Category: Publishing

By Posted on Posted in Arts & Entertainment, General Commentary, Publishing, Shel's Personal Life

Maybe there’s hope for our society. I stopped into Simply Books in the C concourse of Atlanta’s massive Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, not expecting much. After all, most airport bookstores, and even a lot of chain-owned downtown and mall stores lately, cram their shelves with trashy mass-market novels by the likes of Danielle Steel.

I don’t mind a good yarn; I’ve thoroughly enjoyed all the Harry Potter books, Kite Runner, and even the occasional Stephen King–but when I dragged myself through one of Steel’s, I found it one of the most uninteresting and poorly written novels I’d ever encountered.

This bookstore, despite its very limited shelf space, was great. I saw literally dozens of books I’d have been happy to read–including some you may eventually read about in my monthly review column. In my brief foray, I saw these among others:

  • Giving, by Bill Clinton
  • Gary Hirshberg, founding CEO of Stonyfield Yogurt, writing about socially/environmentally conscious companies
  • The Zookeeper’s Wife, a novelized account of a true family that risked their own lives to hide dozens of Jews in the zoo during the Nazi era
  • About five of Jeffrey Gitomer’s entertaining and acerbic sales books
  • A Thousand Splendid Suns, sequel to Kite Runner
  • Meatball Sundae–the latest unconventional marketing rant from mega-guru Seth Godin

    • It is soooo refreshing to see an ariport store whose buyer values intelligent discourse! (And don’t worry, there were plenty of beach novels, too.

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    By Posted on Posted in Arts & Entertainment, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Publishing

    Novels have been used to persuade since at least the days of Gulliver’s Travels. Books like Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Huckleberry Finn had a major influence on 19th century social policy; in more modern times, authors from Ayn Rand to Joseph Heller to Phillip Campbell have used novels as a platform for their agenda.

    Now comes a novel that teaches the very skills of persuasion–something I’m not sure has been done before (though the late Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea’s Illuminatus trilogy skirts the edges).

    Advertising maven Ben Mack’s Poker Without Cards goes deeper into the human psyche than even the very provocative Daniel Quinn, and with the same kind of unexpected mind twists. Set up as a dialogue over several months between Mack’s alter ego Howard W. Campbell and a hospital psychiatrist who believes Campbell holds the key to understanding a particularly difficult case, the book is a page-turner even without trying to have any kind of real plot. The places the two men go in their discussions may change your mind to the whole idea of what’s possible and how the brain actually works–while providing a gripping, if not particularly easy, read.

    And speaking of persuasion, he’s managed to persuade people who seldom write blurbs to endorse his book, including not only Wilson himself but also Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Brodie (author of Virus of the Mind as well as the original MS Word) and Internet marketer supreme Mark Joyner, among others.

    As a marketer, I recommend this book without hesitation to marketers who want to understand persuasion on a deeper, more personal level than you can get from nonfiction. And as a planetary citizen, I recommend it to consumers who want to understand what’s being done to them by forces they may want to understand.

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News, Publishing

    It’s bad enough that sploggers go around lifting articles and slapping them up on splogs (spam blogs) with no paragraph breaks and a bunch of Google ads.

    Now, Business Week reports on professor Philip M. Parker, “author” of 300,000 scraped books.

    I am sorry, but setting a computer robot to pull data from a topic is not authorship. While as a multi-source compilation it probably doesn’t qualify legally as theft, it certainly leaves a bad taste in my mouth! Some of “his” reports sell for as much as $495, too.

    Yuck!

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Politics, Publishing

    Most book contracts give the publisher the right to sell at a deep discount to book clubs, and to pay much less to the authors on those sales. However, the assumption is that the book club is a distinct and separate entity.

    For example, if one of my publishers, Chelsea Green, sold my Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World to Book of the Month Club, I’d get lower royalties, reflecting the deep discount.

    But here’s the ethics problem: The New York Times reports on a lawsuit filed by several authors against their publisher, Regnery Publishing–probably the dominant name in books for those with a conservative worldview.

    The authors (Jerome R. Corsi, Bill Gertz, Lt. Col. Robert (Buzz) Patterson, Joel Mowbray and Richard Miniter) accuse Regnery of essentially forming a book club of its own with the express intent of defrauding authors out of royalties due, by channeling as many sales as possible into its book club and other wholly-owned enterprises.

    In the lawsuit the authors say that Eagle sells or gives away copies of their books to book clubs, newsletters and other organizations owned by Eagle “to avoid or substantially reduce royalty payments to authors.”

    This is a rather nasty form of self-dealing, given the small share authors get even under the best of terms. (Yes, I’m a publisher. I know how much publishers have to invest in a book, yada yada–but I’m also a member of the National Writers Union and I’ve seen the way things are stacked against authors in most book deals.)

    While I totally disagree with these authors’ view of world and national politics, if what they say is true, I totally support their drive to get their fair share. Selling inventory to oneself in order to pay pennies on the dollar is unethical and disgusting.

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics-International, Marketing Trends/News, Media Ethics, Publishing

    One day after Xing’s

    And this is exactly what I was hoping for. Now I can post away, knowing that I have a paper trail showing the integrity of my rights ownership.

    Bravo! And hmmm, maybe they’ll reword it to cover what they really need without appearing to make a rights grab.

    Those links to the two previous posts again:

    My original letter (and the overall context)

    Xing’s first response

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    By Posted on Posted in Arts & Entertainment, Ethics: General, Publishing

    Both as someone who loves a good yarn and someone who writes regularly about ethics both in my blog and in my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, I want to talk for a minute about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

    There’s so much I could say about this latest (and final) Harry Potter book–but it’s a challenge to find things to say that won’t mess it up for those who haven’t read it yet. I think I’ve succeeded.

    Let me put my bias on the table first: I enjoy the HP books so much that we’ve given copies of Book #1 to several of our childless friends. I believe all of them have gone on to read the others, in order (and for these books, in chronological order is the only sensible way to read them). Also, I’m extremely grateful to J.K. Rowling for creating an entire generation of book readers in an era where that didn’t seem at all likely. Yet, there are places in some of the other books where I felt 50 or 100 pages could have easily been cut.

    In spite of its length, I don’t feel that way about #7. In fact, the drama is so intense, so early, and continues with so little down time that I almost wish for a bit more filler. It’s a very fast read.

    As a writer about ethics, I’ve long been fascinated with Rowling’s take on the nature of good and evil (and that of other writers in the genre, particularly Phillip Pullman, whose His Dark Materials series is every bit as masterful). In this book, she goes much, much deeper on that front, with lots of surprises. Several characters turn out to have a lot more depth than we thought, and Harry himself has to make a choice unlike any he has faced before. And the events following that choice just feel so right!

    One flaw, though, is the number of gratuitous characters she’s introducing. It’s a lot to keep track of, and several have only cameo roles. Another flaw is that the trail of corpses leaves some of the deaths without justification or even description, and no time to grieve and remember them before plunging into the next round.

    Still, these are minor. Rowling, not only a master storyteller but incredibly well-informed about mythology from many cultures, has long ago earned a special place in literature, and this book proves her mastery. She deserves every good thing that has happened in her life.

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    By Posted on Posted in Customer Service as Marketing, Marketing Trends/News, Publishing, Uncategorized

    While I’ve been blogging since 2005, at https://www.principledprofit.com/good-business-blog/ , I’ve been publishing the first two of my monthly e-newsletters all the way back to 1997 (I added another one in 2003, and had planned to launch a fourth son).

    At the time I started my zines, I had one website, spam was almost a non-issue, and you could be pretty sure that when you sent an e-mail it would be not only delivered but likely read. At that time, I only had one website: https://www.frugalfun.com , which went live in the spring of 1996.

    But I’ve been thinking for quite some time that e-newsletters have lost much of their effectiveness I know that e-mail deliverability is by no means certain anymore, and you can’t rely on getting a bounce notice if it doesn’t get in.

    Also, I know that lots of mail that does make it through gets deleted unread. This is certainly true in my own ebox, where I simply can’t compete with the volume of incoming mail. A few weeks ago I started a big purge and got my inbox down from 2400 to 800–it’s already back up to 1190, after five days on a business trip. And that doesn’t count the approximately 100-2009 per day that I throw out in my spamfilter–or the dozen or so that I try to rescue from the spamfilter but never arrive (9ne of my biggest peeves).

    This month I asked the 8000 subscribers of my two largest zines if the format was working for them–and got very definite feedback that while the content is valued, the long-form single-email text only format doesn’t work.

    But I *know* HTML email doesn’t work. I’ve seen the hideous results when they are corrupted in transmission, and I also know a lot of spam filters automatically catch anything with HTML.

    After thinking it over, I decided to convert to a blog. Yesterday, I sent the first one in the new format–a brief email with a sentence or two about each story and a link to the TOC on my blog (which in turn has live links to all the articles).

    I’m sure it will evolve (and hopefully take less time to set up, now that I can refer back to certain repeating articles, such as the one about my books).

    We’ll see what happens..

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    By Posted on Posted in Arts & Entertainment, Energy & Sustainability, Frugality/Frugal Fun, Marketing Trends/News, Other, Publishing, Uncategorized

    …And they should be trying to invest in this.

    In three days at Book Expo America, I saw one technology that could really alter the world.

    Because FedEx’s whole model is based on the need to transport paper around the world quickly–in situations where fax or e-mail isn’t practical for one reason or another. Situations that require a physical signature on an original document. FedEx, DHL, UPS, USPS, and all the other courier services need to know that the real business they are in at least as much about transporting signatures as in transporting large documents that would be unwieldy via electronic technologies.

    Frustrated by the demands of wearying multicity author tours, acclaimed novelist Margaret Atwood was signing for a package on an electronic tablet. I’m sure you’ve done it. Mistakenly, she believed that she was actually creating a physical signature on a piece of paper, remotely–so, she thought, why can’t I sign a book in my house? After all, it’s been possible for years to do author events by video or audio, remotely. Why not a long-distance book signing?

    And now she can. Using two-way videoconferencing, she can interact with a fan or group of fans anywhere in the world, and when a bookstore staffer puts a book under the pen at the other end, she can inscribe and personalize the book.

    Interestingly enough, a lot of the company’s promotional material focuses on the “Green” feature: the amount of carbon saved in not flying. Of course, the author who doesn’t have to slog through international border crossings, airports, hotel rooms, and the rest of the grind may or may not be thinking about carbon offsets. And, of course, it’s going to be waaaay cheaper than a year’s worth of book tours–though once the novelty wears off, readers/fans may not find it as satisfying as a real in-person appearance.

    Atwood’s company is called Unotchit and the product is Long Pen (TM). I couldn’t find any pricing information on the site but I’m sure that in most cases, a bookstore or other venue will install the device and then loan out the writing tablet (and, if necessary, the video cam) to the author, so the equipment cost will be relatively manageable. And I’m guessing, ironically enough, that a lot of those tablets and cams will be shipped by FedEx

    This has huge implications–not only in publishing but in sports, finance, real estate (think about closings with absentee owners), music, international business, and probably dozens of other industries.

    You heard it here first.

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    By Posted on Posted in Arts & Entertainment, Publishing, Shel's Personal Life, Uncategorized

    Ever been to a rock concert where the merchandise sales tables has more books than CDs? I went to one Friday night in New York: the literary all-star band called the Rock-Bottom Remainders (a remainder, in the publishing world, is a book that the publisher gives up on and sells at a deep discount–these are the fancy $30 art books you see marked down to $8, for instance).

    This band consists of people known for their books–Stephen King, Amy Tan, Dave Barry, among others. they did have Roger McGuin of the Byrds sit in for a few songs (and he sounded great!). Missing the introductions while waiting to get in on that looooong line, I couldn’t figure out who the female singer with the black hair was who could actually sing. (I did figure out that it wasn’t Amy Tan, who has brown hair.) Later, my distributor, who came with me to the concert, told me it was Mitch Albm’s wife. But for the rest of them, it’s good clean fun, and the idea isn’t so much to sound terrific as to throw a great party.

    And they did, singing mostly songs of the 1960s and early 70s–everything from “My Boyfriend’s Back” to “Don’t Fear the Reaper.”

    It’s been a decade or two since I’ve been to a packed New York nightclub–in this case Webster Hall, a fabulous old theater on East 11–and I’d forgotten that in New York, they multiply the legal capacity by several times when they determine the number of tickets to sell. The place was so crowded I literally couldn’t take off my backpack (filled with books and a laptop and probably weighing around 10 pounds). Ever try dancing like that? I could only stay an hour before my feet, worn down by eight hours of walking the BEA show floor, told me I had to stop.

    But unlike the typical NYC crowd, nobody was rowdy on that long line to get in. All the booksellers and publishers sedately stood and waited our turn (in our case about 20 or 30 minutes).

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    By Posted on Posted in Arts & Entertainment, Publishing, Uncategorized

    This blog may be pretty quiet for the next several days, unless I get a chance to post from the show–but with all the appointments I have, I doubt I’ll have time.

    One of the interviews I’ve got scheduled is with the founding president of Viacom. He’s pitching his new book, of course, but I intend to ask some hard questions about media consolidation and the death of the mid-list book at large publishing companies (Viacom owns Simon & Schuster, which published one book of mine and one of my wife’s, and numerous other imprints).

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