John August

Follow Up

One Too Many Mornings screening

Follow Up, Indie

[One Too Many Mornings](http://onetoomanymornings.com), the Sundance movie I’ve written about a [few](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2010/one-too-many-mornings) [times](http://www.google.com/url?q=http://johnaugust.com/archives/2010/watching-otmm&ei=C12eS438FojUsQOyvq2_Aw&sa=X&oi=nshc&resnum=1&ct=result&cd=1&ved=0CAsQzgQoAA&usg=AFQjCNE49afLrclHRRDZbgE13LDH0pfWrA), is having a screening tomorrow night (Tuesday, March 16th) in Los Angeles.

I’ll be leading a Q&A with the filmmakers right after the screening, talking not just about the film but the challenges and opportunities in making and releasing a microbudget movie.

If you’re considering making a little movie, you should keep a close eye on OTMM. It’s good — a tiny, Swingers-esque two-hander. And the filmmakers are smart guys, not just how they made the movie, but how they’re putting it out in the world. They’re doing everything I would try, but will it work? It’s a great case study for indie films in 2010.

Here’s the info:

Tuesday March 16th – 8:00pm

Downtown Independent
251 S. Main Street
Los Angeles, CA 90012

Tickets are $7, available in advance at [Brown Paper Tickets](http://www.brownpapertickets.com/producerevent/102295).

Hiring complete

Follow Up, Meta

I’ve picked my Director of Digital Things. His name is Ryan Nelson, and his portfolio can be found [here](http://www.ryanmnelson.com/). He’ll be starting in April.

Longtime friend-of-the-site Nima Yousefi (he coded Scrippets) will be coming on board to handle a few special projects in the meantime.

With ridiculously good candidates to choose from, it’s not just protocol to say it was a tough decision. I learned quite a bit, both from video-chat interviews with applicants and calling references. I would have been happy with any of my final few choices; hiring just one was difficult. It forced me to focus on what I saw this person doing two, six and twenty-four months down the road.

I largely followed my [original plan](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2010/hiring-a-new-person) for the hiring process, starting with reviewing portfolios and emailing follow-up questions. I assigned a special project to my top few contenders, both to see what they could do and how they would discuss it afterwards.

You can [read the assigment](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/digital_challenge.pdf) if you like. I’ve left it to the candidates whether they want to share what they did with the world.

If you feel like doing your own riff on the project, by all means go for it. If you’re using my text, I’d like attribution, but otherwise it’s free and clear.

How much should ebooks cost?

Books, Follow Up, The Variant

The [NY Times](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/01/business/media/01ebooks.html?partner=rss&emc=rss) and [Gizmodo](http://gizmodo.com/5482774/how-much-it-actually-costs-to-publish-an-ebook-vs-a-real-book) are attempting to run the math on how much to charge for books purchased on the Kindle and iPad.

Amazon prices Kindle books at $9.99, while Apple will apparently let prices float higher on iPad books, with $12.99 being a frequently-quoted number.

With data drawn from publishing sources, these articles break down costs and profits. Poorly. They don’t differentiate between one-time costs (designing cover artwork) and variable costs (printing each additional copy). And how much of the marketing budget would be identical with or without the ebook version?

The number that sticks out most is the bookseller’s take. A 50% cut makes sense when dealing with a physical book sold through a brick-and-mortar bookstore. A 30% cut is crazy when dealing with atoms pushed out through a virtual retailer. As a reference, I sell pdf and ePub versions of [The Variant](http://johnaugust.com/variant) and only give up 11 cents on the dollar. ((But I give up 65 cents of each dollar earned through the Kindle version, which sells much better.))

Amazon makes the Kindle to sell books; Apple makes the iPad to sell iPads — selling books is sort of gravy. That gives Apple more price flexibility, and should hopefully avoid absurd situations where the digital version costs much more than the paperback. ((I’m not ignoring the Nook or the Sony readers, but they’re not steering the ship.))

The publishing industry wants to keep prices up so they can make money. Can’t blame them for that. But you know something’s amiss when Anne Rice is the [voice of reason](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/01/business/media/01ebooks.html?pagewanted=2&partner=rss&emc=rss):

> The only thing I think is a mistake is people trying to hold back e-books or Kindle and trying to head off this revolution by building a dam. It’s not going to work.

One last point: How soon can we agree to spell ebooks with a lowercase e, and no hyphen?

The Times likes the hyphen, while Gizmodo feels the need to capitalize. I’d suggest that email is the best antecedent. That’s a term that has largely swallowed its hyphen, probably due to its verbification. Can we embrace the future and simply lose the hyphen now?

(Thanks to Quinn for the link.)

Update on the job

Follow Up, Geek Alert

I’ve culled 66 applications down to a final few candidates for the new [Director of Digital Things job](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2010/hiring-a-new-person).

Since several candidates live outside Los Angeles, we did video interviews by iChat — which was a remarkably good second-best solution. It’s odd meeting someone on video, but once you push past the first 30 awkward seconds, it feels remarkably natural. I feel like I have a much better sense of the individual than I would on a phone call.

The contenders are each working on a short challenge project, which is due later this week. I’ve left it up to the candidates whether to make their work public.