« July 2008 | Main | September 2008 »
So the wordcount here this week will be skinny, since I'm guestblogging for Jeff VanderMeer. Cross-posting feels a wee bit tacky, plus it's worth most folks time check out his site (and all the other guest bloggers he's had this summer), so I'll post here a little summary of what I've yapped about over there.
OK, so this isn't quite crowd-sourcing, and I know it's late Friday afternoon in late August, but y'all've got the weekend to give me your thoughts on the below. I'm not giving any context since, of course, there's no one whispering over your shoulder giving you context as you browse the bookstore...
Here's the front:
And here's the full spread:
Sorry, I wish comments were working, but I can't get them to work, can you email me what you think? Thanks!
So Miriam Toews's glorious The Flying Troutmans is the fifth pick by Powells for its brilliant, needs-to-be-emulated-across-the-industry subscription program, Indiespensible.
Here's what you get, quoth Powells:
An exclusive signed and numbered first edition, weeks before the standard copy goes on sale. Plus, the Indiespensable edition includes:• Custom slipcase wrapped in mahogany paper with a linen embossment
• Book's title and author's name stamped in silver foil on the slipcase spine; matching foil stamp of the author's signature on the front panel
Dare I suggest: the right way for an indie publisher to go about an online exclusive?
I don't know what it says that BusinessWeek just generated one of the best summaries of what trade book publishing can be doing. Notwithstanding that a $50K advance is not nearly low enough to properly exploit the Gawker model, the piece pretty much covers the bases.
1. While reading is solitary, talking about books is social. But since time is the biggest impediment to reading, not money, make it easier for readers to talk to other readers through social media.
2. Bookstore events don't work, so have authors connect with fans (see item #1) and jointly brainstorm how to connect face-to-face. {Nota bene for booksellers, the smart ones will use item #1 and #2 to try to make bookstores back into better venues for this interaction}
3. Chasing big books results in overpaying, instead find writers who know their little audience, writers willing be social/find effective ways to substitute for for lack of sociability.
4. Use Word to copy-edit, Acrobat to proofread.
5. Give readers to option to easily buy from your website, and create widgets so as to populate the web with that one-clickability.
All I would add (well, OK, there's lots more to add, really, but the significant thing to add) is 6. Share the love generated by the above amongst all your writers, and ultimately convert it into subscriptions.
I'd actually heard of this on Saturday, due to having a Google News Alert in place on "Bill Hicks," but didn't realize it was a news scoop til the British papers went mad for it. Hicks has always been more famous in the UK—the UK publisher sold over 100,000 copies of Love All the People: The Essential Bill Hicks, whereas we've done only about 15,000). So yesterday I got about another 25 more news alerts , giving me to realize I'd've almost made the blog a semi-genuine news source had I posted about it right away.
Instead, I'll just exploit others, like a true publisher, and just quote New York magazine.
In what will surely make Bill Hicks's zombie corpse rise up from hell in black-hearted rage, Russell Crowe has revealed that he has a "project based on the life of [the late] comedian Bill Hicks, which is going from treatment to draft stage with Kiwi writer Mark Staufer." True, Hicks and Crowe both seem to have had an affinity for alcohol and picking fights with strangers, but Hicks might agree that a commercial biopic comes pretty close to "suckin' Satan's pecker." [SMH via Comingsoon]
And the requisite YouTube embed, a publisher's favorite:
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore calling out the "limited" visions of queer activism...on Swedish TV no less. [About a minute into the 15 minute segment...]
Don't worry, this isn't a trend, but Laurel Snyder, editor of our Half/Life, has a forthcoming children's book (not published by us, our children's imprint Red Rattle is sadly no more), and herewith her trailer.
Warning: This Video contains blueberries and a baby from Laurel Snyder on Vimeo.
Vandermeer, one of the new breed of writer-entrepreneurs made possible by the interweb, has a new column on HuffPo. On political fiction. One of the many things I love about the brave new world of not-entirely-print, not-top-down culture is that writers tend not to have to write down to a perceived lowest-common-denominator audience. The challenge for an artist needing to put food ion the table is being entrepreneurial about venues and audiences—you get that right, you hustle that, and you can write about what you want to write about.
Lisa Crystal Carver is one of the finest transmuters of reflected-upon lived experience into the English language. But she has been forced to stop writing. It's disgraceful.
I've been waiting for the right opportunity to talk about this gorgeous sad neurotic gently twisted coming-of-age novel we just published a couple of weeks ago, called All About Lulu. But the reviews, while great, didn't quite capture how exactly this book exists in relation to its readers, actual and potential.
Then YouTube came to the rescue, via, of all places, Bakersfield CA...
Sparrow ran for the Republican Party nomination for President in 1996 against Bob Dole. Here is a poem he wrote to memorialize it, and below this poem is a YouTube clip in which Sparrow outlines the campaign slogan for this, his third run at the Leadership of the Free World.
Yes, I Am Running for President Again
Yes, I am running for President again,
on this cool AM in March.
I have just awoken, my belly somewhat swollen from
too many All-Natural Cheese Puffs last night, the
air about me ringing with a burnished
bell-like silence—I am somewhat constipated, but
confident. My nation needs me,
several friends have told me
(including Jeff Piazza of Bellport, CT):
she is rudderless and vague,
choked with half-formed fears of
the Chinese, the Japanese, the homosexual,
the Jew. The wolves have been loosed, the peasant have been armed
with pitchforks, night is falling, and the sirens
have begun to wail. I cannot turn back.
I must step out onto this bleak, surreal landscape,
armed only with my standard—the black
flag of Doubt—and my lonely voice, calling:
"Come with me! Come with me!
We will fight the Famine, and the turbulent mob!
We will sing in the darkness, and strum mandolins!
We will hold each other as the mortars boom and echo around us!"
...for saying this in a recent interview:
"That's why he was such a genius: He knew they would crack. Ultimately, he knew that he was right," Cho said, laughing. "It was irrelevant whether people laughed or didn't laugh; he was right about everything. That's why people fell in love with him: Because in our world there is so much insecurity, we are looking for people to stand up for us."
For which, she wins a free copy of the newly reissued Love All the People: The Essential Bill Hicks (pubbing October; advance copies now available...).
But how am I to get her her prize?... If any one knows, email me.
Obscene? Perhaps. But if you can't get enough of streaming social media...
The pre-eminent legal scholar on copyright also happened, until Sunday, to be the pre-eminent blogger on the topic. He was also Senior Copyright Counsel at Google. The state of the debate has become so awful, however, he cannot bring himself to write about it any more.
I regard myself as a centrist. I believe very much that in proper doses copyright is essential for certain classes of works, especially commercial movies, commercial sound recordings, and commercial books, the core copyright industries. I accept that the level of proper doses will vary from person to person and that my recommended dose may be lower (or higher) than others. But in my view, and that of my cherished brother Sir Hugh Laddie, we are well past the healthy dose stage and into the serious illness stage. Much like the U.S. economy, things are getting worse, not better. Copyright law has abandoned its reason for being: to encourage learning and the creation of new works. Instead, its principal functions now are to preserve existing failed business models, to suppress new business models and technologies, and to obtain, if possible, enormous windfall profits from activity that not only causes no harm, but which is beneficial to copyright owners.
Emphasis mine, because in the long run, this intellectual property land grab eventually hurts the owners themselves, even if it allows monopoly rents in the short run...because it is impoversihing the soil from which those cultural artifacts are created. In the material world, the commons is destroyed by overexploitation, but in the creative world, the commons is destroyed by underfertilizing...
A guy The New York Times calls "one of the most influential figures in Latino literature in the United States," who publishes with all kinds of university presses and edits definitive anthologies of various stripes, has actually done a graphic novel for us: Mr. Spic Goes to Washington. Several media enterprises try to figure it out why Ilan Stavans did it:
San Antonio Express-News
Amherst Bulletin
And the bloggers tell it like it is:
Tex[t]-Mex
LaBloga
Tejaztlan Notebook
An itty-bitty excerpt here
Mac Slocum at O'Reilly's Tools of Change with a great counterfactual:
"Let's say the world has only e-books, then someone introduces this technology called 'paper.'..."
Now, here's me with a far clunkier one: If an almost seamless and freely available network of trusted individuals served the function of examining, corroborating, ratifying, promoting, excoriating cultural content on behalf of the world at large, and then someone introduced the printed book review section, would the world's publicists denounce this development on the Huffington Post?
Here's Michael Cader's extended take on the whole drama, synthesizing some excellent responses, including his own.
I suspect I'm going to be offering a link to a Tim Wise essay each time any various bit of nonsense issues forth from the McCain campaign on Obama—let's start with the "race card."
Tim's take, collected in our forthcoming Speaking Treason Fluently, is here.
Since the O.J. trial, it seems as though almost any allegation of racism has been met with the same dismissive reply from the bulk of whites in the U.S. According to national surveys, more than three out of four whites refuse to believe that discrimination is any real problem in America (2). That most whites remain unconvinced of racism's salience—with as few as six percent believing it to be a "very serious problem," according to one poll in the mid 90s—suggests that racism-as-card makes up an awfully weak hand. While folks of color consistently articulate their belief that racism is a real and persistent presence in their own lives, these claims have had very little effect on white attitudes. As such, how could anyone believe that people of color would somehow pull the claim out of their hat, as if it were guaranteed to make white America sit up and take notice? If anything, it is likely to be ignored, or even attacked, and in a particularly vicious manner.That bringing up racism (even with copious documentation) is far from an effective "card" to play in order to garner sympathy, is evidenced by the way in which few people even become aware of the studies confirming its existence. How many Americans do you figure have even heard, for example, that black youth arrested for drug possession for the first time are incarcerated at a rate that is forty-eight times greater than the rate for white youth, even when all other factors surrounding the crime are identical`?
Nice item by Michael Beirut at Design Observer.
One of my first bosses taught me an important lesson.Good designers are a dime a dozen, he said. Coming up with a great design solution is the easy part. The hard part, he said, is getting the client to accept the solution.
"But if the work is good, don't the clients know it when they see it?" I asked.
My boss just looked at me silently for a long time. And then, with gentleness and no small amount of pity, he reached out and patted me on the head: Poor kid.
He was right, of course. In any creative activity where clients are involved, you have to make the sale twice. Before you get to the customer, you have to sell the client. And that's what I love most about the AMC series Mad Men, which starts its second season later this month. It gets so many things right about its subject, the advertising business, but it absolutely nails one thing: the art behind the art of the pitch.
Other than that it is a great piece, why do I mention it? Because that too is how we deal with books, for only rarely do we get to present them to the reader—just as the ad men have to sell the client on what will work with the consumer, our job, most of the time, is to sell the retailer. (Of course, in publishing, we also have the author pitching the agent, and the agent pitching us...there's a lotta hustle in this...)
A whole generation of film buffs grew up with Alex Cox. From 1988 to 1994, he presented Moviedrome for the BBC, his soft voice guiding you into the nether regions of cult film. After making Repo Man and Sid and Nancy, he wasn't just a hipster but a film-maker with credibility, and a moral compass that appealed to fellow artists including Joe Strummer, with whom he worked over many subsequent films. He always looked cool, in an etiolated, desert-bleached, Nick Cave kind of way.His new book doesn't offer much in the way of anecdotes, but is a very revealing look at the day-to-day difficulty of being an independent film-maker. Every student at film school should be obliged to read it. It shows how bad things can get: throughout his 30-year career, Cox provides ample demonstrations of how crass industry lawyers are, how bonds and copyright issues destroy the artistic impulse (intriguingly, he argues for a massive deregulation of copyright), and how big companies refuse to distribute films after having bought them. But it also reveals the sense of fun, of purpose, of liberation, that being a low-budget film-maker can bring.
[N]ot quite a memoir so much as a highly detailed, hugely compelling tour through the making of each of the entries in his body of work, beginning with Edge City, his graduation project at UCLA, through Repo Man, Sid & Nancy, Walker and so on, right up to Searchers 2.0. As such X Films is a workbook for any would-be cineaste of the independent/"guerrilla" stripe, and also a vital contribution to film history, insofar as it records with honesty and exactitude what were the creative and logistical decisions that went into making these bravely unclassifiable movies. The book...reflects Cox's own generous, passionate, instinctively polemical nature: he makes a great teacher both of film production and film history.
Also, word of a Repo Man sequel.