coffee maker which also makes a really good cup of coffee.

You may be asking yourself

What the Hell does this have to do with guitar?

and the answer is – quite a bit.

There’s value in ritual

When you slow down and invest time into something, you have the opportunity to enter a different headspace. It’s not guaranteed, but think about the number of times that you realized something while you were brushing your teeth before bed or taking a shower before you start your day.

Hand grinding the beans only takes a minute or two, but it gives me pause and becomes a kind of meditative action. When I get through all of the steps and taste the espresso, it’s nuanced in deeper way than the Aeropress coffee. It’s a completely different experience than popping a netpresso pod into a machine and hitting start.

If you’re having problems reaching the goals that you want, you may want to consider taking the approach of adopting a daily ritual. If you’re talking about guitar playing, consider adding one daily ritual to whatever you’re currently doing. Maybe it’s transcribing, sight reading, chordal studies, scales or improvisation. It really doesn’t matter that much what it is, and more that you’re doing it daily, with purpose and with proper technique.

Wait where are you sending me now?

Every year, I put a post up on GuitArchitecture.org about New Year’s resolutions, goal setting and breaking out of the mistakes of the past and if getting things done in the New Year interest you, you may want to read that here.

In the meantime, consider this…

In my experience, the biggest long term changes that come in life come from daily attention. Don’t worry about huge overarching goals. Work on one thing, and commit to doing it every day.

I have to “test’ more espresso while working on my 8-string playing (one of my daily rituals now that it’s back) and prep for UFC 168 tonight.

There’s a lot of good things happening that will be manifesting themselves more fully in the new year in the meantime, I hope that 2014 is your best year yet.

As always, thanks for reading!

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A Holiday Thought That May Help The Whole Year

Posted on December 21, 2013 by GuitArchitecture

Note: this was originally posted on GuitArchitecture but I think the message is still valid.

If web traffic is any indicator, I should be writing more about guitar shops in Vietnam, 8 string guitars (and pickups) and Philip Glass arpeggios which comprise the top 3 Google searches for my guitArchitecture blog. (With absolutely no disrespect to Mr. Glass, I never would have dreamed that there are thousands of people in the world actively trying to find out about “Philip Glass arpeggio”s. Hopefully that makes someone’s day better!)

But since I don’t work with Google ads for ad revenue, I get to post on whatever interests me and while the personal motivation /psychology of guitar playing, tangential music business and music making observational posts get substantially fewer hits – they seem to be the ones that affect some people more.

I’ve talked before about the need for a thick skin if you’re going to be an artist and how having a strong opinion could result in people reacting strongly to it as well. While that’s an observation I still stand behind, I feel I should temper that advice with another suggestion that may serve you well.

Forgive people (including yourself) and

try to empathize with them.

These things are actually related. The more you see where someone else is coming from, the less likely you are to judge them harshly. This doesn’t mean forgetting, or letting people do hurtful things to you without consequence – it just means letting go and moving on. If this sounds counter-intuitive, then you should consider doing this because it will serve you better in the long run. As Carrie Fisher once said:

“Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.”

Looking back at my own life I see much truth in this statement. I think of the actions of other people I resented and I see a series of torches that I carried. Each requiring an exhausting amount of energy and maintenance to keep burning.

John Lydon once said, “Anger is an energy” and while I believe that there are things are worth fighting and things worth fighting for, I also recognize that you only have a finite amount of energy in life. In my own life, I eventually had to ask myself the question, “do you really want to spend energy and time on resentment or do you want to spend it on making your life (or the lives of other people) better?”

A friend of mine recently sent me a link of yet another video of Pat Metheny going off on Kenny G. When I saw it, I thought about some of Pat’s earlier diatribes about Kenny and my reaction was the same this time as it was before. I didn’t laugh or think that it’s cool but instead I thought that it’s sad Pat Metheny has to be so insecure about what he does that he has to attack another musician for doing what they want to do musically. Because if you’re secure about what you do, you don’t need to attack other people. It does less to debase Kenny G in the public eye and instead of makes Pat Metheny look like a bully. Think I’m wrong? Consider these questions for a moment:

Does going off on Kenny G get Pat more fans?

Does it get him more album sales?

Does it get more people going to Pat Metheny shows? Or

Does it keep Kenny G’s name in the news?

If Kenny G had a deliberate plan of making music he hated just to sell a million copies of it then perhaps I could understand the rancor but I believe that Kenny is playing music he wants to play just like Pat Metheny is. It’s not something I dig, so it’s not something I buy or listen to so and (like many people I suspect) I don’t think about Kenny G until I stumble across another video of Pat going off on him. If Pat empathized with that sentiment he might be less resentful of what Kenny G is doing (and would look a little less ridiculous). Some jazz purists might not think that Pat looks ridiculous, but in support of my argument I ask only one question:

Of all the ills in the world, is going off on Kenny G really the best you can do?

Again, this is just my $.02 but don’t waste energy on people and things you dislike. Instead, take that energy and invest it in making things better. It’s something I’m still working on for myself. Perhaps it will be helpful to you.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to you all!

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“You Make Your Own Luck” or On Opportunity

Posted on December 15, 2013 by GuitArchitecture

My wife was watching Master Chef Junior Finale on Hulu recently. While what caught my attention initially was the complexity of the dishes they were serving. The contestants (aged 12-13) served up the following meals for the finale:

Contestant 1: Ahi tuna cooked two ways (poke and seared), fried spot prawns with wontons and a coconut curry and poached pear in lemon ginger miso sauce.

Contestant 2: Basil lemon shrimp with an heirloom tomato crostini, pan-seared veal chop with potato gnocchi and butter sauce and a deconstructed cannoli.)

what really stuck with me was what wasn’t said in the episode.

When presented with the prospect of winning a trophy and a $100,000 prize, not one contestant or parent said, “I need to win this. $100,000 is a life changing amount of money.”

There’s a reason for that.

No matter how many times you watch something, you can’t learn a technique until you actually apply it. Even if you sit with a timer and do everything in a step by step process, you need to do it multiple times to make it work.

So how does a 12-year old make beef sliders with black garlic aioli, beef wellington, prosciutto-wrapped chicken roulade with goat cheese, soufflés or any of the dishes above?

They do it by doing it over and over again and if your child is cooking every recipe in your lavish coffee table book of recipes, then they’ll also need to have access to fresh produce and very expensive ingredients. In other words, if you can afford to spend an extra couple of hundred dollars a week to support Jane or Jimmy’s cooking interest, then an extra 100K might not mean all that much to you. Coming from where I did, I had an initial knee jerk reaction to that.

Another Upstate NY story?

A little back story here, I grew up in a middle class home. My dad taught in a public school and my mom worked at Beech-Nut. We were never in danger of starving, but we didn’t take lavish vacations either. When my dad had summers off he did things like install pools for other people or took on other jobs to make ends meet.

One thing that growing up in a place like Fort Plain taught you was that there were haves, have-mores and have-lesses and that while you might not have what the have-mores had, that you learned to make due with what you had access to, you were thankful for what you had and you reached a hand out to the have-nots.

It also teaches you a certain level of self sufficiency. It wasn’t that long ago that buying music meant driving somewhere because there wasn’t an internet to buy it on. When I tell people that buying a cd (or a cassette – some of you may have to google that term), required driving an hour each way to Albany or Schenectady – they don’t believe me – but it’s true.

I realize now that while it was inconvenient, there was something that came from that process. There was an excitement about having to go somewhere and finding something, and while it lead to some BITTER disappointments, it also lead to some amazing finds. Those recordings had other associations linked with it that went beyond just the music (for a related post on you may want to check out this post on my other site).

Now back to our previously scheduled program

Looking at those Master Chef kids, it can be easy to get bitter about success because it’s easy to look at other people utilizing the advantages that they’ve been given and capitalizing on them.

The deeper lesson is that for those people who don’t fall into the “have more” category, you have to make your own opportunity.

I worked at an Ames department store in high school. I knew I didn’t want to do that the rest of my life so I applied for music school. It took a lot of sweat, blood and tears to get in (and get through it).

It would have been easier to have just stayed at the Ames store and keep working and earning a small but consistent paycheck, but instead having no opportunity at the time, I made my own.

The first observation I’d make about opportunity is that most people have to make their own opportunities, but the second part is that the work and effort you put into your opportunities will yield other opportunities.

I got the God of War gig because I went to music school, knew one of the composers and had the skill set (and the instruments) that he needed for the score. There were a lot of missteps along the way to that. There was no easy linear path or a plan to get there, there was just the work and the drive to get better at what I did. This (unknowingly) became the preparation I’d need for that and many other experiences.

Since anything involving a list, typically drives more traffic here’s a brief synopsis of this post (with related material from other posts I’ve put up).

When you start off in anything, you make your own opportunities.
Many times, these opportunities will not meet your expectations, but that shouldn’t stop you. (Funny fact, MANY of the artists I know with impressive resumes spend years filtering out the points that look good on paper (like an exclusive gallery opening), but bombed as events (i.e. no one came, or it was poorly reviewed) with the events that were deemed “successful”.) Yoki Matsuoka may be a MacArthur winner now, but when I met her we were both working at a small robotics firm in Cambridge, Mass, and I didn’t see that job listed in any of the press materials that she’s listed in).
In other words, stumbling and failure is a given on the road to other opportunities. Don’t freak out about it. Just do the best work that you can every single time and take stock of what worked and what didn’t.
Review, Revise and Repeat. The key is to keep improving on what you do until you become the go-to person in whatever you do.
Always be on the look out and look for the deeper lesson. If you see someone doing something successfully, bring it back to you. Ask, “How could I use that to (insert whatever short or long term goal you’re trying to achieve here.)?”
Always be ready. You never know when the next opportunity is going to present itself to you, so you should always be at the top of your game so that when the opportunity arises you can take advantage of it.

There’s a great story behind the Emmylou Harris/Spyboy recording and tour. She wanted to use drummer Brian Blade for the session but Brian wasn’t available, so Brian recommended his brother Brady. They gave Brady the call and he hadn’t played in a while, so he was out of practice. He ended up pulling it out and did some amazing playing on the cd and tour. This is excerpted from his Wikipedia entry,

“Early 1995 saw Emmylou Harris persuade Brady to return to his kit as part of her touring band Spyboy, along with Daniel Lanois and Darryl Johnson. The following year they were joined by Buddy Millerand toured throughout the mid-nineties, culminating in a live album Spyboy, released in 1998.Touring the world with Emmylou Harris led Brady to encounter and be seen by some of the key figures in the American music scene which resulted in Brady becoming one of the most in-demand session drummers around. Brady took part in extensive tours and sessions with the Steve Earle during his El Corazón period; Jewel throughout her 1998 Spirit world tour; and the Indigo Girls on their 1999 album Come on Now Social, 2002’s Become You, 2004’s All That We Let In, and 2011’s Beauty Queen Sister.”

Brady Blade is the exception to the rule. Most other people would have gotten the call and if they weren’t ready, the call would just go to the next person on the list. Don’t be the person who misses the call because they dropped the ball.

Finally, you’re never 100% ready so jump in and make the most of what you got. The final thing about opportunities is that when they are presented, they often seem to be something that’s over your head. Within reason, don’t be afraid to step up. If you don’t read music and don’t play classical guitar style, and you get a call to play Joaquín Rodrigo’s “Concierto de Aranjuez” with a full orchestra tomorrow because the guitarist dropped out, that might not work out for you but if you get a call to play classical style for an art opening it might be worth your time to pull some material together.

Everyone starts from humble beginnings, and some of us return often and have to build up from square 1 or 2. Trust me, it gets easier the more you do it. The main thing is to keep plugging away in the meantime and doing the best you can do in the meantime.

As always, thanks for reading!

-SC

Do You Need A Guitar To Be A Guitarist?

Posted on November 29, 2013 by GuitArchitecture

In an earlier post, I provided some scrutiny to the blanket idea to a common self-help sentiment that, “the answer (to your questions/searching/etc) lies within.”

And while there is some truth to that sentiment, it is only a 1/2 truth. You can find some answers within, but only when interacting with external influences.

“It’s about my music…”

When I taught lessons at CalArts, variations of the above statement came up repeatedly from students who didn’t see the merits of learning other people’s songs as lesson material. “Can’t we just work on my stuff?”

Well, we can…but there’s a problem:

every song you write is the same chord progression moved to other keys
you have two strumming styles
your melodies all seem to be a variation on one melody

In other words, the problem is you just keep writing the same song over and over again with different lyrics.

This is what happens when you work on things in complete isolation. You end up “discovering” things that are already well worn territory, and you develop a language that might have incredible emotional meaning for you but doesn’t necessarily engage other people.

It’s like learning a native language. You could just say, “gaga-goo-goo” the rest of your life instead of learning words but while your parents would know what you were saying, it would be lost on anyone outside that circle. You have to learn other people’s words to have the common ground to communicate with other people. The originality comes from being able to form your own unique sentences and your own ideas.

So the teachable moment comes from getting students to realize that you can learn other people’s material with the intent of developing your own music instead of simply learning how to play their songs. It comes back to two core concepts of mine – having a “why” and learning the deeper lesson.

Do You Need A Guitar To Be A Guitarist?

It’s a trick question as the answer is yes and no.

When you first start off, you have to have a guitar to be a guitarist. I’ve known a number of people who truly had the souls of a guitarist and were as passionate as guitars and guitar playing as I was, but they’re uber – fans. That’s fine but they’ll never be a guitarist because they have no desire to pick up the instrument and play.

So you can have all the intent in the world, but if you don’t play the guitar, you’ll never be a guitarist.

In contrast, at a certain point being a guitarist becomes a skill. You don’t become defined by what you play, but instead by how you play it.

There is a story of Miyamoto Musashi, possibly the most renown samurai in history, being called to a duel on an island. Allegedly Musashi, who at that point in his life stopped using traditional swords in favor of a bokken (a wooden sword), got into a boat and carved a bokken out of a spare oar on the boat. Musashi killed the opponent with the bokken upon arriving on the island, and bid a retreat in the boat before his opponents followers could attack.

Musashi didn’t need a sword to be a master swordsman.

Gear

In this season of black fridays and holiday excess, I invite you to be mindful and take stock of what you really need to play.

If you’re a guitarist and your guitar is not in playable condition, you’re going to need something (a setup, repair or possibly a new instrument). Ditto for an amp if your an electric player.
If you need to record and don’t have a way to record audio, you may need something,
If the only pedal you have at your disposal is an Arion Distortion you may need something.

But often what’s needed is a set up, or some new strings, or some lessons to get inspired and go to another place.

It’s easy to get caught up in gear lust and say that if you only had (insert mystery guitar/amp pedal here) that you would be able to do (insert desired outcome).

But it’s important to remember that just as gear can be inspiring – an abundance of options doesn’t lead to exploration of all options, it leads to paralysis.

A key feature of teaching improvisation involves teaching people to work within limitations. It’s in the limitations that you can find the unique approaches and the vocabulary that you thought you were missing.

This holiday season – I invite you to take stock of what you really need to reach your goals and to explore maximizing what you already have.

Do you need to be a guitarist to own a guitar?

Does owning one guitar over another make you any more of a guitarist?

The answer lies within and without.

-SC

The Greener Grass Or Some MisAdventures In Self-Publishing

Posted on November 17, 2013 by GuitArchitecture

Welcome to the Book Bizness

As an author, I had two bizarre Amazon related experiences last week.

First, I saw this:

Click to see at full size

Which was odd, because 1. The cover art still isn’t updated on Amazon and 2. The new book is $31.50 on Amazon – so I have no idea why it’s someone would list it at that price. (It’s not going to sell at that price but even if it did I, unfortunately, wouldn’t see any money from that sale.)

Second, I got a list of book sales from Lulu.

Lulu is a POD (Print-on Demand Service) that prints physical books and distributes physical and digital versions of the books. The main reason to use Lulu is that they have a distribution deal with Amazon – which is the largest book distributor on the planet.

One line on the spreadsheet caught my eye in particular:

Format	Channel	Quantity	Earnings	Author Name
Paperback	Amazon	1	$0.3	Scott Collins

Yep. My “profit” on one of my books turned out to be $.30.

How does this happen?

Well…in short – it happens when you make a deal and parameters change that you couldn’t anticipate or

Sometimes you can make the best laid plans and not have things turn out the way you expected them to be.

Guit-A-Grip is going to be undergoing a major transformation, refocus and relaunch as we go into 2014. This article will hopefully be a part of that process but in the meantime – how I got to the point of only getting a $.30 return on a book from Amazon is a longer examination in motivation and execution and whether examined from a business perspective, an entrepreneurial lesson or a how-to/how not to instructional – I hope that you’ll find it very much grounded in The Why.

The most bizarre path to writing a book I can imagine.

Okay. Here’s how this starts.

It’s 2005. I’m in Boston. I’m playing in several bands. I’m not making any money. In fact, I’m outlaying money for rehearsal spaces and rehearsing and recording for several projects that are not going to see the light of day. My previous assessment around 2000-2001 of the live scene imploding is proving to be accurate. The traditional model of revenue from clubs, bars etc. is dead – and I realize that it’s going to be another few years before everyone understands what the odor is, and that I need to be ahead of the curve.

So, I come up with a plan. The only lucrative area of my musical endeavors at that time was coming from teaching. It was something that I was fairly good at and something that I enjoyed doing. I quickly came to the conclusion that if I was teaching in an academic environment

I could make a reasonable living
I would have access to things that would help me make music
I would theoretically have a supportive environment to create that music in

So I had to go to grad school. This plan, however, had a huge problem. From an academic standpoint, my undergraduate education had been a dismal failure. I’ve detailed this in substantive depth in podcast #2 and podcast #7 so I’m not going to go into it here. But needless to say, I grew a lot as a player after my undergrad experience and the concept of going to grad school (and not making the same mistakes I made in my undergrad) was appealing to me.

So I did three things.

1. I researched grad school programs that I was interested in. I found two – The Third Stream studies at New England Conservatory and The Multi-Focus Guitar program at California Institute of The Arts. CalArts was appealing to me because I was familiar with the Krushevo cd and really dug Miroslav Tadic’s playing. Also, I had read a number of quotes from him in Guitar Player and I sensed a kindred spirit in some ways. After meeting him at the CalArts campus, I knew that that was where I needed to go.

2. I pulled together a 2-song demo with the strongest playing I could pull off. I also sent a copy of the Tubtime CD (which in all honesty probably sealed the deal more than the 2-song recording because when I met Miroslav again it seemed like he really dug Tubtime).

3. I pulled out an ace in the hole. I had been working on researching 12-tone patterns to add some additional dimension to my playing and I had done about two years of research mapping out every possible 12-tone pattern based on symmetrical divisions of the octave.

Previously, I had written a 300 page book (The title:

The Guitar Pattern Technique Reference Book

A systematic positional mapping out of the guitar fretboard for technical and compositional resources

Volume I: One Note Per String Patterns

rolled right off the tongue)

that was literally a series of photocopies that I took a sharpie marker to marking out all possible positional fingering patterns with 1 note-per-string on the low E string.

It took about a year and a half to do (in the middle of the worst living situation I was ever involved in) and had 1 breakdown and 2 major revisions. I had it bound at KinKos with a vellum cover and sent it out with a cover letter to some publishers (and Brian Buckethead Carroll if I recall) to see if there was any interest and (not surprisingly) there were no bites.

As a commercial release – it was a huge failure and the loss of 18 months or so.

As a book – it was my first success.

I don’t view it as a success because it was well written (it wasn’t) or because it was well executed (it wasn’t in particular) it was a success because it was a book that I conceptualized and executed. I had to learn how to lay out pages, how to write (in the sense of explaining my ideas), how to edit and how to budget.

This was 1994. I think each book cost me $25 or $30 to print. I remember spending close to $300 getting them out into the world. I still have 2 copies. I’m leafing through one of them right now and it makes me wince and smile at the same time.

Basically, I spent $300 to put myself on an internship for how to produce a book. And I learned a good lesson on how not to release a book.

It was a damn cheap education and it became the foundation for the aforementioned ace in the hole. While I knew that my undergrad education wasn’t going to win me any points with an admissions committee, I also knew I could take the research I did and pull it into a book. I knew I could avoid some of the mistakes I made with my previous book and make it a much tighter thesis.

I realized that if I could throw down, essentially a graduate level thesis paper (a typical graduation requirement of a grad level program) as part of my ADMISSIONS APPLICATION – it would be difficult to ignore my application and no one would have any question of my ability to handle the intellectual rigor of graduate school.

So I went to work.

Mind you, I was working a day gig, playing in two bands, teaching and trying to move from Boston to California at the same time. It was nuts. But I got it done and a key factor in that was Lulu and the POD model.

Print On Demand

It turns out that technologically, a lot had happened between 1994 and 2004. Doing what I wanted to do in 1994 would have required going to something called a vanity press. A vanity press is (soon to be was) a place where authors would pay a publishing company to press a run of books (usually 500 or a thousand) and then would have to sell the books to try to make back money.

For the musicians out there reading this, it was essentially pay-to-play for book releases. Authors would end up giving most of the copies away in the hopes of getting reviewed or selling them to friends or family. A slim majority would break even and an even slimmer margin made any money on it.

The print on demand model changed that model. Once printing became something that could be automated and scaled on a small level, authors could have people order books and have them printed and shipped as the orders came in. There was no need to maintain an inventory. The cost of becoming an independent author with a self published book went from thousands of dollars to nearly nothing.

So I went with Lulu for the book. I used other books as a model for layout and the initial 12-tone release looked a thousand times better than my first effort. Lulu sent a copy, and I put the copy in with the application materials. Eyebrows were raised and I got a scholarship and went to CalArts.

A funny thing happened in the meantime. It turns out that there was a Quartz error in the PDF conversion for the document and that meant the physical book I held in my hand (for reasons no one has ever been able to explain to me), interchanged every sharp and every flat.

In other words. 200 + pages of the book were wrong.

So I re-did the book. (This was the first time but I’ll talk about the 2nd time later and put it up on Lulu for sale. I was making about $10 a book. Mind you that initial book, Symmetrical 12-Tone Patterns For Improvisation, was the answer to a question that no one was asking. I think it sold 10 copies or so.

As a revenue source, a complete utter failure.

As a device to get into grad school – it was a wild success.

Also, it brought my game up to another level. I got deeper into book design and my writing was stronger than my previous book.

School Daze

A funny thing happened on the way to the forum.

It turns out that while I didn’t make the same mistakes I made in undergrad (I had really good grades for a change in grad school), I did make all new mistakes. My biggest mistake was that I was so focused on getting the skill set I thought I needed for teaching, that I focused on all the things I couldn’t do rather than improve the things I could do. So instead of putting a good foot forward and then making that an awesome foot, I put a bad foot forward and had a mediocre foot to show for it when I was done. I might be unnecessarily harsh on myself here. I had some great experiences while I was there – but I was so focused on my post college plans that I didn’t get the things I needed out of that experience until I was out the door. What kind of a moron has access to a Vinny Golia and doesn’t study with him because he’s working on his fingerpicking? Right here (Thank GOD that I had the opportunity to play with Vinny on multiple occasions afterwards and get my ass handed to me in the best lessons imaginable later).
Another funny thing happened – this time in 2006 when I got out of school. The market crashed and it seemed like every teaching job in the world went underground for a while.
Still holding onto the teaching idea, it became REALLY obvious that no one was going to take me seriously unless I had a PhD (or to a much lesser degree a DMA). I just got done with a 2-year grad school stint, I wasn’t ready for a 10 years of a doctoral program to get an ethnomusicology doctorate.
However, while at CalArts, I started teaching a lot of lessons and it turned out that I DID have a unique way of presenting things and looking at the guitar. I started writing my guitar opus and created the 2,000 page monstrosity that got re-edited and written into 5 books and counting.

The trouble with tribbles

So, with one book under my arm – I started releasing other books.

Here’s what I did right:

(note: some of this was by design but a lot of it was by dumb luck)

I cultivated an audience.

I was developing a lot of content on the guitarchitecture.org website and writing for Guitar-Muse.com and other blogs. I had some good web traffic and people who were digging my approach. On the minus side, this was incredibly time consuming and didn’t generate any income. When I say incredibly time consuming, a sample blog lesson entry might have taken 20-30 hours, for a free blog post.

I strengthened my writing.

Again, I wasn’t making money from the posts I was doing, but my writing was getting much more focused and I got really good at generating ideas quickly and editing graphics quickly. Both really useful skills later.

I had a unique promotional angle

So, one idea I came up with, that turned out to be a really good one was that I did pre-release sales of the book. Basically the pitch was, I’m releasing this book. If you buy it now, you’re getting a rough version at a much cheaper rate than the final book, but I’ll send you a free update (or updates as the case would be).

A couple of interesting things happened from this approach.

1. People felt like they were getting a good deal.

2. People felt like they were helping support me.

3. I got to edit the book over a longer period of time that wouldn’t have ben afforded by a one time deadline – thus making the final product that much stronger. (this philosophy was employed later. I had stopped printing the 12-tone book because I felt that my writing and relationship had completely evolved since the first edition – so I re-wrote it and released it as a new book in 2013. I’d still argue that it might be the best thing I’ve written thus far).

4. I was getting a mailing list that I could contact with every subsequent release.

Point #4 turned out to be invaluable as the other books were released. The percentage of people that I contacted on the mailing list that bought multiple books was about 95%.

Give people value.

That was something I was really adamant about in making the books. I didn’t want anyone to feel like they were ripped off. When I saw print editions that were 30-40 pages and sold for $30 and it got under my skin a bit. So I decided to release 300 page books for that price and still do better financially than I would do in a traditional publishing deal. (Here’s a telling story – I had a guy complain that $10 for a PDF was too high. I recommended that he buy the $5 light edition I had on fiverr at the time and see if that was a good deal. He liked it. He then bought one book at the $10 rate and subsequently bought ALL of the books I had as pdfs 2 days later. He never complained about the price after that because the content was there.)

In a related note, once I had final versions of the books, I offered bundle deals for the books. Which turned out to be smart because people were hesitant to spend $15 a pdf but were psyched to spend $20 for 2, $30 for 3 or $40 for 4. Regarding this issue of providing value with pricing here’s

A brief diversion with a music business book publishing lesson

The first thought I had when I did my books was to get them published. I had a friend who was published on Mel Bay and he told me something that was confirmed by Mel Bay – namely, that if I sold my books on Mel Bay that my return would be about $1 per book.

Many musicians reading this post will likely look at those margins and think about CD (remember those?) profit margins many artists on major labels tried to FIGHT for. And this is highlighted by this quote, “Well that might seem low – but they are ethical and they do pay. I have several other books with other publishers that I’ve never seen a dime from.”

So this isn’t the Steven King model where someone throw a ridiculous amount of money out at you, it’s – you put a lot of work into a book and then get to call yourself a “published author”.

I figured I’d call myself a published author and make a better profit margin.

Full disclosure here:

On a $30 book. My profit margin is probably $6-$8. To get $10 or $20 a book, I’d have to sell it for closer to the $50 range, and while I might have been able to sell a few at that price point, I really wanted to make sure that the reader had value.

That’s the plus side of self publishing. You get to make those calls.

On the minus side, it’s all on you. That sounds like a plus, but it’s a double edged sword. The writing is on you. The editing is on you. The layout is on you. And you can ask for help, but you’re going to burn out friendships quickly. Believe me on that one.

True independent self-publishing is not for everyone. Now I’m not talking about going to bookbaby with 2-5k and having them release a book for you, I’m talking about taking it all on yourself and having to do everything on your own. It gets easier and harder simultaneously and it’s not for the thin skinned.

Okay I talked about some things I did right – here’s a host of things I did wrong.

I took all opinions as equal.

I had some people complain about the 2-12 hours it sometimes took to process their paypal order. By some I mean 3. Typically I did it in the same hour, but in one case the order came in at 1 am and I was sick and passed on on cold medication and didn’t get to it until the following day. In my memory there were 10-12 increasingly angry e-mails in my box when I woke up, but in reality it was probably 5. Even with the note I put on the site about a 1 day turn around, some people wanted instantaneous turn around and that was when I went fully to Lulu.

I put all the orders on Lulu and Amazon.

Again, this had positives and negatives. My reason for doing it was to give customers instant access to digital content, and I still think that was a good move.

The problem is, I don’t get a list from Lulu of WHO orders anything from them or from any of the distributors just when it was ordered and what the revenue was. So the entire previous model I used of being able to contact a mailing list went out the window.

I spread out my message platforms.

I thought that being on Guitar-Muse and all of these other sites would drive traffic to my site. Turns out that I was driving traffic to other sites. Furthermore, by focusing content on Guitarchitecture, Guitagrip and Guitar-Muse, I was dividing my readership between multiple places, also bringing down my rankings for GuitArchitecture in Google.

I relied on forums for traffic

I was spending a lot of time at one point contributing content to various lists. I never hawked my products but if I had a free lesson up on a site – I’d post it on a lesson page of a forum as an FYI. “Hey if anyone’s looking for help with sweep picking there’s a new post here type of thing. That got me kicked off of the Guitar Player Forum (they still don’t understand what a forum is and that’s why there’s was still merde last time I went) and ultimately got my wrist slapped on several others. I was also submitting to Guitar-Squid for a while and the weekly e-mail they sent was generating a lot of traffic.

The problem with that model is that people would go to the page, read one item and then immediately go back to whatever they were doing. It wasn’t building any kind of loyal readership, it was just intaking people and sending them out just as quickly.

I assumed that content was what mattered academically.

My thinking in getting books done was that if I didn’t have a doctorate degree that being an author with a number of substantial reference books under my belt would provide some clout. It turns out that many academic circles are firmly entrenched in peer review. While there are a number of positives that occur (and the necessity for peer review particularly in science publications) the process can hold up publication for years – if not decades in some circumstances and many of those books are published by the academic equivalent of vanity presses. Small runs of a 1,000 books or so written by academics for academics being sold at inflated prices to make back their investment.

That IS changing and the stigma around self publishing is changing, but there are still a lot of places that look down their nose at people who work outside the traditional system. So, whether that is a mistaken perception in the long run remains to be seen.

I didn’t understand the downside to being sold on Amazon.

I say this as someone who is a faithful Amazon purchaser, there is a dark side of publishing on working with Amazon.

First, here’s what happens with a book on Lulu.

Let’s say I decide to sell a paperback book. Lulu says, “Here’s what we charge to make a book, how much money do you want to make?” then the calculate a price based on that.

Here’s a Price Breakdown when you go offsite

An accounting miracle happens when you want to sell on platforms OTHER than LULU. When you get to the review process, you see two profit margins. It looks like this:

So that $6.75 you were making per book – just went to $2.30 a book if it’s sold elsewhere because some money has go to whoever is selling it. My initial thought was, “geesh – that percentage seems really high – but it’s still $1.30 more than I’m making on Mel Bay and the important thing is that people are reading the book. If they like it, perhaps they’ll get more or tell other people.”

Then the squeeze comes in.

You see, Amazon decided that they wanted to be able to sell the books at the lowest possible price. So they set a 10% discount on the books from Lulu on their site. They can impose that on Lulu because they’re so huge. That’s why my $35 book sells for $31.50 on Amazon.

Guess who eats part of that 10% discount?

You got it.

And that’s how $6.75 goes to $2.30 -> $.30 in one fell swoop.

So why sell on Amazon then?

Because they’re the largest seller on the planet. They can sell my books in Canada, The UK, Italy, France, Japan or anywhere else in the world that they have a portal.

When Hootie and the Blowfish signed with a major label, they had a dilemma, which was that as an independent act – they were making something like $5 a CD profit selling them at shows and would only make $1 a cd on a major label. They took a shot and realized that if they were selling MILLIONS of cds that they’s ultimately make a lot more money even at only $1 a cd.

So, that $.30 was extreme. In general my books on Amazon make between $1-$2. So it’s not great money, but it’s something and it’s convenient for people who don’t want to buy pdfs.

Why not sell Kindle versions?

Largely, because the books are heavily graphics driven and would have to be completely reformatted for Kindle. I don’t know that I’d ever make the money back on them. Also, I’m happy I have those books out, but I don’t want to keep working on the same material endlessly. It’s time to move on.

If you make more money from PDFS- why sell physical books then?

I like books.

My mom taught me to read and a read my first book at 2. I like physical books, and there’s an entire generation of people who like physical books.

Having said that, I like ebooks and REALLY like the kindle app on my phone, but, especially when playing guitar, there’s something about having something tactile…about having a physical object on a music stand or a desk that allows people to interact with the material in a different way. (Some people will doubt this but did you know that it’s been proven that it takes longer to read an e-book than a physical version of the same material? Researchers have no idea as of this writing why that occurs, only that it does.)

It’s about depth of experience. It’s why I don’t tweet, even though from a business standpoint, it’s idiotic for me not to tweet. I don’t use Twitter because it’s part of the ADD mindset that that our technology encourages and that our society cultivates.

It’s why I write 4,000 word articles instead of just posting a video. It’s not about the 10,000 that will read a sentence and click to the next thing. It’s about the 100 people who read through the material and really get something from it.

I write books because I think the material is important and I think it will help people either because the material itself (or the process behind that material) helped me.

I release the material in forms I think people will respond to.

I do it in a way to make money – to keep going – to help people and thus – help myself.

So you have a reason why (a higher why? a higher calling?) and you adapt. You learn from your mistakes, try to anticipate things that won’t work out the way you like they will (like getting a $.30 royalty) and try not to make them the next time.

(In a related note – this website is adapting…but that’s a whole ‘nother story for another day. But I’ll talk about that more as we get closer).

In the meantime, as always I hope this helps and as always, thanks for reading.

-SC