Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
I remember reading a while back that Amazon was helping the sales of
midlist books.  Did that not happen?
  

    
They have to be published, first. In my limited experience, publishers are
reluctant to support them. But I don't want to pretend to be a publishing
expert.
  

    
Re: <41>

Still here, Howard?  Lurking, perhaps?

I joined Electric Minds just a few months prior to your departure.
The "glory days" had ended long before my arrival there.  eMinds
gave me the ability to seamlessly incorporate graphics such as
animated .GIFs into messages.  For example, I created this mock ad
and posted it to eMinds back in 1997.

\<img src="http://www.pe.net/~sputnik/images/ads.gif";>

Recently, I discovered an active noncommercial virtual community
for digital artists that predates eMinds.  Ironic.  Took me six
and a half years to find it.
<http://www.sito.org/cgi-bin/gridcosm/gridcosm?level=top>
Collaboration is the name of the game.
  

    
SITO's great. Coincidentally, I wrote a piece about Bob Anderson, a SITO
regular, for Electric Minds:
http://www.abbedon.com/electricminds/html/wwj_austin_1928.html
  

    
 \<img src="http://www.pe.net/~sputnik/images/avatarz.gif";>

The faces on the mock ads are permutations of an "avatar" that a
nameless commercial artist had created for Electric Minds.

Although I quit eMinds last year, I'm still distorting images using
Adobe Photoshop, as these portraits of presidential candidates
that I posted to Gridcosm attest.
<http://www.well.com/user/silly/vote.html>
  

    
Inclusion of a graphic can really alter the appearance of a message.

\<img src="http://www.pe.net/~sputnik/images/toonshew.gif";>

Ed Stastny has informed me that Jon Van Oast deserves credit as one 
of SITO's founders.  A Very Important Geek.  His URL is... 
<http://scribble.com/>!  Would some WELLbeing please explain to all 
of those legions of lurkers out there in cyberspace why the word 
'scribble' is unduly significant hereabouts?
  

    
"scribble" is a command to erase a post. 
  

    <scribbled by satyr>
  

    
AND lots of us read large chunks of the many and varied topics on the well
months or years after they have been posted. in computer topics for example
you can almost watch things develop by reading through the comments.

sometimes folks remove some or all of their comments from the well. this can
leave lots of holes in the story but, people 'own their own words' here so
that is just life.