Blog – The ExhaustNotes Blog

Be a Professional Writer For ExhaustNotes!

Berk and I were discussing the challenges of taking on additional writers here at ExhaustNotes. We print new stories about every two days and while we appreciate our loyal readers it wouldn’t hurt to drag a bunch more subscribers into the fold. We’d like ExhaustNotes’ popularity to reflect the quality of the content and to increase ad revenue to match our prodigious output. Plus, younger, less jaded motorcyclists who actually like all the electronic junk manufacturers strap onto motorcycles would be kind of cool.

So we’ve decided to try a thing: Berk says the best way to increase Internet hits and ad revenue is to publish interesting stories from insightful and entertaining writers on a regular basis. To do that, ExhaustNotes will need more than just two guys typing in their spare time. We may need three. Or four. Or more.

I don’t know about you but I’m ready for some fresh new perspectives on motorcycling and with Berk pushing 72 and me pushing a crusty 65 we tend to give fresh new perspectives a bit of the old stinkeye. You’ll notice we type a lot of dream bike segments and none of them are modern bikes. Do not stand on our lawns.

Perspectives don’t have to be young to be fresh, just different. Let’s hear how you love the way your motorcycle makes all the power and braking decisions for the rider. Hey, you still get to steer… for now. Tell us about the biker lifestyle and how it differs from the cosplay actors at comic-com. Exactly how do you use a 200 horsepower, full-race motorcycle on the street and stay alive? Tell us in an interesting way and you’ll get paid for doing it!

How much will you make?

Glad you asked: ExhaustNotes uses a simple formula to calculate how much we earn. We take the total site income from advertisers and Google ads and subtract the expense of running the site. That gives us a pool of money to pay the writers. You won’t get paid by the word. For example, if revenue after expenses is $100 and we publish 100 stories then each story is worth $1. Now, say Berk writes 70 stories and I write 30 stories then Berk makes $70 and I make $30. This is the part where you new writers will come in: If we publish 5 stories from you then the split will reflect your contribution. Berk divvies the money up twice a year, assuming there’s revenue.

On the surface this seems self-defeating, since you’ll be making the same amount per story as me and Berk then we must be losing money. Maybe not. The idea is to increase revenue, build the reader base and create a bigger pie. If it works we’ll all get filthy rich and go live with the prostitutes. Okay, maybe I can’t go live with the prostitutes but one of you guys might be able to.

We understand the unfairness of a 3000-word story earning the same as a 700-word story but life is full of unfair situations. Writing for ExhaustNotes is just one more. Try to picture this whole ExhaustNotes website thing as a grand experiment that we are opening up to a wider pool of participants. Who knows what will happen?

If you’ve already been a guest columnist for ExhaustNotes you won’t get any money from your past stories. That ship has sailed. This new deal is going forward from today. Mike Huber’s Romanian travel story is the very first one of our new system.

A few other things you should know: Berk is going to be the editor-in-chief and his word is final, meaning submitting is not the same as getting published. Punctuation and grammar matter. If Berk has to re-write your story to make it intelligible he probably won’t use it. ExhaustNotes only pays if we publish your story and we pay poorly at that. You retain all rights to your work and can do whatever you want with it. Remember: You are not going to make a ton of money doing this. If you feel our accounting methods are not strenuous enough don’t submit a story.

Having the proper mindset is critical. Berk and I write ExhaustNotes for the fun of it. If you factor in our time, we lose money doing it and I see no good reason why you shouldn’t lose money writing for us, too. Any beer money that happens to come our way is gravy that we use to buy mini bikes and reloading components. Topics are mostly motorcycle related with guns and construction materials thrown in, but any topic that is interesting will be considered. Everyone has to start somewhere; I started my writing career with a simple letter to the editor of The Key West Citizen. Let’s see what starts your writing career.

If you have a story you’d like to propose on motorcycles, guns, Baja, reloading, great rides, great roads, or any other topic you think would be of interest to our readers, email us with your story idea at info@exhaustnotes.us.

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Coming up…more good stuff!

We’ve got a bunch of cool stuff coming your way in the next few weeks.

I’m working on a detailed tutorial on how to time a revolver…it’s my beloved Model 60. It seems the more things go south on that old war horse, the more I love it. This time, the revolver went out of time (that means it’s firing with the chambers misaligned with the barrel), and the way to correct that is by fitting a new hand. That’s the piece you see in the big photo above, showing the well-worn 60-year-old original hand on the left and a new one on the right (the hand is the part that advances the cylinder for each shot). Good times. Did I mention I love that gun?

I’ll be on a bunch of secret missions in the next few months. I’m visiting Janus Motorcycles in the next few weeks and I’m going to ride their new Halcyon 450. You may remember I rode with the Janus guys in Baja three years ago (wow, those three years went by quickly). The Janus trip was a hoot and I was blown away by the quality of these small motorcycles.

I’ll be in Gettysburg soon…four score and seven years ago, and you know the rest. Gettysburg was the turning point, and the bloodiest battle of the Civil War. I’m looking forward to the photo ops, and you’ll see the Nikon’s output right here.

And another: Hershey, Pennsylvania…an entire town blanketed in the aroma of good chocolate, streetlights that look like Hershey kisses, calories galore, and tasty treats. That will be a sweet ride!

Folks love listicles. There are a dozen or so reasons why a Timex is as good as a Rolex. That one will generate a few comments, and we’ll be bringing them to you here.

How about the Indianapolis Motor Speedway? You’ll see it right here on ExNotes. Good stuff. Yep, we’ll be there, too.

Bill’s Bike Barn…yet another vintage moto museum. Never heard of it? Well, you will!

More gun stuff? Absolutely. Fine walnut and blue steel. I’ve got a cool story about the most beautiful stock I’ve ever seen on an absolutely incredible .257 Weatherby Magnum Ruger No. 1.

Look for a follow up on the Shoei helmet Gresh wears these days…it’s in the mix, too.

A road trip to New Mexico, and that means a visit with Joe 1 (or is he Joe 2?) and another video or two. Gresh has a bunch of motorcycles. Maybe I’ll borrow one and he and I will go for a ride. Who knows?

And more rides on my effervescent and exciting Enfield, one of the best bargains in biking (we’ll have a listicle coming up bargain bikes, too). Now that the left-leaning evil time suck (i.e., Facebook) is in the rear view mirror, I have lots more time. I’m doing what the Good Lord intended, and that’s riding my motorcycle and writing about it.

Stay tuned.

How Much Milk Is Left?

A few weeks ago I read a Wall Street Journal opinion piece by Peter Funt (of the Candid Camera show). His article was on the pandemic lockdowns and isolation inducing more folks to publish their memoirs, and Funt made the case that this was not such a good thing. Most memoirs are God-awful boring.

That got me to thinking about the adventure touring genre. You know, the books, blogs, videos, and endless Facebook posts and forums about adventure rides.

Adventure rides.

We used to call a motorcycle ride a motorcycle ride. Now they are all “adventure” rides. And we don’t tell a story or do a bike test. Now, it’s a reveal. Harley is going to introduce a new bike in few days. But it’s not a new model announcement. It’s a “reveal.”

Ten to twenty years ago, the place to go to read good riding stories was ADVRider.com and their Rides page (back then, the stories and photography were actually good) and HorizonsUnlimited.com. Now it’s mostly videos, Facebook, and blogs. There’s too much of this (and I say that as guy who writes a blog). I seldom view any of it. Which is not to say you should stop reading ExNotes. We’re different, you know. We’ve never had a “reveal” (other than that one unfortunate wardrobe accident in China) and we never will.

All of the above begs the question: How much milk is left in the adventure riding cow?

Fads come in waves, and a surefire way to know that a wave is dissipating on shore is when a big company tries to surf in on the little bit of surf that’s left. Witness the Pan America, Harley’s too much, too late entry into the ADV world. Harley wants to compete with the BMW GS, KTM, and Ducati high end ADV bikes.

It’s hard for me to see how Harley is going to prevail. For starters, my feeling is that most folks who ride big V-twin cruisers (folks who form the bulk of Harley’s current customer base) have little interest in adventure touring. The premise is that Harley will attract a new crop of customers, presumably drawing the sheeple who would have bought BMWs, or KTMs, or Ducatis. Color me skeptical, but I just don’t see it happening.

No, what’s happening is a sea change, not an opportunity to do a little surfing in a dying market. The world moves in fads, with each fad having about a ten-to-twenty-year life, and we’re due for a new one. I just don’t know what it is. Consider this:

- In the 1960s, it was British vertical twins. Those were cool years and the Triumphs, BSAs, Nortons, and Enfields of the day were cool bikes.
- In the 1970s and the 1980s, it was Japanese machines (the so-called UJMs). Honda’s 750 Four had five gears, and that fifth one was for the paradigm shift that swallowed the British empire and made us wonder if maybe Japan won World War II after all. Four cylinders across the frame, with differences between manufacturers that could only be described as trivial. The UJMs were kind of cool, too, but not as cool as the Britbikes (at least to my way of thinking). But the Britbikes were toast, destined to emerge two decades down the road as the darlings of a small but well published vintage motorcycle market niche (and in case you missed it, that was a plug for Motorcycle Classics magazine).
- In the 1990s, it was Harleys and all that went with it. You know, middle aged guys becoming pirates and bikes festooned with chrome, leather fringe, and conchos. I was one of them for awhile and I had everything but the tattoos. Bikes that people with more money than brains bought (often paying over MSRP) so they could don do-rags, denim, and non-DOT helmets, and look pretty much exactly like all the other beer-bellied rugged individualists. I was one of them for a while, too.
- Sportbikes had a good run somewhere in the middle of all this, too, with ergonomics that guaranteed significant incomes for chiropractors and physical therapists, who frequently used that money to pay well over list price for a Harley (see above). Guilty again. You got me. I had a TL1000S, a Triumph Daytona, and a Speed Triple.
- With the turn of the century, the trend migrated toward 650-pound, liter-plus bikes styled like dirt bikes and equipped with electronics rivaling Air Force One. Denim and do-rags were replaced by Power Ranger clothing. Everybody wanted to be Charlie and Ewen, but few could afford the chase trucks and mechanics, and even fewer could handle one of the bloated beasts off road. Most adorned driveways and Starbuck’s parking lots. I mean, the headlight lenses on some of these things cost $1800; no way anyone was taking those wunderbikes into the woods. I’m sort of guilty here. I had a Triumph Tiger. I took it off road just once and it was terrifying.

I think we are fast approaching the last throes of the overweight off-road $25K-to-$30K wannabee adventure bikes and their thousand-dollar Aerostitch-wearing riders…you know, the guys who stand on the pegs even when riding on level asphalt. (Sit down, guys…your “sell by” date flew by years ago and I’ll say what everyone else is thinking: You look silly.)

So what’s next?

Electric motorcycles? Nope, I don’t think that’s going to happen in any major way. Alta is gone, Zero is struggling, and the Livewire may have already suffered electrocution as a consequence of Harley’s rewiring. Electric bikes don’t sound like motorcycles, the range is not there (it’s not going to be any time soon), and I think a motorcycle without an internal combustion engine really isn’t a motorcycle at all. So what will be the next big moto thing?

Self-driving motorcycles? Nope. Dead on arrival, I think.

Even more “mode complexity” on street bikes? Probably not. That sort of thing appeals to juvenile minds (ones susceptible to Jedi mind tricks). I think even the easily-led characters mentioned above recognize this as too gimmicky. I once had a pimply faced kid ask me at one of the IMS shows how many modes our imported-from-China 250cc ADV bike had, and I told him: Two. On, and off. He nodded knowingly, as if I had let him in on a great secret, and wandered off toward the Ducati booth.

I think the ADV thing is going to dry up, even though we are still seeing sales upticks in the motorcycle market. Sort of. ADV-style bike trends have been up, but it always was a relatively small market segment and the current increase (most likely the result of the “more free stuff” crowd rocking Washington these days) appears to be big but actually is not. Dirt bike sales are up, but that’s for off road dirt bikes only. Street bike sales are down about 10%. And that thing about motorcycle sales overall going up? Yeah, it is, but it’s mostly ATVs (of the 4-wheel persuasion, which are included in the motorcycle sales figures). One bit of actual data, and that is this: CSC can’t keep bikes in stock. They sell out as soon as they arrive. But CSC delivers real value at a very reasonable price…I don’t know that I ever saw an RX-Anything with conchos and fringe. And CSC motorcycles are definitely not $25K driveway bling. Yeah, the big bike ADV thing is fast approaching its “sell by”date, I think. The fat lady is singing, folks. It’s almost over.

So, given that the ADV milk is drying up, the next big thing will be…

Hell, I don’t know.

What do you think? You guys figure it out and let me know. And if you think you know, leave a comment here. Curious minds want to know.