Category Archives: Books

Scoundrel Marketing

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From Booksquare, on The Da Vinci Code trial (which I blogged about previously here):

[W]e do appreciate the fact that the British taxpayers are covering the costs for the most intriguing marketing campaign of the season.

Sales of the plaintiffs’ book, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, are way up, of course.

I detect a categorical similarity to the post-Oprah James Frey bump. And I furthermore suggest all writers immediately consider ways they can grab headlines, post-publication, through a lurid public display of their baser natures.

UPATE: suit dismissed.

Amazon.com: Publisher?

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Reporting from the London Book Fair in their Lunch Deluxe e-newsletter, Publisher’s Marketplace notes some comments by Vicky Barnsley of Harper UK, speaking at a panel titled “21st century issues:”

Barnsley said, “Personally, I see Amazon as a bigger threat to publishers [than Google is],” having displayed “interest that they want to move into the publishing space…. They recently hired someone from Penguin US; they are approaching agents and trying to acquire content, which is very different from what Google is doing.”

Yeah. I’d feel threatened, too.

This is huge.

Write, or buy a lottery ticket?

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In a Guardian article on POD (publish on demand) books, we find this charming side dish:

. . . 50% of all published books with an ISBN (International Standard Book Number) tag sell fewer than 250 copies and barely more than 1% of manuscripts submitted ever get published.

Interesting numbers; I don’t doubt they are true. Yeah, the odds are stacked against us.

What I don’t understand is how POD is supposed to help. Sure, by publishing yourself, you are, technically, um, “published.” But does anyone think that by self-publishing, you can improve your chances of selling more than 250 copies? Even if Amazon does list your book?

Sure, you bypass the multiple gateways of agents, editors, publishers, distributors, and booksellers. But not the readers. Ah, the readers . . .

Do you read the book, first?

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In the Washington Post, Louis Bayard considers movie adaptations of books, and remarks that he has a friend who refuses to watch an adaptation until after she’s “read the book.” He calls this an act of self-defence

because a movie adaptation, if it’s at all decent, will forever alter the way we see a literary work.

True. Yet when an adaptation is good, it gives such pleasure, doesn’t it?

Why I’ve been harping about certain T&Cs

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Every time I’ve happened across a conversation about Amazon Connects, I’ve pointed out that according to its Terms and Conditions, authors who use its “plog” feature (essentially an Amazon-hosted blog) don’t own the rights to their posts.

My comments have seldom elicited a response of any kind. Decided absence of outrage. I’ve concluded that, for the most part, writers figure it’s not a big deal.

And certainly, the majority of blog posts are best consigned to oblivion within 24 hours of hitting “publish.” Or even sooner. They are too topical, sloppy, or just plain forgettable to be worth re-using later.

And yet. And yet. One never knows. So now there’s Blurb, a software product written up in the New York Times (registration required).

The software, which is expected to be available free later this month at www.blurb.com, features a “Slurper” tool that automatically downloads and reformats the contents of a Web log into a book that bloggers and their admirers can purchase online.

The odds that the average blogger will sell more than one copy (to his/her mother) are gratifyingly slim, of course. But for some writers, I suspect that blogs will emerge as the equivalent to collections of letters — ancillary bodies of work that will be of interest to a subset of readers. And other writers, particularly non-fiction writers who blog on topics related to their books, may end up drawing on blog posts for future book material.

And of course, there is blogfic.

So yeah, owning the rights to your blog posts is important. In my opinion. Important enough that if you do “plog,” you should confine your plog posts to news — not use them to do any real writing.

If it feels good, read it?

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I found this via Booksquare — a Guardian story that claims people prefer books with happy endings.

Okay, I’m willing to believe that. Who wants to pay money to be made to feel miserable? (Yeah yeah that just invites a whippersnapper response, doesn’t it! Go ahead, it’s the weekend!)

But halfway through the first draft of this post, I realized that the info on the study’s methodology was a bit on the thin side, and what there is raises a flag in my Bordeaux-livened brain:

The survey of 1,740 respondents was carried out on the World Book Day website.

So this is, what, like an AOL poll? :-o

The details from the outfit that conducted the poll, Worldbookday.com, aren’t much thicker:

An online survey was carried out on the World Book Day website between January 1 and 9 February 2006. There were 1740 respondents.

The survey was commissioned by the organisers of World Book Day and analysed on their behalf by Education Direct.

Well, maybe Education Direct was able to extrapolate Reality from 1740 Internet users? Hmmmmm.

I next googled to see how other papers are presenting the survey results. Here’s how it’s framed by The Telegraph:

Book readers overwhelmingly prefer novels with happy endings . . .

and

Almost half the nation’s readers . . .

I.e., no qualification that maybe, just maybe, the poll might not be representative of the larger population.

The Mirror, otoh, spins it into a story on the Top 10 Happy Endings. How funny is that: falling back on pure fluff somehow feels the most honest of the batch :-)

Okay: why didn’t Tom Cruise demo this on Oprah????

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This article on Scientology in Rolling Stone, by Janet Reitman, is a long one. Covers a lot of ground. But it leaves a whole bunch of majorly pressing questions unanswered.

FOR example. We learn that if you hoist yourself far enough up the Scientology flagpole, you become an “Operating Thetan.” OT for short. And being an OT has some nice perqs:

OTs can allegedly move inanimate objects with their minds, leave their bodies at will and telepathically communicate with, and control the behavior of, both animals and human beings.

We also learn that Tom Cruise is an OT level VII, which is “near the top” of this illuminous trajectory.

Okay. We can surmise, therefore, that Tom Cruise is able to do some fairly extraodinary things, including move inanimate objects with his mind. Which raises the aforementioned questions. The first of them being:

Tom Cruise can MOVE inanimate OBJECTS with his MIND??????????

And then moving right along to:

Who ELSE can move inanimate objects with his mind? Can John Travolta? Kirstie Allie?

And: How many generic brand, joe six-pack sort of Scientologist types are running around with the ability to move inanimate objects with their minds???

Are they allowed to do this in PUBLIC? Large objects? Cars? Buses? St. Bernards? Or is this just private, in-the-comfort-of-your-own-home activity? “Honey, I was thinking, the couch would look better over there, next to the fireplace.” “Okay, lover.” Zzzzzzzzzzzztttttt.

Speaking of which, does this ability ever become a source of marital tension?

“Darling, would you PLEASE pick up your dirty socks?”

“Why should I? You’re the OT level VII. Just use your mind to pick them up.”

“Yeah well, if you’d get off your lazy ASS and get YOUR OT level VII then I wouldn’t be stuck doing all the supernatural odd jobs all the time, now would I!”

:-o

UPDATE: Reitman has written a book, Inside Scientology.

Hometown hero (if you are into Greek history, anyway)

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A University of Rochester emeritus professor of history, Perez Zagorin, has written a book on Thucydides titled Thucydides: An Introduction for the Common Reader.

Here’s a review, the author of which, James P. Holoka of Eastern Michigan University, says the book will “be most useful to an audience of undergraduates and other ‘intellectually curious people,'” and that Zagorin

is to be congratulated for his well-informed, evenhanded, readable, and eupeptic presentation of a formidable ancient historian.

“Eupeptic.” I had to look that one up to be sure. It means “having good digestion; cheerful, optimistic.”

Peter Stothard reviewed the same book last month for the Wall Street Journal (subscription required), writing

“Thucydides: An Introduction for the Common Reader” is a useful book. Yet as Mr. Zagorin himself recognizes, a great historian claimed by so many generals and politicians in so many struggles over so many years cannot always be understood through the minds of others. Mr. Zagorin calls for his own readers to become readers of Thucydides and to judge for themselves whether, for example, the Peloponnesian War was truly inevitable or might have been avoided by better diplomacy.

Oh, for a few more hours in the day . . .

Somebody stole their architecture

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No, not the gazebo in the back yard.

There are two writers suing Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code. Their names are Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, and they have a book, too: The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. It was published in 1982. I have a hunch it hasn’t sold as many copies as TDVC.

Whether they feel their sorry sales numbers are an outrage is hard to say (ha ha ha) but oh, are they pissed that Brown used their “architecture.” As explained by the New York Times (registration required), Baigent, Leigh and a third author (who declined to participate in the suit)

spent five years, from 1976 to 1981, researching the book . . . before arriving at what they call the “central architecture” of their argument. It is this architecture — the trajectory of the case they make in “The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail” — that they say Mr. Brown appropriated, rather than individual words or passages.

So. He hasn’t plagiarized — not in the way we usually think of plagiarizing. What he’s done is to re-use some elements of a story that they told in their book over two decades ago (adding, btw, a lot of his own invention in the retelling).

And he was either luckier, or cleverer, or a better story teller than they were, and consequently, his book was a blockbuster.

It will be interesting to see how this turns out . . .

UPDATE: I’ve posted more here.

Extinctions of Yore

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Well, the Permian extinction of yore. If you can’t recall it, that’s perhaps because it happened 250 million years ago, and you’re not a geologist, or both.

There’s a book on it out, now: Extinction, by Douglas H. Erwin, a Smithsonian paleobiologist. It’s been reviewed here in a Washington Post piece by Joshua Foer.