This evening is the annual Young Women’s meeting (which I always associate with General Conference), and General Conference itself begins next week. Over the past few years I’ve come up with a few things that I focus on as I listen to each Conference, in addition to the messages, and I’m now wondering:
What do you listen for when you listen to Conference?
Continue reading “What Should We Look For in General Conference?”
The latest (v. 42, no. 4) issue of Dialogue features another important Mormon film article by Randy Astle* titled “What Is Mormon Cinema? Defining the Genre.” Astle pulls together work by Mormon (Preston Hunter) and non-Mormon film critics (Hamid Naficy, Rick Altman) in an attempt to position Mormon film as somewhere (Astle says “positioned in the interstices”) between genre and ethnic cinema.
The article is available via a subscription to Dialogue, but Randy has generously allowed me to excerpt a few passages here at AMV. To start out with I want to present his basic summary of the second point of his two-part purpose for the article (the first is to offer up the case for “approaching Mormon film from a taxonomical perspective” — I’m going to assume that most of AMV’s readers already believe in the merits of such an approach, or at least allow that such an approach can be a useful exercise in literary criticism). Continue reading “Randy Astle on “What is Mormon Cinema?””
In school, my marketing professors taught that businesses would avoid a lot of errors if they would introduce new products only after studying the intended market for the product first. Too many products are created only to find that there isn’t a market for them — no one wants to purchase them.
Its kind of like the idea “start with the end in mind,” execpt you have to do research to figure out the end first.
Marketing experts agree that the proper way to create a product is to start with a market study. Which group of people would be interested in which features of a potential product and how much would they be willing to pay for that product. Knowing this, the producer can decide whether or not the product is worth the effort. Or, just as importantly, what features or benefits the product should have to distinguish it from other products competing for the same customers. Once the study is complete, then, they argue, the product can be designed to meet what the market wants.
So, is this the way that a writer should plan out the books he writes?
Continue reading “Which Comes First, the Writing or the Market?”
The April 2008 issue of Christianity Today featured an article on the changes that have affected Christian retail over the last two decades. The description is surprisingly similar to what has happened to LDS retailers — so much so that I thought the article’s claims bore some analysis here.
The article indicates that the CBA, the former Christian Booksellers Association, “has reported a drop from more than 3,000 members out of an estimated 4,000 Christian retail stores in the mid-1980s to a mere 1,813 members today out of an estimated 2,800 stores in existence.” The same kind of drop has been seen by the LDSBA, which has seen attendance by bookstores at its annual convention drop by half.
Unfortunately, the article is long on description of the problems and short on answers. But there are a few ideas that may help LDS retailers improve.
Last week William, in the comments to his post on a reader-oriented ecommerce site, suggested that the site he was proposing needed to be restricted to just fiction. While such a decision should probably be left to whoever starts such a site (William made it clear he isn’t taking on the project), I disagree. It seems to me a comprehensive site is one of the things we are missing.
A Motley Vision 