Keynote Speakers Friday Night

When I heard that each of the keynote speakers were given time to speak on a topic of their choice, I shook my head. It will never work.

Randy McCharles organizes the conference, and is obviously smarter than me, because it did work.

For the purposes of this blog I am going to focus on two points that were brought up by different speakers.

Mark Leslie http://www.markleslie.ca/

Director of Self Publishing & Author Relations for Kobo, Yes that KOBO!

Mark is an engaging speaker that knows his topics. He also understands how to speak to a variety of audiences. It is great to see someone with his people skills at a conference. I bumped into him in the hallway and chatted. I asked him why he was at this conference. Implying wasn’t there somewhere else he should be? His answer summed up why I am returning to “When Words Collide” – it is a great conference with many unique features.

Point One – The “BOOK” has died many times.

It died when radio arrived, it died when TV arrived, it died when the internet arrived.

In fact it did not die – it had babies. The advent of the new technologies that supposedly would finally kill the book, actually gave birth to more books. People want to travel with many books now, They want to have their library with them. With devices like KOBO this can happen. More importantly to me is my Mom can finally get any book and read it because she can increase the font size! Never underestimate the impact of one small piece of technology. The ability to increase font is one of those great, impact-full changes.

Brandon Sanderson brings out our second point. I would be remiss if I did not encourage you to go and listen to Brandon Sanderson if you can. Not only an “EPIC” author, but and enlightening speaker.

Point Two – The myth that 90% of everything out there is crap.

There is an internet myth that implies that 90% of everything out there is crap. We apply this axiom to everything. It is simply not true. Brandon illustrated this by looking at movie reviews. Roger Ebert one of the finest movie critics out there reviewed everything; it was his job. If totaled, the movies up he liked was 60% of all movies he watched!

Not satisfied with result alone Brandon looked at the reviewer from Rotten Tomatoes who did not like the movie “Return of the King”. The most liked movie on Rotten Tomatoes, I think, This person didn’t  like the Return of the King, but when Brandon totaled up all the likes and dislikes for this reviewer over the year he was just under liking….you guessed it 60% likes.

The conclusion is that we need to be more respectful and not let the internet mentality of “CRAP” creep into all of our life. 90% of everything out there is not crap. Learn to know the difference between something you don’t like and crap.

Be Well – dcd