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Eight years of Otaku Journalist, Part 1

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Eight years ago in November, I pressed “publish” on Otaku Journalist for the first time.

My first post, “Welcome” is so laughably vague compared with how specific I’ve gotten over the years. Today I’m not only occupying a specific niche topic; the main purpose that Otaku Journalist is still around is to help others with their niche (usually geeky) pursuits, too.

Eight years is an incredibly long time to have a blog. I’ve gone through four visual redesigns and countless directional shifts, in which I prioritize different topics. But I don’t blog in a vacuum and it’s always been my readers who have set the pace.

With that in mind, I’m going to take the rest of November to look at the 20 most popular posts of all time on Otaku Journalist, according to the Google Analytics tracker I first placed in the site code on November 14, 2009, and share my own insights.

Let’s get started with #20-16 this week. We’ll end with #5-1 on November 27.

20. How to start a career in anime journalism

Sept 29, 2010 | 7,458 pageviews

It goes without saying that the older an article is, the more time it had to build up pageviews to get on this list. But I think the reason this article is on the top 20 is because it stars three big names—Colette Bennett, Patrick Macias, and Gia Manry—who are still active in the industry.

Seven years later, Patrick Macias and I co-edited an edition of Otaku USA magazine. I still chat with Colette about our Korean skincare routines. Gia moved to my city to work for Bethesda, but I only recently met her and her husband for the first time at an Otakon happy hour. I will always be grateful to the three of them for giving me a chance when I was nobody, and somehow still popping up in my life now and then almost a decade later.

19. Why is the media covering Space Dandy while other anime get ignored?

Jan 6, 2014 | 7,627 pageviews

You’ll see that a lot of the top 20 have these question-format titles. This particular one has not aged well. Anime is practically mainstream these days, with the New York Times reviewing Makoto Shinkai’s Your Name like they would any other blockbuster.

Space Dandy marked a sea change in how anime was produced. More and more, we’re seeing not only simulcasts, but co-productions where an American company funds a Japanese anime project and the resulting production is equally marketed toward an overseas audience, too. To this end, I’ve noticed more and more shows have Crunchyroll listed as a producer.

18. The truth about Boys’ Love and rape culture

Oct 14, 2013 | 8,237 pageviews

The likely, ugly truth is that people Google “anime” and “rape” and this pops up. It’s definitely a fetish thing, but my article is clearly not about that and I guess people are still clicking.

Like most older posts, I read this one and think I could rework it to be better now. It takes a while to get to the point. It makes it sound like anime fans invented slash (actually, Star Trek fans probably did). Plus, I think at this point, I still felt a lot of shame about enjoying BL, while today I realize it’s a fairly simple concept—just one of many sexual fantasies people enjoy.

17. How to make money anime blogging

Aug 28 2013 | 9,066 pageviews

I believe this is the first time I ever wrote about affiliate marketing on Otaku Journalist. Today this is one of the cornerstones of my career, through Gunpla 101, my candle blog, and this one.

You can tell just how long it took me to develop techniques to make affiliate blogging profitable. First I made $150 in eight months, then I made $150 every month. (Now I make $150 every couple of days, or once a day around Christmas. For more on how I did that, you can read way more recent articles.) There are also some references to projects I no longer have, like my “free guides” which actually became the chapters of my book Otaku Journalism. I hope that my more recent courses and posts on the subject surpass this post’s popularity, because I have absolutely refined my blog money-making techniques a lot since then.

16. How to write anime reviews people actually want to read

Dec 17, 2012 | 9,469 pageviews

Amazingly, I wrote this post before I was even writing reviews professionally. (I started as an Anime News Network reviewer in 2014.) So this advice isn’t using the full extent of my knowledge and experience on writing reviews week after week for four years. Some of it I don’t even agree with anymore (who cares about audience reception, actually).

Even in 2012 I knew that it was important to give reviews a recognizable grade, but this is the hardest part for me even now. I wrote a blog post about it in 2015: My Biggest Weakness: Grading Reviews. I tend to write a review that says what I really think and then give it a higher grade than it deserves to get the hecklers (who are just coming to check the grade and not to read the whole review) off my back. But lately I’ve been working with my editor to give more critical grades that better reflect what the episodes deserve.

Since this is NaNoWriMo, I’m going to conclude each post this month with my word count as of the night before this post went up: 8,253. Still on track!

Be scared of something and do it anyway

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Last month I taped a segment with Fox News. I haven’t watched any of it and I don’t plan to.

When I tell people that, even my loved ones who understand me best, they seem puzzled because I’m not shy. I speak loudly with plenty of inflection, and I love trying to entertain other people and make them laugh. I make conversation with everyone from my Lyft driver to my dental hygienist. I’m an introvert, but my friends say I’m the most extroverted introvert there is.

But here’s the thing: I really don’t like how I sound. I’ve never gotten over my voice deepening so much when I was a teen. In a few short years I went from being a featured singer in the school choir to being mistaken for my dad when I picked up the phone. That’d be unsettling for anyone, but when you’re a petite five-foot-one woman, it definitely feels weird.

Disliking the sound of your own voice is not unique. It’s because we hear sounds differently when they come from inside ourselves. According to the Washington Post, hearing your voice or seeing your face from a second person perspective elicits a reaction similar to disgust. Time Magazine goes a step further and suggests hearing your recorded, unfamiliar-sounding voice is akin to body dysmorphia. Maybe one of my trans or nonbinary readers could weigh in?

Even so, I do not avoid opportunities to speak, and that’s why I think it’s hard to convince others that I don’t like my voice. I am on a lot of podcasts. I have been interviewed on the radio and for documentaries. I even sometimes enjoy public speaking, especially when it’s somewhere I feel comfortable, like when I gave a talk on my concept of Otaku Journalism at Crunchyroll Expo (which should be on YouTube pretty soon, but even when it is I won’t watch that either).

In short, I don’t have a great voice. I am not a naturally gifted public speaker, or somebody who started out liking it. But through time and practice, I’ve become somebody who can do it on command and even have fun.

Recording equipment set up in my living room.

I think we use “introvert” and “extrovert” as convenient excuses to avoid stuff, when they’re only labels meant to define your natural inclinations. There’s no reason an introvert can’t become a performer and there’s nothing preventing an extrovert from choosing and enjoying a more solitary profession, and letting their social side come out on weekends. I especially hate the smug memes about why introverts (it’s usually introverts) are secretly better.

The way I see it, we all have different strengths and weaknesses, likes and dislikes—and far more than you could fit into the two rigid categories of introvert and extrovert (or the eight personality types of Meyers Briggs, for example). These are good starting points, but they are not the end-all be-all of our personal definitions.

Yes, we are naturally better at some things and worse at others. But if we avoid the things we want to, we’ll never grow, we’ll never get better, and we’ll feel bad about the stuff we never did and wonder what might have been. Life in your comfort space is nice, and an excellent place to revisit when you’re overwhelmed, but if you spend all your time there, it gets boring.

I want to encourage you to be scared of things and still do them. Heck, to be bad at things and still try them! I’m trying to be a good example of this. Which is one of the reasons why I am in Japanese class, even with my bad accent and the fact that I have to study twice as much outside of class to keep up with everyone else. Which is why I run races even though I was always the slowest kid in gym class. Which is why I go on TV even when I’m scared to watch it and see how badly I definitely screwed it up.

It may sound like torture to fill your life with uncomfortable, difficult things, but you can start with one thing at a time. I don’t want to live a life where I limit myself to only doing the things I’m good at, and I don’t think you want to, either. To quote Jake the Dog in Adventure Time, sucking at something is the first step to becoming sort of good at something. What will you try today?

P.S. In the time since I wrote this, I signed a contract to do a writing + acting gig. I haven’t acted since high school, so I’ll keep you posted on how that turns out.

See also:

The like list: Recommendations for work and life

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I hate being sick. Over the last few days I’ve had to cancel all my plans while I slip in and out of a nagging low-grade fever. That’s why there wasn’t an Otaku Links this week.

In a rare moment of lucidity in which I sit down to write this week’s Otaku Journalist post, I don’t feel like tackling anything all that in-depth. No, let’s talk about simple, happy things. Today let me tell you about the stuff that makes my life a little easier, even when I don’t feel great.

Here’s the Otaku Journalist recommendation list, full of my favorite stuff I’ve utilized this year. Most of these are not affiliate links, which is unusual for me, but it turns out my favorite things are not products so much as services. Check them out:

Crunchyroll. Of course this fantastic streaming service gets the first shout-out of the list, because I haven’t done much for the past few days except watch One Piece. I use Crunchyroll to review airing anime, but my real guilty pleasure is watching its immense archive of super old stuff, from Super Gals! to Endless Waltz. I can’t believe Crunchyroll doesn’t pay me to recommend their service, but at $60 a year, I don’t really need them to.

One Story. I love short stories, especially those of Philip K. Dick and Flannery O’Connor, but I had a hard time finding a literary journal that I could stick with—until I found this one, which simply selects and sends you one amazing short story per month. I’ve been a member for over three years now, so I’ve spent some of my sick days re-reading some of the 50 I already have. It’s $21 for a year, but I usually renew around the holidays when it only costs $12.

Shield Security. Over the holidays, somebody in France hacked Otaku Journalist, which was inconvenient, to say the least. Then my friend (and sometimes contractor) Crimm told me about this free WordPress plugin. It allows me to use two-factor authentication with all my sites, hide and spoof my login page, and a number of other hack-proof solutions. While I still hear about hacking attempts (the plugin notifies me ASAP), none have been successful since.

Google Drive. Speaking of amazing free tools. I use this to write everything from blog posts to books and keep them all organized. I love the “suggesting” feature for when I’m editing (or being edited) and want the writer to be able to view each suggested change instead of blindly accepting it. I love the offline feature, both for helping me focus without getting distracted by Twitter and for allowing me to retain backups on my machine no matter what happens.

Poppin Softcover Notebook. There’s still no substitute for the ultimate portable writing studio—pen and paper. (Though after this many years of primarily typing, my handwriting is a cramped chicken scratch.) I do the majority of my creative writing this way, otherwise I spend too much time falling down Wikipedia holes for “research.” I used to use Moleskine notebooks, but 1) I stopped being able to find their softcover version and 2) it costs $24! This is only $9. 

Get Bullish. Jen Dziura is the kind of woman who runs a business from her cell phone while being prepped for a c-section. I find her business advice both extremely unrelatable and deeply inspiring, because if I do barely half of what Jen does, I’m still ahead of the curve. I’ve also met dozens of entrepreneurs in my city through a mutual interest in Jen’s articles, sold one of my books through her shop, and will be attending her BullCon conference in DC this year.

Bad with Money Podcast. I find the gym extremely boring. But I still want to be able to open jars by myself, so I tough it out a couple times a week with the help of some truly interesting podcasts. My favorite is Gaby Dunn’s half entertainment, half education show about money smarts and the issues with today’s financial system. Weirdly it has not only helped me become a better saver, but has helped me find cool TV shows and books to read thanks to the many entertainment industry guests Gaby has on the show.

Baggu. $10 for a friggin grocery bag? Yes, but what if I told you I bought my Baggu bags six years ago now and they still don’t need to be replaced? They’re washable, waterproof, and can be compactly folded. I keep one in my purse at all times just in case I need extra storage.

Moo cards. My Otaku Journalist business cards (front side visible here) are thick, perfectly square cardstock art. I don’t mind splurging on eye-catching cards because I usually only hand them out at anime cons and as a result have a ton left from ordering back in January 2016.

The Billfold. This is my favorite regular read. Since becoming a freelancer I’ve not only become comfortable talking about money, but honestly started to enjoy it. I love the voyeuristic pleasure of learning about how other freelancers do money. Mostly I was lured over when Nicole Dieker, the geeky writer and musician behind Hello The Future, became an editor for this site. Actually, I have my first freelance article for them going up tomorrow—about my trip to Japan!

TSA Pre. I went to Anime Boston with my friend Andrew this year. As I zipped through TSA Pre, he had to take off his belt and his shoes and eventually get a pat down like a common criminal. Don’t get me wrong—security theater is stupid and I’m old enough to remember what flying was like before 2001. But sometimes you get tired of protesting the system and just want to get to your gate before literally everyone else. This was especially easy for me to get around to because my closest airport is walking distance, but I imagine eventually everyone will have TSA Pre and it won’t be any more convenient than anything else.

Quickbooks Self-Employed. I used to manage my finances entirely through Google Sheets, which meant I had to manually type in everything I spent, saved, and earned. Every time I’d fall behind or forget something, I’d have an accounting error that would be a huge headache at the end of the month or, worse, at tax time. For $5 a month, Q S-E connects with my bank, my credit card, PayPal, and everything else so I only have to check every month if I want! (I still check near daily because old habits die hard, but it hardly needs any input from me.)

Let’s Freckle. I hate tracking time and I hate invoicing, so this is a problem I’m happy to throw money at. I turn on my timer and get to work, pausing only to switch which client I’m working for—and just hit “stop” when I’m ready to log hours. When it’s the end of the month, I can send each client an invoice of all the hours I’ve logged, which is automatically generated for me. Before Let’s Freckle, I was so bad at time tracking I’m sure I undercharged all my clients because I despised the process and was too scared to check if I’d made an error in my favor.

Spearmint Altoids. OK, this last one’s an affiliate link. When you are with me and I offer you an Altoid, it is not because your breath stinks. It’s because I assume everyone likes these as much as I do. I usually have two tins in my purse at any time, and buy them in bulk (the way drugstores do) at least twice a year. They calm my stomach, they relieve my anxiety, they do everything except make my breath smell any better. (Except temporarily? Gum is way better for breath freshening.) I really hope I feel better soon because just the idea of one of these makes my sore throat burn, and I really miss getting my fix. Better than some vices, right?

This is a sick woman’s happy post. Please contribute by posting things that make YOU happy in the comments. Let me know if we have any favorites in common, too!

Top image via this post. Really just used it because it had Altoids in it.

On failure and knowing when to quit (P.S. Asuna is free now)

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Late last year, I decided to give myself a bit of a digital makeover. I left my last part-time web design gig with revamped WordPress skills, and even as I ditched the job I still wanted to make WordPress design and development a part of my career.

I added a Web Design section to Otaku Journalist. I created a portfolio site to showcase some of my previous work. And, most time-consumingly, in order to prove that I knew what I was talking about, I built my own WordPress theme from scratch.

It’s been five months, and I have to say, business is slow. I do have several recurring web clients, but not because I advertised my availability online—I got them all through work connections. Every now and then somebody fills out my “get a quote” form, but after pricing out a potential contract in the three figures, I never hear from them again.

It’s easy to ignore the web business failure, because I’m still getting web clients, just not the way I planned. As for the theme, Asuna, I’ve sold exactly one copy.

That stings because I spent more than 20 hours building Asuna to be absolutely perfect. If you check out the demo, you can see I gave it 13 points of customization out of the box, while your average WordPress theme only has one or two.

However, if before putting in that 20 hours I had taken one hour to do a little research, I would have noticed a couple major hints this wasn’t going to sell:

  • Most anime bloggers who use WordPress have a free theme, not a paid one.
  • Heck, most bloggers in general don’t pay for themes, since so many are free.
  • Not as many people like Asuna from Sword Art Online as I previously thought.

Long story short, enough is enough. Starting today, you can get Asuna for free.

Get it for free already!

I’m actually excited about this because it’ll mean more people than me are trying and testing my theme. Plus, since I’m a professional and you don’t have to worry about it being buggy or broken, I’ll at least be able to feel pride in my well done work helping people out.

More than that, I feel like a weight has been lifted from my shoulders. I was trying so hard for so long to make it happen, trying out different price points and advertising. Now I can give up and expend my energy elsewhere.

Additionally, Asuna has helped me find a clearer answer to the question, “What is valuable?” Just because I spent hours agonizing over it didn’t make Asuna a valuable product. On the flipside, just because writing is easy and fun for me doesn’t mean it doesn’t have value. This is why I even monetize projects I do for enjoyment.

Asuna was a failed project long before I decided, this week, to quit promoting it. So when in a project’s lifespan do you decide to give up? As soon as it starts to become more trouble than it’s worth. Asuna was a ton of work up front, and then nothing but minor maintenance and updates since then, so I was able to push it to the back burner in terms of time investments. Really, it’s the mental and emotional investment I freed myself from when I decided to start giving it away.

If Asuna had succeeded, I wanted it to be the first in a series of WordPress themes I design from scratch. Maybe I’ll still make another (I’ve got a design concept based on Holo from Spice & Wolf waiting in the wings) but it won’t be as a part of my business. I’ve closed the book on this attempt so I can free myself up to try new projects. Sure, they might be failures, too, but what if they aren’t? The only way I’ll know for sure is if I try.

Lead photo by Markus Spiske.

On passion projects and working for free

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I’ve launched a lot of new products and businesses over the years. But Anime Origin Stories is the first new endeavor I’d characterize as a passion project.

Normally when I start something, I think, “OK, how am I going to fund this?” When I wrote Build Your Anime Blog, for example, I priced the book and limited my time working on it so that once it came out, my royalties would amount to a decent hourly wage.

I didn’t do any of this for Anime Origin Stories, because I didn’t think it would be very big. (Usually I survey my audience and test if business ideas are viable, but not this time.) I impulsively decided anime fandom needed an archival project, and that I, with my master’s in journalism, was going to be the one to make it happen!

But I was wrong about interest. Anime Origin Stories turned out to be very big! I’ve gotten more than 105 responses and counting now. And because I write custom follow-up questions to each participant, I’m not very fast at getting through them.

Over the weekend, I managed to plow through 30+ surveys and write follow-up questions, and it’s only because on Saturday, I hardly did anything else! I’d say that overall, the time I’ve spent making the site, coming up with questions, and posting stories totals more than 20 hours. I’m putting as much time and effort into it as one of my paid gigs.

I’m not saying this to make you feel bad for me. Not only did I choose to invest my time in this way, but I’m having a blast doing it. Everyone’s stories are so intensely personal and yet entirely relatable—it’s almost like we all have a hobby in common or something.

Still, it’s the opposite of what I normally do. In the past, I’ve turned my hobbies—writing, watching anime, building Gunpla, even lighting candles, into revenue streams. For Anime Origin Stories, I’ve turned interviewing, a thing I usually do for money, into an unpaid pastime.

First, let me tell you why I normally monetize everything I’m interested in. My secret is that I want to minimize the time I spend working and maximize the time I spend actually living life. I figure if I can turn the things that give me joy into income, I won’t have to work as much.

I realize this doesn’t work for everyone. Upon hearing this, some people tell me that turning their hobbies into jobs would make it so they could never enjoy their hobbies again. But I am obviously not one of those people. I know I need money to live, and I know I have a finite amount of time alive, so I got creative with where that money is coming from.

Like many people who have not studied economics in the slightest, I dream of the day everyone gets a universal basic income. I fantasize about the things people would create just for the sake of it, not because they have a paycheck on the line. Until that day comes, (or more likely, doesn’t), I’d say money is the largest motivator I have to get up and do things. But—it’s not the only reason I do stuff, and Anime Origin Stories is proof of that.

Still, work is work, whether you get paid or not, and I’d rather get paid. Considering how much of my time it’s taking, I will be including affiliate links on Anime Origin Stories soon, most likely in the sidebar. I’ll also be working on a paid ebook that compiles the first 100 interviews—plus some original research by me about each decade—for sale later this year.

While money can certainly taint a project, I don’t think it does by default. I don’t think Gunpla 101 is less genuine or speaks less to my belief that “Gunpla is for everyone” because it also happens to link to the tools I use and kits I build. I don’t think, had I launched the site with zero affiliate links, people would say, “Wow, Lauren is so noble and self-sacrificing.” I don’t think anyone is saying that about Anime Origin Stories now.

If you’re in the same boat, and your hobby has turned into as much work as a second job, don’t worry about being judged for adding a monetization factor. When my friends launch projects that include paid products or Patreon, I’m thrilled to support them. I’d be even more excited if, thanks to support like mine, they could do their thing full time.

And finally, thanks for helping to make Anime Origin Stories a success to the point that it compels me to write a post like this.