Sean CW Korsgaard Profile picture
Award-winning freelance reporter, author, US Army veteran and constant adventurer, seeking great stories and an audience to hear them.
Rich Harrison Profile picture 1 subscribed
Jul 25 4 tweets 3 min read
This is another often ignored factor in why book sales are declining among men: Cover art.
Publishing started swapping out flashy, splashy covers for generic ones, to cut costs, and because focus groups claimed it made books appeal more to female readers.

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Countless examples exist, but not one exists where it helped sales.
What's especially maddening: Focus groups be damned, I know plenty of women readers hate this change too.
Thinking a woman won't buy a book because it has a dragon/rocket ship on the cover is way more sexist.


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Apr 22 31 tweets 11 min read
Everybody on Twitter wants to offer their hot takes on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
Fine, here's the correct one. Mine.
Short version? Terrible actions that spared us far worse ones. Such is war.
Long version? Lets start with two words.
Downfall
Ketsugō Image It's become popular these days to decry the bombings, understandable given we know much more about the consequences of nuclear warfare today than we did in 1945.
By saying it was justified, I don't mean to say that what happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki wasn't horrible. Image
Dec 23, 2022 8 tweets 3 min read
That's another curious move by Disney, because initially thier acquisition of Marvel and Lucasfilm was to close the one weakness in their multigenerational family approach, by giving them something to make Disney appeal to young boys as much as princess musicals do young girls. That was part of why in the early 2000s you saw Disney desperately trying to turn everything from Tron to The Lone Ranger to John Carter of Mars into franchises.

Turns out, buying two existing franchises that already appealed to boys, Marvel and Star Wars/Lucasfilm, was easier.
Dec 23, 2022 16 tweets 4 min read
Half of Disney's successes and failures can be pinned on making the same move that helped and then crippled both comic books and YA lit before them.

Dumping kids/families in favor of childless adult superfans with cash.

Issue is... there are always more kids. Not so with fans. Comics enjoyed one decade of wild success after dumping kids and spinner racks for collectors and the direct market.

Then the 90s crash it sparked damn near killed the entire industry, and Scholastic and manga eat thier lunch by focusing on selling to the kids they abandoned.
Dec 20, 2022 6 tweets 4 min read
Today I turned 33. I am celebrating as I usually do, with a big steak and rewatching Zulu and the Lord of the Rings.

My first anthology, #WorldsLongLost also turns two weeks old today.

Buy a copy if you haven't already, and leave a review. Ot also makes a great holiday gift! Image For would be outlets and reviewers, I am open to interview and review copies are available.

Here's some of the promo work I've done for the book already:

My coeditor Christopher Ruocchio and I spoke with @paulsemel about what went into the anthology.

paulsemel.com/exclusive-inte…
Jul 19, 2019 14 tweets 5 min read
The great thing about the #Apollo50th is that there have been hundreds of beautiful articles from dozens of authors and outlets. Heck, I even wrote a couple of them.

I don’t know which of them has been the best, but I think this bad hot take from the times is the worst. There are multiple reasons why offering praise to the Soviet space program on the eve of the #Apollo50th is in very poor taste, but one of the biggest is that they literally only did these milestones for propaganda purposes.