astridv | (no subject)

fandom_stocking! This is one of my favorite exchanges because it's so low stress. I'm still waiting on a script before I can start working, so I hope I can make the best of that free time and stuff a few stockings.

Unrelated but, man, what the hell is wrong with Firefox? Guess I'll be switching to Chrome for the time being but I hate not having all my add-ons...

I just returned from a delightful trip to Hamburg (where I finally met the equally delightful

ratcreature ^^). My publisher had invited for a day of lectures and workshops and it was absolutely worth the trip. Being in one place with dozens of illustrators, authors, and editors you normally only read the names of, talking about business... very refreshing. The overall mood was pretty optimistic, too. I met a couple of illustrators who happen to live in the next village over. And at one point I stared at someone's name tag and finally asked her "Say, have we worked together? Your name sounds familiar?" Mine sounded familiar to her too and we finally realized we had collaborated on a series of nine books. ;)

I heard some lectures on copyright and storytelling, also one about how to turn a book into an app. (That one quickly disabused me of the notion of maybe trying that myself sometime, because of the sheer complexity.) Perhaps most interesting to me was the one about self-marketing and social media, and the changing media landscape. Extremely interesting to see it from the point of view of a publisher who's already using the potential of social media.

The overall tenor that day, when it comes to making books for kids in times of new media, had to be if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Times are a-changing, that's for sure.

I'm inspired to get a second tumblr account under my full name and use it for that purpose. [eta: just did!] I originally got my facebook account for this but I simply can't warm up to that site, while I relatively quickly got a feeling for tumblr (with all its obvious flaws). Just don't know if I trust tumblr with my spam-free gmail address. Maybe I should create a new email address first.

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FWIW, I signed up to tumblr with my fannish gmail, and I never have more than one or two spam messages in the folder there at any time (and I only let it be emptied in the official interval, not deleting any by hand), even though that is the mail I signed up with for all social media (dw, lj, tumblr, pinterest, goodreads). Nowhere near the number of spam messages I get on my t-online email, even though I don't use that to sign up for anything, except for amazon. And nothing compared to the spam I get from the email attached to my domain, which can be harvested on the website.

Ah, that's good to know. Yeah, I suppose a lot of the spam comes from bots who find it on some older websites somewhere.

Anyway, I was just about to create a third google mail account when I remembered that I already made an alternate one, and after a handful of tries I managed to log in. I used that to sign up on tumblr just now. (And if that one starts getting spam suddenly, I'll know the culprit for sure...)

That sounds like such a wonderful conference experience! Just the sort of purpose that sort of thing is meant to serve.

-J

Yeah, the meet-up was a success, with a lively exchange of ideas. More than one person told me they were glad they'd come; as was I. (Even thought that train ride was a pain in the ass as usual...)