My New Gig

I've been coy over the past two weeks, because I didn't want to say too much too early, but my long national nightmare is over as of tonight: I begin my new job tomorrow morning.

I'll be joining a great marketing team on the Practical Law product at Thomson Reuters, and I'm thrilled about all of it: joining a big, smart company with great resources and reach; working on a major product that provides real value to a professional audience; and both using the things I've already learned and learning more about methods and audiences and marketing tools.

Even more interesting, I'm diving right in: there's a big marketing summit for the Legal division of TR on Tuesday and Wednesday, so my first business trip will be on Day Two of the job, which may be a record. (I'm going to Minneapolis, which is where most of this division is headquartered.)

The Practical Law offices are in Manhattan -- Third Ave in the forties, which I'm amused to remember was the big publishing neighborhood back when I started in the business, twenty years ago -- so I'll be back in town all the time now, and might even start showing up more regularly to events there.

Anyway: I've got a great new job at a great division of a great company, which I hope will lead to less grumpiness here than there's been for the past three and a half months of unemployment. It may also lead to fewer posts here, since obviously real work is always the first priority. But we'll all have to see how things shake out: getting back into the commuting habit will probably mean I'll be reading more again.

(And, since I like to track everything, I'm also happy to note that my unemployment time is on a downward slope, though there are very few datapoints. I was out for 20 weeks in 1990-91, 17 weeks in 2007, and now 14 weeks this year. From this, I can project with presidential-election-level confidence that I will next be unemployed for 11 weeks in 2019.)

QR Codes Kill Kittens by Scott Stratten

Schadenfreude is a powerful motivator. For some of us, it's the only thing to get us out of bed in the morning: the knowledge that somebody, somewhere, in in a vastly worse situation than you are, so you might as well find out who that is and laugh at them.

I'm not too proud to admit it: this was the first book I read after I got laid off. I know I'm a good marketer, and that I'll be up on that horse again quickly, but there's no better way to convince myself of that than by seeing what highly-paid and well-credentialed idiots have done when given far too much money and freedom.

The subtitle of QR Codes Kill Kittens is "How to Alienate Customers, Dishearten Employees, and Drive Your Business Into the Ground," and that's exactly what it covers. It's from social media guru Scott Stratten -- one of the smartest, immediate, and down-to-earth marketing experts you will ever find -- and it's a litany of bad examples, presented in picture-book form, of all of the incredibly stupid things that marketers do when they try to be tech-savvy without thinking it through.

(If you have time to only read one business book in your life, this would be an excellent choice.)

If the title confuses you, let Stratten explain it:


QR codes do kill kittens. They kill happiness, and brand equity, and positive feelings, and any sense that the organization on the other end of the code is competent. And the book of that title will show you a long list of equally stupid marketing ploys, from badly thought-out scheduled tweets to mobile-hostile landing pages to social icons without URLs to printed URLs full of random characters. Every single one of those ploys seemed like a good idea, only because the marketer behind it didn't take the time to stop and ask: how is my customer actually going to interact with this? Where will this thing appear, and what are the circumstances around that placement? What else will the customer be doing or thinking at that time?

Stratten has four reasons that QR codes kill kittens -- they don't work, nobody likes them, they're selfish, and they waste useful space -- and organizes the book around those four problems. There are a lot of QR code examples, because QR codes are incredibly easy to use badly. (Put it on a billboard by the freeway! Put it on an automatic door! Put it on a sign pulled by an airplane! Put it as your brand's Facebook profile photo!) But there are plenty of other kinds of marketing mistakes, too -- and a few Internet-style funny pictures, because of course there must be.

If you do marketing -- and by that I mean, if you help in any way to package products and services for customers or help those customers find the right products and services -- these are lessons you need to know. Not so much so you use QR codes correctly, since tactics are always changing, but so you market correctly: thoughtfully, purposefully, with your customers in mind at all times.

That won't magically make all of your efforts successful, since nothing can do that. But it will keep you on the right path, and you'll be far ahead of the bad marketers, who will be out there killing kittens every day with their thoughtless slapdash efforts.

Job Hunting Again

Sadly, my seven great years at the house of Wiley are coming to an end this month -- not by my choice.

But it's a turbulent market out there for books and information products, with too many disruptions over the last few years than I could list. (Wiley has three divisions, and there's an existential threat to the business model of each one of them right now -- interesting times.) So I'm not happy, but I'm also not surprised. I have only good feelings for this place: it's still a great place to work, producing a lot of great things that materially make the world better, and I'd stay much longer if I could.

Since I can't, though, I need to find a new place to work. My hope is that this won't be as hard as last time, since the economy is booming (unlike 2007, when I was out of work right before the crash) and I now have seven years of really diverse marketing experience, including time spent on a wide range of categories (accounting, finance, architecture, public health -- to add to SF/Fantasy/comics, hunting & fishing, and general fiction from the earlier days) and pretty much every media or marketing vehicle known to man. But hopes only go so far, so I'm now knee-deep in plans and schemes and opportunities.

All that is to say that content may become scarce here, particularly once February gets under way and I don't have an office to go to everyday. Or, alternatively, I may throw myself into writing things here to keep myself busy while the mills of job-searching grind on the background. We'll have to see which one it is.

And, for you folks out there: if you know of anybody looking for an experienced Marketer --  either in publishing or out of it -- I'd be very grateful if you'd let me know about it.

What Is Currently Making Me Angry With the Heat of a Thousand Firey Suns

I need to update information on a website I control with information about a company in India -- and I was just on their contact page a few minutes ago, which loaded and gave me all the data I needed. However, that page now will not load, and no amount of googling or futzing around has made IE just show the god-damned cached page you had five minutes ago!

Back in the early days of the 'net, it wasn't uncommon to set your browser to "work offline," and poke through the pages you'd loaded before. But that seems impossible now, and of course that's exactly what I need right now.

I really, really hate it when technology removes capabilities.

Update, two minutes later: Before anyone asks, I has a couple of IE windows open at all time at work because our portal site is set up to only authenticate with IE, so most of the systems & resources I have to use only work that way.

Borrowing E-Books

PW today has an article with lots of numbers -- though surprisingly little analysis or thought -- about Amazon's e-book borrowing program, part of its Amazon Prime subscription business. It burbles about how "the monthly pool for borrowed e-books in January grew to $1.7 million, the largest in the history of the program" without ever explaining how this pool is defined, how and why the value of the pool fluctuates, or how it works.

I assume this is because Amazon, as usual, is being deeply opaque, and only releasing a few numbers carefully chosen to make them look as good as possible. As far as I can tell, the "pool" is set by Amazon fiat -- they decide how much money they feel like spending on ebook "borrowing" that month, and then divide it up according to some unspecified algorithm. (There's clearly at least a breakdown geographically, since there's both a "global fund" and a "monthly pool," though their relationship is not made clear.)

I would have to dig into the Kindle Direct Publishing agreement to be sure, but my guess is that Amazon has not promised to give any money to the authors of these ebooks, and that they're papering over that in their ongoing attempt to convert as many of their customers as possible to Prime. (Because subscription revenue is what everyone wants -- particularly when you run a website and no one can call you on the phone to cancel.)

So authors should take note: Amazon may have decided to give you $2.23 per ebook "borrowed" in January, which is potentially higher than you would have made from a sale in that same period. But every piece of that transaction -- and every penny of resulting revenue -- is under Amazon's complete control; it looks like they don't have to pay you a cent for that "borrow" if they decide (after the month is over, like this time) not to.

And don't get me started on "borrowing" ebooks. Do you have a digital file in your possession? Then it only expires and leaves your possession if you (through choice or laziness or ineptitude) let it do so -- once you have a digital file, there are plenty of tools for any of us to copy and save and transmute it. So it's only "borrowing" by courtesy -- or only "borrowing" in the legal language laid out by the people giving you contracts to sign.

Worries Assuaged

It's a complicated, fast-moving world -- particularly for someone trying to do marketing. And I worry constantly that I'm not doing things I really desperately need to do.

But then I get a big, professional-looking e-mail with the subject line "Are you using email marketing?" and suddenly I realize that lots of people are doing vastly worse than I am, and that there are people making money teaching 1996-level marketing strategies.

And I'm just the kind of guy that feels better because of that.


Edit: Yes, the first time I did spend so much time making sure I spelled "assuaged" correctly that I misspelled "worries" with one R. Luckily, I'm no longer an editor, so that's not ironic.

Trend Pieces

Apparently classic, excellent books are now getting really inappropriate covers! Purely to chase new audiences of actual readers! (Who, clearly, aren't nearly as cultured as the article-writer, and so aren't worthy to read Great Litra'chur.)

This is deeply shocking, particularly since putting inappropriate/lurid/silly/trendy covers of good books has never happened before in the history of the world!!!!!

Book Blogger Poll

No one asked me to do this -- in fact, they possibly might have asked me not to, if they knew I existed -- but I saw that Larry at OF Blog did this list of questions, and I realized I hadn't done one of these for quite a while.

So it was time. Questions are in bold, my snotty answers not. Though this is all more than slightly pointless.



How many times do you post each week?

Lately, at least twice, though the goal always is to post at least daily.

What percentage of your blog posts are reviews?  (2-part question)

Over the past few years, anywhere from 1/3 to 2/3, depending on the week.

What percentage of your blog posts are promotional posts? (2-part question) promos = cover reveals, author interviews, memes, etc.

Memes are promotional? If this is simply a dichotomy between book reviews and everything else, than a monkey could work out what's left once to take out reviews.

I do no cover reveals, author interviews, or crap like that -- mostly because I'm not interested in them personally.

How many books did you review in 2012?

I covered 125 books in single or dual posts, and a number more in desultory end-of-the-month roundups.

How long does it take for you to read a book, on average?  Actual # of hours, not days.

That depends heavily on the length and kind of book, obviously. (I suppose many book bloggers always read the same kind of thing, and I am biting my lip to avoid negatively characterizing them here.)

I read about 50-60 pages an hour, as an average -- of most literary fiction, SFF with some meat to it, reasonably popular nonfiction. Really dense nonfiction goes more slowly, mysteries and more frivolous SFF goes more quickly. But a 700-page book will take longer than a 200-page book, no matter what the genre.

How long does it take you to compose a review, on average? Don't forget you have to format it for your blog, insert links, choose images, etc. as well.

Anywhere from half an hour (when I'm really speedy) to 4-5 hours over the course of months (when I'm procrastinating, can't figure out how to say what I want, or the stars just aren't right yet).

What percentage of your reviewed books were from books you purchased? (4-part question)

You want a real number? Let's say one-third, roughly.

What percentage of your reviewed books were from books you borrowed or were gifted? (4-part question) from library, friend, etc. (NOT a galley)

This is about another third, through it's all from the library.

What percentage of your reviewed books were from galleys? (4-part question) from publisher, Amazon Vine, etc. 

And this is the last third -- though many of them are real published books from publishers -- after so many years at the book clubs, the joy of "getting" to read something early is long gone, so I tend to read stuff after publication.

What percentage of your reviewed books were from trades with other bloggers? (4-part question)

That's easy -- zero. Why would I be trading with other bloggers?

How much time does it take you to promote a single blog post via Facebook, GoodReads, Twitter, visiting other blogs, etc.?

None -- the feed is automatically syndicated to Twitter and Facebook, and I'm too lazy (and internally conflicted about the whole idea) to do anything more.

Are there other places where you promote your reviews? This may be difficult to define since some of your social media is also for fun, so please use your best judgment in settling on a number.

Again, I don't "promote" my reviews. I already work in the monkey house, so I'm not doing this to bootstrap anything.

How much time do you spend on blog maintenance per month? Updating, editing, prettifying--anything that isn't writing an actual post.

Far too little, I'll tell you that for free. If it's an hour, that would be a lot. My blogroll has been crying out for attention for at least five years now.

How many giveaways did you host in 2012? How many of those giveaways were self-funded? Meaning, you paid for s&h. Did you also pay for the books themselves? How much money did you personally spend on giveaways this year? Please include book costs, shipping and handling costs, packaging, tape, etc.

Let me lump all this together, since it's easy: I don't do giveaways. Not funded by me, not funded by anyone else, not at all. (If a publisher I already knew and trusted wanted to do something, I wouldn't necessarily be against it, but I don't give away stuff for my own purposes.)

Actually, I do have a short stack of books that I've been vaguely thinking about giving away, but I had two problems. One, I couldn't think of a good way to do it -- what would determine the winner? Second, the idea of having to box them up and mail them filled me with a vast ennui.

How much money did you spend this year on finished copies?

If there's an implied "specifically for your blog" there, the answer is zero. I buy books, I read books, I write about books. It's all part of one big thing.

Do you also buy them if you already got a galley (for you, friends, etc.)?

Not on purpose for myself, no. I've bought books as presents that I also owned.

If you have other people contributing to your blog, do you pay them? If so, what amount did you spend?

I don't, so they get nothing.

How much did you spend on site maintenance? web design, domain name registration, etc.

Nothing. I keep thinking I should get my own domain, but I haven't done it.

Do you attend book conventions like BEA, ALA, etc? If so, please total/break down the costs for registration, hotel, travel for each one.

I do usually attend BEA, because I'm a publishing-company marketing manager by day. (I actually had to work a booth most of last year's BEA, for the first time.)

I've also gone to a few SF conventions -- fewer as the years since my time at the SFBC have gone on -- but that's not to promote my blog, it's just because I like to remember when I belonged there.  

Do you have business cards or other promotional items? What did you spend on creating them, and why are they important to have?

I have a bunch of free business cards (from five years ago) that include the blog's URL, but they're really not promo for the blog.

Are there other blogging costs that we haven't listed that you would like to add? Please explain and quantify as much as possible.

Not monetary costs, no. I don't spend anything directly on this blog; it's a hobby rather than a business venture. 

Do you receive any kind payment for your personal blogging efforts? ad revenue, paid promo posts, promo tour organization, etc.

Nope. I did have a few paying book-review gigs for a while -- really just ones that fell into my lap, since I've spent no energy chasing them -- but they've all stopped now.

Come to think of it, if I actually spent some time and did it professionally, I probably could get another book-review gig, for at least nominal payment. Since I haven't, I guess that means I'd rather babble here without interference. (Examining one's own behavior isn't always pretty.)

If you do receive payment for your blogging, does it cover the cost of running your site? Please share the amount you earned in 2012 if possible, or put "decline to answer" or "N/A."

No payment connected to the blog at all. I do get a trickle of cash-equivalent through my Amazon links, but that's it.

Most book bloggers seem to agree that any ad revenue and finished copies don't come anywhere near offsetting the expense of maintaining a book blog. Which begs the question: why do you do it?

I got into the habit of listening to the sound of my fingers rambling, and I still enjoy it.

Again, this is a hobby -- I do it because I enjoy it, and because I realize it is a hobby.

What are some of your frustrations, hopes, and dreams for your blog?

Frustrations: mostly that I can't quite say what I want to say about a book, or that people (primarily the author) take it wrongly. But that just loops back to prove that I didn't say it right.

Hopes: that I will be so smart and erudite and awesome that one of my old SF buddies will offer me a great job and take me away from the cold but exceptionally remunerative world of business publishing. But it's a very silly, self-mocking hope.

Dreams: to get better at this instead of falling into the same things over and over, to write well about vastly different books, to find more interesting reading projects that will amuse other people as much as they do me.


How can your readers help you as a blogger? What do you wish were different about the reader interaction on your blog? Frustrations, successes to share?

I'm not sure if I want more comments, which would be the obvious thing -- on the one hand, I think the appearance of more reader involvement would be great, but I feel like comments are people sternly disagreeing with me (no matter what they actually say), so they're nerve-wracking.

If there were lots more readers who hung on my every word like gospel and spread the Hornswoggler name far and wide, that would be totally awesome, he said entirely facetiously.

Aside from all the above reader things, how can your fellow bloggers help you? What do you wish were different about your interaction with fellow bloggers or readers?

Other book-review bloggers? Nothing I can think of. I'm not a joiner by temperament.

How can authors and publishers help you as a blogger?

Send me lots of stuff for free!

More seriously, to spend more time and effort writing and publishing better books -- there's a lot of dreck out there, presented cynically or otherwise. Of course, vast numbers of people who aren't me love dreck, so this is not necessarily a good plan for general success.

What do you wish or publishers understood about the process of blogging?

I think we publishing folks understand blogging much better than a lot of bloggers think we do. Bloggers are the modern equivalent of the nice middle-aged lady who used to review romance novels for the Podunk Herald, and get about the same amount of courtesy and attention as she did.

How has your experience been in interacting with industry people?

I've spent my professional life in publishing, so I have no coherent answer to this on a purely blog level.

Which authors and publishers have you found to be particularly responsive/helpful/enjoyable to work with? Why?

Since I'm all-too-often lackadaisical about notifying publishers that I've posted a review, the ones who have continued to send me things anyway -- usually because I have personal contacts there-- have been the nicest.

I won't make any more of this, because I'm almost certainly not worth it, and I only get review copies because they're so ridiculously cheap.   

Do you find egalleys or physical ARCs easier to review from?

I like physical books, for two reasons:

• the device I have to read on is an iPad, and that gets glare of varying degrees on my train (the main reading time) 8-9 months of the year 
• I just plain forget about digital copies, since they're not sitting on a shelf and looking at me

What are your blog's monthly page views?

3,571 over the last 30 days -- that may be slightly below the average because the holidays were in there. But I'm in that neighborhood.

How many subscribers do you have for your RSS feed/email sign up?

396 through Feedburner, possibly more in other ways. (There's a LiveJournal feed, among other murky things.)

How many followers do you have through Google Friend Connect or Linky tools? Please list/quantify other sources if you use something similar. 

None as far as I know; I didn't set up anything like that specifically.


How many Twitter followers do you have?

470

How many Facebook fans do you have?

657

How many GoodReads friends/followers do you have?

None; I don't post on GoodReads.

What is your Amazon reviewer ranking?

I'm number 7857, but I've gotten dissatisfied with posting my reviews there -- it steals link-juice from the main blog, and there's no way I can link to Antick Musings from Amazon. So I don't see what good posting anything there actually does me.

Are there other facts & figures pertinent to your audience reach? Would you like to share your name and blog? Please leave your URL and/or contact details if so. Anything else you'd like to add? Last chance! 

I am Elmer J. Fudd, millionaire. I own a mansion and a yacht. If you're reading this, you already know where my blog is.

(Apparently this was originally a survey on Google Docs, which explains some of it, and particularly the last question.)

Behavior I Don't Want to Encourage

Since I'm a blogger who has a handful of people reading his rants -- even though those rants have been thin on the ground lately -- I get the occasional pitch from marketers, asking me to promote this whatzit or mention this thingamabob. I'm entirely in favor of people sending thing to me for free -- e-mail me if you have anything in that line -- but I'm grumpier about offers that don't include the sweet touch of the Package Fairy, or which have that faint whiff of shadiness to them.

(A few days ago, I was offered untraceable money via PayPal -- though, tellingly, it was only after the fact and "if the client was happy," which I assumed meant it was just as solid as it sounded -- if I would post a link, recommend it, and never mention that it was sponsored. I politely demurred, of course -- I probably could be bought, but I don't go that cheap.)

But, today, someone asked me to post an infographic about an oscilloscope. Why? I have no idea. I guess SF is congruent to real science, if you squint really hard, but that hardly seems like a good enough reason to hit me up for it.

It was completely random, there was no whisper of quid pro quo, and oscilloscopes are pretty neat. So what the hell -- here's an infographic about oscilloscopes.

The maker of that particular oscilloscope -- Tekronix, which I thought also made some kind of consumer computer peripherals (networking stuff, maybe), though their website shows only technical measuring tools and similar gee-whiz Buck Rogers stuff -- would really like it if you clicked here to learn even more about oscilloscopes, including a spiffy Tutorial page!

But the next time a marketer wants me to do something, I'm going to be looking for some tangible benefit out of it.

Trillions! Trillions! Trillions!

Most of the projects I work on for my day job never get mentioned here, because they're deeply technical and only of interest to accountants, CIOs, and similarly specialized business folks. But, once in a while, I do have something that's more exciting that that, and this is one of those times.

Yesterday was the official publication date for Trillions, a great book on what pervasive computing will mean for business and society, from three very smart and very savvy technologists/designers/thinkers, Peter Lucas, Joe Ballay, and Mickey McManus. They're all part of MAYA Design, a Pittsburgh firm that does amazing work on interface design and other things I don't even have the terminology to describe. (When I visited them last year to talk about marketing for Trillions, they showed off an amazing system called Visage that they created for DARPA to manage and control manifold real-time dataflows for a battlefield.)

So Trillions is genuinely visionary, and comes from three guys who really know and live this stuff. It's an exciting book to be (a tiny) part of.

I'd like to get more copies of Trillions out there, particularly in the hands of SF folks and influential Internet people. (And who else would be reading this blog?) In the past, I've sent out queries to people I knew on books of less direct interest to the field, but I think I've already outstayed that welcome. So, this time, I won't spam anyone; I'm just looking for inbound interest. I'll be happy to send a copy of Trillions to you if you'll read it and possibly blog/talk/write about it -- I'm not looking for guarantees, just interest. I might be able to swing e-books in some format as well, though it's still much easier to ship blocks of dead tree.

Check out the website, which has a bunch of fascinating videos about what MAYA has done and the topic of the book, and shoot me an e-mail if you're interested in a copy of Trillions.

C'mon! It's the only book at Wiley I've worked on that has a quote from a SF writer! (And probably the only one that ever will!)

"Trillions is bold, unabashed, ingenious, and absolutely fizzing with insights about the new-modern process of blending design, high-tech, and commerce. Always entertaining and mostly right on topic."

 - David Brin

Book Marketing 101: Getting Into the Right Shelf Category

This occasional series of posts will continue when I have something to write about -- as always, suggestions are welcome, either in comments or e-mailed to me directly. Today, some thoughts sparked by various references online to books that "bookshops were unsure where to shelve."

Chain stores are never unsure where to shelve a product -- it comes in already planned to go in a very particular place, whether that product is a book or the thirty-seventh new flavor of Coke. And what that means is that the decision on shelving -- both whether the chain will carry that product at all, and where it will be placed -- is made long before the product arrives in stores, and is made at the corporate level.

To talk about books specifically, since that's what I know, every section in a bookstore has a buyer responsible for it. The bigger the chain, the more likely that buyer will have only a small number of sections, and that the buyer will be an expert in those areas. For a small chain, though, a single buyer may handle all fiction categories, plus narrative nonfiction and cookbooks, and will not be deeply familiar with all of the subcategories she has to buy for. [1]

And so, in a way that can seem counter-intuitive to people who aren't in the business, the biggest chains are the best at buying in a broad range of categories, because they're big enough to employ lots of experts to cover those categories. [2] But even when they're smart and knowledgeable, a buyer is still a person, with individual tastes and preferences -- for or against subgenres, or types of books, or entire areas. And publishers have people dedicated to selling to those buyers, and to maintaining relationships with those buyers.

The thing about relationships, of course, is that they're complicated. Buyers and account managers aren't adversaries, since they work together to maximize sales. But they're not colleagues, either, since they work for different companies with different goals and plans. And some relationships are better than others. Some buyers and account managers trust each other deeply, based on a shared history, and others are wary of each other, for various reasons.

Another point to consider is that a publishing company (or division, or group -- whatever the account manager is attached to; whichever list she's selling) inevitably has a stronger track record in one section than another, and better contacts in those stronger sections. (Sure, the powerhouse publisher of romance can get the buyer for mysteries on the phone, but the mystery buyer will be more skeptical, without a good track record in her section, and a buy from her for the exact same book may well be smaller than the romance buyer's buy would have been.)

So this is yet another way that publishers position books, one more set of considerations to take into account when bringing a product to market. If there's a great upcoming book that could be either travel or memoir, it matters where that house has a stronger relationship. And it matters which section is hotter at the moment, and what section the author's history has been in, and, sometimes, even, how senior and influential that section's buyer is. Publishing is a gut business a whole lot of the time, driven by instinct and hunches as much as data.

It's also a business with millions of new products every single year, most of which aren't as successful as someone thought they should be. So there's always room for finger-pointing afterward, for those in the mood for finding blame. But, given how many books sink without a trace all of the time, in all categories, it's difficult to ever prove anything would have been different if X had been done instead of Y.

(And, yes, if a store was going to buy five copies of something per store, it could put one or two in each of travel, memoir, and new nonfiction -- but then those are single copies, and less visible, when otherwise, all together in one section, you'd have a face-out.)

This all applies to shelf-space, not to on-line stores, of course -- on-line, you're dealing with search algorithms and trying to SEO the title of your book. (Don't laugh: we've been doing that in nonfiction for ages now, and a lot of category fiction has titles that look suspiciously keyword-driven now, too.) It's outside the scope of today's post, but I'll just say this one last thing -- sure, online a book can be in three categories, or ten, or fifty. But if it's not showing up in the first page of search results for that category -- and it probably isn't, if every book is in three or ten or fifty categories -- it's effectively invisible, even more so than it was on just one shelf in a bookstore. And ebooks will always, inevitably, be driven by search and SEO considerations, since they don't exist in any physical form.


[1] And, then, independent bookstores will generally have a buyer -- singular -- who plans every category of new books in the store. This partially explains why independents are generally good in a few categories -- and, typically, the same few categories for the vast majority of independent stores -- and ignore or neglect others.

[2] I may be speaking somewhat historically at this point; the ranks of buyers have thinned substantially over the past couple of years, driven by the rise of ebooks. (You don't need category experts to manage inventory when there's vastly less inventory to manage, but that thinning means you also lose those category experts and can end up in a similar situation to those small stores.)

Anatomy of a Tweet

It's yet another night when I'm tired and uninspired, yet still feel I should write something here. (Fred Pohl writes four or five pages of a novel every single day, and has for fifty years or so -- the least I can do is a crappy little blog post.) So this is something different: the long version of a tweet I made this afternoon when I learned that Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad had just won the Pulitzer Prize.

I tweeted:

So I guess I really do have to read VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD now, don't I?

A few years ago, before I was tweeting, that might have been a "real" blog post instead, going something like this:

It feels oddly echoing to be proven right, some of the time. I spend my days trying to get people to buy books, which means thinking about why people want books, how they come across those books, and how to get their useful attention. One thing I find myself telling authors a lot -- because it's a plausible explanation, and because it makes as much sense as anything else -- is that, a lot of the time, a potential buyer has to see a book several times before he [1] decides to buy it.  There are ways to short-circuit that, by making a product as ubiquitous as possible, so that you can get five impressions on one person in as many minutes -- and, in my space, I do recommend authors do things to increase those impressions, like going to and speaking at conferences, sending out useful messages to their professional contacts, and using social media effectively -- but that usually means that it happens over a longer period of time.

Consequently, a reader who picks up a new book -- new to that reader, I mean: completely new, and not the latest book by someone she's already reading -- generally won't remember that first impression, or even the second or third. I don't remember the first time I heard about Goon Squad, but it was probably last summer, around the time it was published. Maybe I read a review, maybe people I follow on Twitter talked about it, maybe a dozen maybes. But I didn't know Jennifer Egan, so the book -- a contemporary "mainstream" novel, as far as I can tell, primarily about two people in the music business but extending out through people they know -- got slotted into the "could be interesting, if you have time" category. (And there's never time for a book I don't have; there isn't time for 90% of the books I have on hand -- just from across the room, I can see The Corrections and Tigana and Up in the Old Hotel and Patriots and Liberators, all of which I've had for years and haven't come anywhere near next-book-to-read status.)

The same for the next few times I heard about it -- it sounded like a good novel, it sounded like fun, it sounded like the kind of thing I'd really like. But I've already got at least a thousand novels that I suspect I'll really like, from He Knew He Was Right to Mr. American to Silverlock, and I haven't managed to read them. So Goon Squad stayed in the back of my head, which kept wondering if the title was an Elvis Costello reference. (I hope it is.)

And then today it won the Pulitzer Prize. And that was the pebble, I suppose, that finally got that avalanche moving. I checked the library website from work, found that my local had it, and picked it up on the way home. It'll be the next thing I read, as soon as I finish Fuzzy Nation.

As a reader, I hope it's worth it. As a book marketer, I wonder how many other people like me had a similar reaction today, and how many copies of Goon Squad are popping off library and bookstore shelves today. (It's #4 on Amazon's Movers & Shakers right this moment, so that's probably "a lot.") And I wish I could figure out ways to make similar things happen to the books I'm responsible for -- that, as always, is the rub.


[1] I usually do say "he" here, since I'm mostly talking about books for CPAs and CFOs and other still-pretty-male-dominated financial jobs that start with "c".

In Which I Casually Mention My Other Blog, As If In Passing

If I were a more diligent blogger, keenly attuned to maximizing my personal brand online and leaping on every opportunity for self-promotion -- you know, the kind of thing that I tell my authors to do all day long? -- I would be posting here at least once a day with some kind of reminder about my other blog, Editorial Explanations.

(As You Know, Bob, Editorial Explanations was a series of posts here before I decided it made more sense as a standalone -- so it's only separate to make it better indexed and cleaner. This blog is "stuff I want to talk about on the Internet," so I still consider Editorial Explanations a subset of the greater Antick Musings world-domination engine.)

On the other hand, I did say for the first five years of this blog that I wasn't going to talk about politics here, because that's a quick trip into crank-dom. So maybe I just want to have it both ways. (Or maybe I'm trying to make Editorial Explanations more of a meta-commentary -- media criticism, to be grandiose about it -- and less about my particular political views. That's the hope, anyway.)

So: if you like, pretend that I have a really promotional post every single day, urging you to check out Editorial Explanations and the other awesome sites in the Antick Musings Network. With that, and some judicious theft of underpants, I'll be well on my way to profit!

Looking for a New Assistant

Updated With Real Link!

This job hasn't been posted yet, but I have gotten all of the approvals signed off, so I can let the world know: I'm looking to hire a new assistant. (I'll update this post with a link to the job, once it has been posted; for now, interested parties could e-mail me directly at the address to the left.)

My previous assistant has moved on and up to a new job within the wonderful world of Wiley -- and please take that as a subtle hint that such fortune could eventually happen to my next assistant as well -- and so I desperately need someone new to sit in a cube just outside my office-icle and do all kinds of complicated publishing-related stuff.

The job reports both to me and to my boss, and supports a group of five marketers (some of us more than others), in a fast-paced, hard-working, fun-loving, adjectivally-hyphenated group we like to call Wiley Global Finance -- google us for more details. (And that "global" isn't simply puffery -- Wiley publishes globally in English, and this position will entail regular contact with colleagues around the world.)

We're looking for someone with 1-3 years of experience, but we're open to various kinds of experience: publishing, digital media, marketing in other areas, or something else related to finance, accounting, and markets. Our group is aggressively moving into digital products of various kinds -- ebooks are the most minor, obvious piece of that -- and we're looking to find someone who will help us continue moving forward. We have openings at the marketing assistant level only rarely; this is not an opportunity that comes very often.

John Wiley & Sons is a strongly growing, rock-solid company (over two hundred years old, and check out the course of our stock price over the last year) that publishes heavily in the less-glamorous ends of the information world -- we're public, so you could easily check to see how we're fared over the past few years and what our leadership team says about the future. And we're located in lovely Hoboken -- not New York, but you can't see New York from New York, either -- which is great for people who live in New Jersey and the southern half of Manhattan.

This is a "book publishing" job, if you want to be excessively reductive about it, but that may not be true in five years -- or two, or even one. Wiley is a company run by smart people with real plans and visions, and I love what our future looks like. Please contact me directly or click here for more details -- and please feel free to let anyone else know about this job.

Book Websites

Penguin's marketing folks shot me an e-mail this week to let me know that they've put up a website for the hugely successful novel The Help by Kathryn Stockett. (Showing, yet again, the truism in publishing that it's much easier to sell the second million copies of a book that's already moving than it is to get something completely new to sell a hundred thousand.)

It looks very much the usual kind of thing -- pseudo-bloggy content (regularly updated, I hope) on the main page, reading guides for book groups, plenty of pictures of the author looking pretty, and lots of social networking connectivity.

Now, when I do websites for the books I work on, they tend to look like this. Or, if we're being really fancy, this. On the other hand, we don't publish a dozen novels that we paid a million-plus for (each), in the hopes that one of them will hit big and pay for all of those bets. So I suppose I shouldn't feel jealous.

More Day-Job Video Fun

At some point I'll stop inflicting my day-job videos on Antick Musings readers, but they're still new and fun for me at the moment. This one just got completed, and I think it'll be of interest to the wonkier sort of SF reader.

So here's my author Douglas W. Hubbard, talking about the new edition of his #1 business math book How to Measure Anything:

One Report Video

Here's another day-job video, which I hope you'll find at least mildly more interesting than you would most of the stuff I do at my day job. It's for the new book One Report, by two very smart, highly connected, and really passionate guys, about how corporate reporting should integrate all of the ancillary statements (environmental, human-impact, etc.) that a company also makes.

(So I'm posting it because I believe in what they're saying, because I'm proud of it, and because I still think being able to post videos here is neat.)

I Can't Help You Out With Death, But...

It's Income Tax season in the US once again -- and probably other places as well, but I don't know their schedules, and, honestly, don't care all that much -- which means we're all trying to figure out what we owe and how to make that number as low as legally possible.

My first recommendation -- for partially self-serving reasons, which I readily admit -- would be for the fine books and subscription products of the esteemed J.K. Lasser Institute. I'll also note that the flagship of that program, the immense and magisterial J.K. Lasser's Your Income Tax 2010 (a complete line-by-line guide to filing) is also available at practically every bookseller in these United States of ours, both virtual and physical, and is near the front entrance of a whole lot of 'em right now as well.

But, if you're insistent on buying from my Secret Masters, and you're demanding a link to them, and you're not sure you want a book -- such a dirty, tedious, old-fashioned thing as that is, well, then, I have to shrug and point you down the road to Tax Central. (Though you will find Mr. Lasser there as well -- you can't avoid him! You might as well buy all of his books now and get it over with!)

Good luck to you all in tax season -- merry deductions and many happy refunds.
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Listening to: The Mountain Goats - How To Embrace A Swamp Creature
via FoxyTunes

Decoding Marketing-Speak

"Nearly a dozen" always means eleven, because ten is ten, and twelve is a dozen.

"More than a dozen" is less than fifteen.

Similarly, "top-x" always means x -- e.g., "One of the top eight books on neuropathology in suburban Baltimore" means it's the eighth.

Video Killed the Radio Star

I just posted my first-ever video to YouTube...but I didn't create it, nor do I appear in it. It's a video by Richard T. Herman and Robert L. Smith about their excellent book Immigrant, Inc., and all I did was ask them to make it. (I'm also in the process of trying to spread it as widely as possible.)

This is a book with a great, inspiring message: that immigrants have been, and will continue to be, an immense force for growth and innovation for the American economy, starting literally dozens of strong firms that create jobs, wealth, opportunity, and new products. I hope zillions of people read it and take it to heart; this is actually one of the rare times when I'm not being sarcastic and dismissive. (So take a picture to remember it!)