A Canadian book blog: Publishing, marketing, books and technology from a Canadian perspective
BookCamp Vancouver 2009 Unconference : Exploring New Ideas in Books, Publishing and the Future of Reading.
Join Us on October 16 at SFU Harbourcentre for a day-long exploration of books, book-like technologies, and the future of the publishing industry.
We want to bring together the technologists and the book publishers, marketers, writers, librarians, media, and anyone else interested in reading, writing, publishing and gadget geekery.
Registration details to come.
Is Amazon Taking Over the Book Business? is a great article by Lev Grossman and Andrea Sachs in TIME on Monday, Jun. 22, 2009.
As I’ve said before, Amazon isn’t just a bookstore.
As numerous publishing journalists and bloggers have pointed out, Amazon has diversified itself so comprehensively over the past five years that it’s hard to say exactly what it is anymore. Amazon has a presence in almost every niche of the book industry. It runs a print-on-demand service (BookSurge) and a self-publishing service (CreateSpace). It sells e-books and an e-device to read them on (the Kindle, a new version of which, the DX, went on sale June 10). In 2008 alone, Amazon acquired Audible.com a leading audiobooks company; AbeBooks, a major online used-book retailer; and Shelfari, a Facebook-like social network for readers. In April of this year, it snapped up Lexcycle, which makes an e-reading app for the iPhone called Stanza. And now there’s Amazon Encore, which makes Amazon a print publisher too.
Come out to the Shebeen.
Old Publishers Have New Think Coming
The Shebeen Club
Monday, April 20, 2009
6:00pm - 9:00pmWhat: Old Publishers Have New Think Coming call to arms!
When: Monday, April 20th, 6pm-9
Where: The Shebeen, behind the Irish Heather, 210 Carrall Street.
$15 cash at the door includes dinner and a drink.
And yes, it’s okay to show up without RSVPing first.
Gutenberg was an early adopter. Very few people know that.
Call to action from Monique: I’m going to organize a panel in Vancouver. We’re going to create a model for publishing and marketing books. We’re going to move forward as an industry. Leaders will be identified. Roles will be assigned. If you’re not open to totally change everything you’re doing, then you are not ready for this revolution. Don’t come.
Who’s in?
Monique Trottier is the owner of Boxcar Marketing, an internet marketing company in Vancouver, BC. As the former internet marketing manager of Raincoast Books, she spearheaded major online marketing campaigns, including online promotion of Harry Potter and the creation of the first Canadian-publisher podcast and blog. Her thoughts on marketing and technology can be followed on Twitter at “somisguided” or on her blogs at http://www.boxcarmarketing.com/blog and http://www.SoMisguided.com.
Posted by Monique at 01:52 PM. Filed under: Blogging • Book Publisher • Books • Marketing • Technology •
Freaky. Yes it works. I printed out the page.
http://ge.ecomagination.com/smartgrid/
Did You Know? from Amybeth on Vimeo.
Hey, Hatshepsut is my favourite Egyptian king. He was a she and she rocked! Hatshepsut is kind of pronounced like “hot chep soup”, like hot chicken soup.
This is a 3,500-year-old perfume bottle that a German research team discovered in March 2009 and there is still some ancient oil in the bottle.
So exciting! More on National Geographic…
Ada Lovelace Day is when we celebrate women in technology who inspire us. I am in awe that I made Kate’s list because Kate is truly inspirational to me.
My shout out, since I’ve been negative about the publishing industry, needs to go to Julie Wilson of SeenReading.com who continues to come up with phenomenal ways to capture the attention of book readers.
She’s promoting poets for Poetry Month:
30 in 30 video
She also has a kick-ass google mashup of bookstores across Canada and about a million great ideas for promoting books online.
I love you Julie. Thank you for rocking my world!
Bruce Sterling Session
Monday, March 16th at 05:00 PM
PRESENTERS
* Bruce Sterling - Wired.com
DESCRIPTION
His state-of-the-cybersphere analyses are always a highlight of SXSW Interactive. Don’t miss what the veteran science fiction writer and industry pundit has to say about the wired world this year.
MONIQUE’S NOTES
Let’s talk about our relationship. Yours and mine.
I’m an author. I’m a journalist.
There’s my business card.
With a phone and fax number.
Look. These artifacts are called books. I know you’re not used to seeing them.
Let me explain how they work.
I write a lot of words in a row. A whole lot of words. Not even character count. Then I go back and carefully restructure them and move them until they have a coherent storyline. Then I send them to my agent who sends them to a publisher who sends it to an editor and eventually it goes to a distributor who handled cult activities like author tours. And it goes to retailers who sell it to people and then return unsold copies.
This whole business has hit the skids.
Publishing has never been such a parless states. If you were an author in this system, you go 4-8% in a not really accurate royalty system. But that was ok because you, as an author, were likely to go screwy anyway.
As an author and journalist, I feel much more sorrow for the state of editors.
Editors/Publishers model is not working out. Now you have the cliched perfect storm of troubles.
Sterling on the book
I have them. I thought about spamming the audience with them. Or hiding them and geo-locating them ...
No this belongs to someone who is young. Under 20?
There is not a teen in the room? So much for this being a teenagers. Think. Just break times’ hourglass. Just take them away young people. I don’t expect you to read them. You txt.
How do we face this problem?
Twitter feed: media is dying
Print media spent 20 years making fun of a paperless society.
Could I put it on Kindle? Oh it’s there. Am I happy about that? No. Will anyone be reading a Kindle when one of them is my age? No. It’s like an atari.
Traditionally authors burn all their love letters on their death bed. Now we issue them under creative commons.
WIRED Italia. Look at the size of the ads in this baby.
[ ... monique distracted ... ]
What concerns me is the death of the audience. It doesn’t matter what happens to me. I’m better off than most authors I know, most journalists I know. There was a period of greater prosperity. I wonder why, why do I have a relationship to you. Why do you have a relationship to you?
My twitter group is bigger than you, more widely spread than you. They are probably a better audience than you. They can put up with more than you. They’ll RT me. I know some of you are gathering together in the back conspiring ... drifting ... you’re the people formerly known as the audience. And you’re forfeiting the benefits of the audience. Paying attention to the point of being able to discuss it.
[Bruce opens a drink. I used to have a great parties. It was my house. We were there to enjoy ourselves. Opens chips. You thought you were getting chips, but I was in control of the chips. The servers. They were in my corner.]
MT: Best laugh out loud.
Old social media (parties) were bring who you trusted.
The party audience was replace by social media influencers. Their capacities were built up. It was impossible to open up to this audience because they’d tweet their buddy list. It’s a technologically transformed situation and the loss is a social loss.
There’s a loss.
How do we restore those days? They aren’t coming back. Why do I keep up author appearances? Why do I have to keep up a level of respect? You’re not my friends. I’m not your host.
[cookie eating now]
Even if you’re broke, you will still be densely connected.
Connectivity is a symbol of poverty.
I might become boring enough that no one comes by anymore. You can lose your fame to the point that no one shows up.
I can’t throw a party and sit around and talk about vinyl and books. I feel the loss keenly. Playing lost vinyl for your friends. This has vanished.
I have little parties in those places with which I have similar relationships to this one. Lift Conference is getting bigger every year. Reboot in Denmark, great conference again. Amsterdam is on top of their game.
USA could be like Canada. We’re afraid of French, Germans. We’re liking Canadians: cute, cuddly. They’re afraid of being us.
Let me read this silly stuff to explain what’s happening:
“Melt down money-quake yuppy flu end of the world as we know it the long emergency bush’s legacy the great reset the inflection un-real estate communism 2.0 ... the long doom.”
This is what I think books will look like in the future. Austin is a bookish town. Book culture will mutate on the way down.
Austin bookstore I saw on the way into town. HP Lovecraft: greatest, most creative ... and when he wasn’t getting commercial work he basically started blogging. Here are his miscellaneous writings. A small fraction of his discourse and it’s bigger than his collective works. This non-fiction, community organization was more time than his stories.
Within his community, he was trusted. The American Amateur Press Association was his blog network. A lot of writers came out of this association. Robert Block. The Lovecraft circle who grew up from a B.
He perished.
What does the future look like?
Go to Brave New Books in Austin. Right-wing nutty.
This is a harbinger of something interesting. The tactics are more important here.
[ ... more to come ... 15 minutes of battery left ... ]
Posted by Monique at 03:17 PM. Filed under: Book Publisher • Books • Marketing • Technology •
New Think for Old Publishers panel at SXSW drew a lot of frustration from the crowd of book lovers and supporters.
The official description of the session was:
This is not a discussion of whether ebooks are killing treebooks, or whether it’s possible to get cozy with an Amazon Kindle. It’s about how participatory culture and the online world interact with good olde book publishing.Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody, Deborah Schultz, and fellow panelists will share with the audience a variety of perspectives on what’s going right and what’s going wrong in publishing, assess success of recent forays into marketing digitally, digital publishing, and what books and blogs have to gain from one another. Penguin Group (USA), which houses some 40 plus imprints and publishes an extremely broad variety of physical and digital products everything from William Gibson’s first ebook in the 90’s to Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food to Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse novels (the source for HBO’s True Blood) is deeply involved in exploring ways that old and new media might better collaborate. Audience members are invited to speak up about what they think book publishers could/should be doing to better provide relevant information and content to blogs, websites, and online communities. Come tell old media what you want and how you want it.
Clay Shirky ITP
John Fagan Mktg Dir, Penguin Group (USA)
Deborah Schultz Founder/Chief Catalyst, deborahschultz.com
Peter Miller Dir of Publicity, Bloomsbury USA
Ivan Held Pres GP Putnam’s Sons, Penguin Group (USA)
They certainly told publishers what they think. The summation was “you suck at this is the biggest way possible.”
I think it’s unfair to attack the folks on that panel but as representatives of the industry they do have to go back to their houses and understand that they need to convey, not that bloggers are an unruly bunch, but that publishers need to get off their asses and get involved with social media. Enough is enough.
BookSquare says
If you’re going to hold a session called “New Think for Old Publishers”, you gotta come with some new thinking. Either that or tell the audience that it’s a research session…and the audience is supposed to bring the new thinking. Good idea, needed better execution. Nobody read the panel description to mean “we want the audience to tell us what we’re doing wrong and how we can fix it”.
...
The publishing people on stage said, essentially, tell us what we’re doing wrong and how we can fix it. You have 300 people who give up an hour of their lives to hear the cool things the traditional publishing business is doing…and you can ask them to consult on your business?
Watch a video of the panel here.
Other links to conversation about this panel:
Medialoper has a fairly neutral assessment of what unfolded.
Twitter stream of comments on this panel #sxswbp
Monique’s summary
What went wrong is this:
* Publishers have not listened to the crowd for a long time.
* The crowd is restless.
* Publishers wring their hands about the web.
* The crowd offers options publishers don’t like.
* Publishers weep into their hands.
* The crowd wants to help and offers other suggestions.
* Publishers act like deer in headlights.
* The crowd plows down publishers and reinvents the industry without them.
What this panel really came down to is that the wisdom of the crowds is not being tapped. The crowd is now sick and tired of trying to help people who won’t help themselves.
Hold me to this: I’m going to organize a panel in Vancouver. We’re going to create a model for publishing and marketing books. We’re going to move forward as an industry. Leaders will be identified. Roles will be assigned. If you’re not open to totally change everything you’re doing, then you are not ready for this revolution. Don’t come.
Who’s in?
UPDATES
Peter Miller Glibness. “Do As I Say, Not As I Do: Tips from a panelist who barely survived” in Publishers Weekly.
Read the article.
Michael Tamblyn of BookNet Canada on 6 Things That Revolutionize Publishing
Posted by Monique at 10:42 AM. Filed under: Book Publisher • AMACOM • Annick Press • Arsenal Pulp Press • Bantam • Bloomsbury • Chronicle Books • Coteau Books • Douglas & McIntyre • Drawn & Quarterly • ECW Press • Egmont • Frontenac House • Grove Press • Harcourt Books • Harper Collins Canada • House of Anansi • McClelland & Stewart • Penguin Canada • Raincoast Books • Random House Canada • Scribner • Seven Stories • Simon & Schuster • Turnstone Press • Vintage Canada • Books • Marketing • News • Technology •
Saturday, March 14th at 03:30 PM
PRESENTERS
* Jenny Benevento - Bento Artisanal Metadata
* Tom Conrad - Pandora Media Inc
* Abby Blachly - Librarything
DESCRIPTION
Web 2.0 is all about tagging, right? Many content types are not findable with user-generated metadata. More web projects are using controlled & expert created metadata to complement user tagging to enhance user experience, findability, social networking, & site popularity. We’ll show you how & why it can help you.
MONIQUE’S NOTES
Why you should/could use normalized metadata?
Users want to get shit done.
LibraryThing started because I guy wanted to share his book list and pulled the info from the US Library of Congress. That became social as more people wanted to do this. The Dewey number, bisac, etc. are fields of metadata that are pulled into the site in order to take marked records and to make it into an understandable, searchable archive.
Tagging is also present on the site so there’s a good mix of user-generated metadata along with normalized metadata. In addition, users are able to add controlled metadata for things like series titles.
... lull in blood sugar ...
I’m really excited to be at SXSW this year. I have wanted to come every year and have always had some excuse. This year, I’m here!
Today is my second day and I’ve attended two sessions so far that are worth blogging about. Here are my notes on the Boxcar Marketing site:
Everything You Know About Web Design Is Wrong
This was a quick comparison of transcendental changes in the film industry and how those same types of changes need to occur in web design.
Curating the Crowd Sourced World
Nice panel discussion from people who are currently letting the crowd do the driving (but, of course, the wheel is only controlled at any one time but one person). Perhaps the panelists are more interesting individually.
Fun Facts
There are 6500 registrants for the interactive portion. These are the participant bags.
The speakers’ name signs are last name only. This is so that the cards can be reused by all speakers with the same last name. Now that’s a cool planet-saving measure.
Posted by Monique at 10:10 AM. Filed under: Blogging • Book Publisher • Chronicle Books • Marketing • News • Party Tricks • Technology •
Where are you today for the Inauguration of Barack Obama?
Farmstead Wines wants to know. Farmstead has partnered with Memelabs to bring the Where Were You video time capsule.
Post your video about where you were for the inauguration.
Marko Casalan, 8, is officially world’s youngest IT whizz
[Marko]... was unable to sleep because of excitement on the night before the much-feared experiment aimed to recreate Big Bang conditions at the underground facility of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research or CERN in Switzerland.
The experiment failed because of technical problems, but Marko is confident that it will eventually prove to be a scientific breakthrough. “The media said it could cause the end of the world,” he said, “but there was never any danger of that.”
Words Fail Me.
I am a lion: A potent, playful, preening dominator.
YOU’RE A LION!
You’re a curious cross between potent and playful—and on occasion you take yourself too seriously. You have a vain streak, and gazing into a mirror seldom fails to please you. You like to be surrounded by friends, and savour a sense of casual dominion over them. You can move quickly on your feet when you need to, but generally you prefer taking it slow. Through and through, you’re a lion.
Wild lions currently exist in Sub-Saharan Africa and in Asia, and there’s a critically endangered remnant population in northwest India. The animal is extinct in North Africa, the Middle East, and Western Asia. With exceptionally large males exceeding 250 kg in weight, it is the second-largest living cat after the tiger. That might not sound like a vulnerable animal, but it is.
Thanks to @ehrenc on Twitter, here’s the link to Victoria Barnsley’s (HarperCollins UK) speech on change in publishing. Read it! She is living and breathing the Web 2.0 world from the position of someone who’s been in the business long enough to remember receiving handwritten manuscripts. (Ok, I’m that old too, but those were really old writers.) http://snurl.com/57cm0
Posted by Monique at 12:03 PM. Filed under: Book Publisher • Books • Predictions • Technology •
Plain Words, Uncommon Sense
A blog on books, writing, tap dancing, technology, and the other amusements of Monique Sherrett
(or Monique Trottier in unmarried form).
Monique Sherrett lives in Vancouver, BC, Canada and is a litblogger, among other things. Find out more ...
"So misguided." A comment often uttered in my eclectic salon.
Send me book galleys, ARCs or review copies. Contact me at
monique at somisguided dot com
Contact me at Boxcar Marketing
Google+
Follow @somisguided
What I read, what I recommend: Amazon Listmania