The Year of the Horse: A Few Predictions about what this Year will Bring

Happy New Year everybody and welcome to year of the horse! I hope you all had a great new year and got to have a couple of drinks in the process. This year is going to be a great one for artists and the arts and if you allow me to be so bold I’m going to make some predictions about the year to come.

Film

2013 was the year of Breaking Bad. I don’t believe there was a soul outside of North Korea who wasn’t talking about this series. When the final episode aired Facebook was lit up with comments. Viewers have been accused to longer storytelling in a medium that allows characters to grow and chance.

This year television series will no longer play second fiddle to Iron Man 4 or the new Spiderman or Superman vs Batman. . . well maybe the latter, but you get my drift. Audiences have always craved good stories and Hollywood is going to give it to them by spending more money on the small screen. Bigger movie stars will be attracted to the quality storytelling that television shows will offer this year.

In addition, this is going to be the year Netflix really takes off by offering original content for download whenever the view wants it. House of Cards was a resounding success and expect Netflix to produce more films and shows this year. Netflix is the wave of the future and expect more companies to compete with them.

Books

Amazon will remain a giant in the publishing industry. They will continue to experiment with online publishing while the other publishers will lag behind. Their borrowing program Prime has become a huge success for Amazon and they will continue to expand the program.

Big bookstores will continue to falter as more people shop online and read e-books. More books are going to be bought at supermarkets or at vending machines like Red Box.

In Vancouver there is a program that has started where there are these small checkout kiosks on the side of the road where people can borrow or exchange used books, kind of like a mini-library. These kiosks are completely self-regulated and readers can borrow, take and return as they please. These mini-libraries have proven very successful and will expand to more cities.

This year the West Vancouver Library was one of the first in Canada to allow people to borrow Kindles which they could then download e-books onto. Borrowing e-book readers will become more popular in 2014 the pilot project will spread to other libraries.

Artists

This year will be great for filmmakers, authors and musicians. Social media will come into maturity and that will mean even more unprecedented opportunity for artists of all kinds. Artists can finally escape the gatekeepers that have dictated for so long what is popular and what is not.

Twitter was taken public in 2013, but unlike Facebook they did it right. Twitter will grow their platform aggressively and it is much better than Facebook for artists looking to widen their audience and meet new friends. Facebook is making it harder for your posts to appear in another person’s feed while Twitter’s simplicity is making it more popular. And with the common practice of retweeting it is much easier to go viral on Twitter and spread your work—whether it’s a song, a story or a film.

What do you think? Is there any predictions you think will come true in 2014 that I haven’t mentioned? Do you disagree with anything I have written? Drop me a line anytime because I would love to know your thoughts!

Please check out my new suspense novel Shame the Devil on sale at Amazon here.