Sometimes it's not easy to price a technical writer's work. How much is a user's manual "worth", really?
It probably is not worth much if it is one of those thick door-stoppers gathering dust at the top shelf of a never-used library.
However, it might also be worth billions if it shows a technician at a nuclear plant how to stop a core meltdown in progress.
Here is a rather well-priced manual that I've read quoted in the Wall Street Journal (June 7, 2007).
Natasha Pearl runs a New York lifestyle-management service. Among her services is finding top-quality kitchen personnel for her wealthy clients.
Ms. Pearl reportedly charges $10,000 "to find a chef" "and up to $20,000 to draw up a housekeeping procedural manual for a mansion."
As Sinatra says in one of his immortal songs, "nice job if you can get it..."
Friday, June 8, 2007
Good Copy Illuminates and Delivers (the Truth)
Good copy has two important functions.
1) It brings up "the world" alive. And once our attention is engaged,
2) It also delivers the unvarnished truth.
Delivering the truth without aesthetics, without illumination, would be like that proverbial tree falling down in the forest and nobody noticing it. Does a tree really fall if there are no witnesses? We don't know.
Sheer aesthetic fireworks, on the other hand, without any truth, is disservice to the world. It is betrayal of our short existence here on this earth. It's the lowliest of the black-arts.
There should have been an Eleventh Commandment: "Thou Shalt Not Mesmerize For the Sake of Self-Aggrandizement." Eventually all good writers come to learn appreciate the "Eleventh Commandment."
Here is an author that I discovered today; a writer who has a full grasp of both of these important prose rules and boy, can she write!
She is Manohla Dargis of the New York Times and she is writing "only" movie reviews. But they are complete. Perfect. Because what she writes is both beautiful and true.
Here is the beauty part:
"Played by a tamped-down, amused and amusing Al Pacino, Willy Bank is a pint-size Trump in oversize eyeglasses and a burnt-orange tan that makes him look like an Hermès handbag..."
With a description that visual and strong, you can immediately see this character right before your very own eyes. That's power copy.
But that's not all. Dargis continues:
"But that’s how everything rolls in Mr. Soderbergh’s Vegas: smoothly and sleekly and low to the ground, without obvious effort and, most important, without ugliness... When Danny Ocean and his Boy Friday, Rusty Ryan (Mr. Pitt), stroll across a casino floor, you never see the cigarette burns on the carpeting or the middle-aged men quietly weeping after the night and their savings are long gone."
Wow! That's Sociology of Vegas 101 in a few sentences.
Writing well does not need to sacrifice from the truth. Or, inversely, writing the truth need not be an exercise in eating broken glass. Manohla Dargis is one of the many excellent writers out there today proving the point.
1) It brings up "the world" alive. And once our attention is engaged,
2) It also delivers the unvarnished truth.
Delivering the truth without aesthetics, without illumination, would be like that proverbial tree falling down in the forest and nobody noticing it. Does a tree really fall if there are no witnesses? We don't know.
Sheer aesthetic fireworks, on the other hand, without any truth, is disservice to the world. It is betrayal of our short existence here on this earth. It's the lowliest of the black-arts.
There should have been an Eleventh Commandment: "Thou Shalt Not Mesmerize For the Sake of Self-Aggrandizement." Eventually all good writers come to learn appreciate the "Eleventh Commandment."
Here is an author that I discovered today; a writer who has a full grasp of both of these important prose rules and boy, can she write!
She is Manohla Dargis of the New York Times and she is writing "only" movie reviews. But they are complete. Perfect. Because what she writes is both beautiful and true.
Here is the beauty part:
"Played by a tamped-down, amused and amusing Al Pacino, Willy Bank is a pint-size Trump in oversize eyeglasses and a burnt-orange tan that makes him look like an Hermès handbag..."
With a description that visual and strong, you can immediately see this character right before your very own eyes. That's power copy.
But that's not all. Dargis continues:
"But that’s how everything rolls in Mr. Soderbergh’s Vegas: smoothly and sleekly and low to the ground, without obvious effort and, most important, without ugliness... When Danny Ocean and his Boy Friday, Rusty Ryan (Mr. Pitt), stroll across a casino floor, you never see the cigarette burns on the carpeting or the middle-aged men quietly weeping after the night and their savings are long gone."
Wow! That's Sociology of Vegas 101 in a few sentences.
Writing well does not need to sacrifice from the truth. Or, inversely, writing the truth need not be an exercise in eating broken glass. Manohla Dargis is one of the many excellent writers out there today proving the point.
Wednesday, June 6, 2007
Two Inspiring Success Stories
Did You Know That...?
John Paul DeJoria, Co-Founder and CEO of "John Paul Mitchell Systems" which sells $800 million worth of hair products a year, was not always rich. "I was homeless twice in my life, mainly because I was too proud to ask anybody for help. In my early twenties I was divorced from my first wife. I had my son; I had no place to live. I went out and collected Coke bottles at night. I'd cash them in at the drugstore. You'd only get two or three cents in those days. We lived off a very skimpy diet in those days, rice, potatoes, cereal, macaroni and cheese or canned soup, but we lived."
Bill France, Jr., the man who single-handedly invented NASCAR stock car racing and helped build the Daytona race track, used to sweep the floors in his youth to make ends meet. When Daytona International Speedtrack was built in the late 1950s, France helped grade the earth, erect the stands, and even cleaned the port-a-johns on the construction site. When France passed away as a multi-millionaire on June 4, 2007 he left behind not only a legacy of sports but one of perseverance and success as well.
John Paul DeJoria, Co-Founder and CEO of "John Paul Mitchell Systems" which sells $800 million worth of hair products a year, was not always rich. "I was homeless twice in my life, mainly because I was too proud to ask anybody for help. In my early twenties I was divorced from my first wife. I had my son; I had no place to live. I went out and collected Coke bottles at night. I'd cash them in at the drugstore. You'd only get two or three cents in those days. We lived off a very skimpy diet in those days, rice, potatoes, cereal, macaroni and cheese or canned soup, but we lived."
Bill France, Jr., the man who single-handedly invented NASCAR stock car racing and helped build the Daytona race track, used to sweep the floors in his youth to make ends meet. When Daytona International Speedtrack was built in the late 1950s, France helped grade the earth, erect the stands, and even cleaned the port-a-johns on the construction site. When France passed away as a multi-millionaire on June 4, 2007 he left behind not only a legacy of sports but one of perseverance and success as well.
Monday, June 4, 2007
Marketing Notes: "Qode" and Onion's Sharp Take on MySpace
This morning a reader of mine made me aware that QR Code technology indeed exists in the United States, provided by Qode, a Florida company (www.qode.com). Thanks Ken D. for the heads up.
You can download the Qode software to your cell phone and then point it to the "Qode" (a version of QR Code) and it will take you to the related web site. I guess these must be proprietary QR codes because you would not want any cell phone to point and get to the same web site, or would you? I'm still not sure who and how money is made through this technology. What is the business model? Probably that's also changing and evolving as well as we speak.
You can point your cell phone at a Qode and take a virtual tour of a house on sale, compare ticket prices, get all kinds of info on all kinds of products and services, etc. And the information can be customized by times zone and other variables as well. For example, pointing the phone at a Qode "stamp" at 9 a.m. in San Francisco would take you to a web page appropriate for the "morning zone" but the same stamp will take you to an "afternoon" page in New York.
SECOND ITEM:
The Onion, the nation's premiere satire paper, has published an item on May 31 that made me laugh out loud because it expressed my own cynicism about MySpace's claim as a "social space." How can people who do not even know one another claim to be one another's friends, by the thousands at a time? That I could never comprehend. And The onion slashed at the whole idea with the following new story:
"MySpace Outage Leaves Millions Friendless"!!! I really laughed hard at that one. "BEVERLY HILLS, CA -- An estimated 150 million people continued to be without social lives Tuesday as a massive system failure at MySpace.com entered its third day."
Fantastic humor but perhaps also a scary harbinger of things to come... could it be true? Why not?
You can download the Qode software to your cell phone and then point it to the "Qode" (a version of QR Code) and it will take you to the related web site. I guess these must be proprietary QR codes because you would not want any cell phone to point and get to the same web site, or would you? I'm still not sure who and how money is made through this technology. What is the business model? Probably that's also changing and evolving as well as we speak.
You can point your cell phone at a Qode and take a virtual tour of a house on sale, compare ticket prices, get all kinds of info on all kinds of products and services, etc. And the information can be customized by times zone and other variables as well. For example, pointing the phone at a Qode "stamp" at 9 a.m. in San Francisco would take you to a web page appropriate for the "morning zone" but the same stamp will take you to an "afternoon" page in New York.
SECOND ITEM:
The Onion, the nation's premiere satire paper, has published an item on May 31 that made me laugh out loud because it expressed my own cynicism about MySpace's claim as a "social space." How can people who do not even know one another claim to be one another's friends, by the thousands at a time? That I could never comprehend. And The onion slashed at the whole idea with the following new story:
"MySpace Outage Leaves Millions Friendless"!!! I really laughed hard at that one. "BEVERLY HILLS, CA -- An estimated 150 million people continued to be without social lives Tuesday as a massive system failure at MySpace.com entered its third day."
Fantastic humor but perhaps also a scary harbinger of things to come... could it be true? Why not?
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