Ling Chan of the Vancouver Opera and Capulet Communications have been doing a couple of sessions for business groups on blogger outreach and twitter. Vancouver Opera’s success and Capulet’s expertise are written up in the Victoria Times Colonist, and the story went out on the Canwest wires and has been picked up by the New Brunswick Telegraph Journal.
Hooray for Vancouver Opera, and congratulations to Capulet for being such superstars.
The opera’s blog is used to make it more accessible to people, educate them, increase awareness and make connections, Chan said. Other organizations have approached the opera about its social networking methods, which only started in spring of 2008.
Warmest regards,
BookCampTO was this weekend and it stimulated my brain.
Mitch Joel, who I admire greatly, was in attendance and we had a couple of excellent thought exchanges, one of which is playing out on his blog.
Here’s a fleshed out version of my comment “Gratis vs. Libre.”
The thing of value that publishers and authors have is the content of their books. Setting the value of that content at zero is not the way to go. (Although there are interesting examples of free PDFs that lead to great value for the publisher and author. See the D&M case study on The Tar Sands (PDF).—Thank you Alison for sharing!)
Giving the content away for free (in whatever format the book takes) is like my fellow apartment dwellers who toss books into the “free” box in the laundry room. Those books are gratis. They are one step above being thrown away. The value exchange between giver and taker is “meh”.
Freeing the content, as in libre, is what publishers and authors are after. It’s the quest to give—as in a gift—that allows the value exchange of the content to remain in tact.
Why did the D&M campaign meet its goals with the free PDF? Partly because it’s still early days for free PDFs. D&M captured our attention by giving away the entire book because there are few people doing that as a marketing strategy. There is value in the rarity.
More important though is that there was a strategy to this campaign. They set measurable goals in advance. And they didn’t set the only goal as increasing sales because they recognize that there’s not a direct correlation between a single marketing campaign (with multiple facets) to sales. But most important of all, they treated the PDF as a gift.
It was available for a limited time. And it was available, in particular, to journalists and bloggers as a file that they could gift to others. It was libre—free to travel, free to be shared.
Book publishing is an industry in a cribbage game—and it’s not about avoiding getting skunked by your fellow publishers, it’s about avoiding getting skunked by every other industry vying for consumer attention. You are playing as an industry, not as individual players.
BookCampTO is one example of how we can work together and I really hope to bring that conversation to the west coast. Thank you for the Toronto hospitality.
I’ll be posting my BookCampTO notes at http://www.breakthespine.com/. If you’re interested in attending the Vancouver debrief session sign up for email alerts at Break the Spine, email me, DM me on twitter—chose your means.
How to Entry
Write 250 words or so on the Death of a Critic (Literary or Art), and what they did to get there.
Send entries to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) Visit RevengeLit.Blogspot.com for details
Background
Everybody Hates a Critic. Some people hate them more than others.
Terry Griggs’s new comic-noir biblio-mystery Thought You Were Dead kicks, err, off with a literary critic found under a hedge with a knife in his head, and literary revenge plays an increasingly important role as the novel unfolds. The literary world, and especially the Canadian literary world, can be a small, spiteful – and occasionally murderous – place. Character assassinations abound, books are regularly murdered in the (shrinking) book pages across our fair land, while others are smothered with damningly faint praise. More than a few knives, even if thankfully metaphorical, have been buried hilt deep in authorial backs.
Do you bear the scars of CanLit’s internecine wars? Have you spent a small fortune on postage and only have a drawerful of rejection slips to show for it? Has the world been slow to recognize your evident talent? Then, dear reader, this contest is for you.
To celebrate the launch of Terry Griggs’s Thought You Were Dead, Biblioasis and Seen Reading are teaming up to help you unleash the murder we know is in your heart with our Revenge-Lit contest. Pen a flash fiction of 250 words or so (though, in truth, no one is likely to count them) on the (fictional) literary critic whose body once filled the chalk outline and what he did to get there and send it by June 12th to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
The best of the entries will be published as they are received at RevengeLit.blogspot.com. The winning entry will:
1) Receive a one hundred dollar cash prize
2) Be published in a forthcoming issue of CNQ: Canadian Notes & Queries
3) A Biblioasis press catalogue of in-print trade titles (approx. 40 books, retail value approx. $1000.00)
Entries to be judged by Dan Wells, Julie Wilson and Terry Griggs.
As my mother used to say, “Do as I say, not as I do.”
I tell people that they should offer email subscription options as well as RSS because many people still prefer to receive email. That said, I had set up a Feedburner account, then crashed my website, then fixed it (thank you Hop Studios), then noticed the wrong “Sign Up for Email Alerts” was being used.
Alas ... I’m back up on Feedburner, thank you for your patience.
The Shebeen Club
Monday, April 20, 2009
6:00pm - 9:00pm
What: 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.
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.
* 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.
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.
Blogger Night at the Opera included a lot of photo taking by those much better equipped than I. Here are a few of my favourite picks from my fellow opera bloggers:
During the siege of Sarajevo, which lasted 3 years, a shell struck a group of 22 people who were waiting in line for bread. For the next 22 days, Vedran Smailovic, a renowned local cellist, played Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor at the site in honour of the dead. His actions inspired Steven Galloway to write this novel.
The part I read is from page 75..
The woman is Arrow, a sniper. Nermin is her boss. He has brought her to this spot to hear the cellist for her first time. She is to ensure that the cellist is not killed by enemy snipers.
Registration opened yesterday and there was a flurry of activity. The conference sells out every year so if you are interested in attending, here’s the place to buy your tickets. http://northernvoice2009.eventbrite.com/
I will, under no circumstances, miss Dave O this year.
Friday is the best day for me to geek it up. I love the on-the-fly scheduling.
The people attending, and speaking, all rock. (This is Megan Cole. Definitely worth meeting.)
And you never know what kk is going to do, so it’s totally worth coming out to Northern Voice for curiosity sake.
Look mom! Blogging with no hands. (That’s called podcasting.)
Every person attending the event will receive access to the conference event, along with a complimentary WordPress souvenir, and admission to the social event in the evening on the 24th. The swag is apparently very cool.
Early bird pricing of $35 is only valid until Friday, January 9. After that time the price raises to $40.
If you plan to stay overnight, the Fairmont has reserved some rooms at a sweet price, but book soon. Fairmont will be releasing some of the reserved rooms into the general populace shortly. If you want to book, please use this link.
Roughing It In The Books is what I love best about the internet. Here are two women who love books, reading, writing, publishing and are having an online conversation about it that we can all follow and/or join.
The site focus is on Canadian Literature.
I don’t know anyone who reads the classics anymore – not the Canadian Lit. classics anyway. Ask Canadians about them and they roll their eyes and mutter something about Roughing it in the Bush – which, unless you have actually taken a University level Canadian Lit. course you probably haven’t read. Susanna Moodie’s whiney tale of life in the New Country is the quintessential Canadian novel people love to hate. Ask a non-Canadian and their reaction would probably be, “Canadian what?”
So true!
When you talk to people who haven’t studied Canadian Literature, they really have no idea that we live in a land full of amazing writers. And the reference to Roughing It In The Bush by Susanna Moodie is another clever inside joke. Even those of us to studied Canadian Lit. were steered to Sinclair Ross (1908-1996), Ernest Buckler (1908–1984) and Susanna Moodie (1803-1884). All great authors for many reasons, but they just don’t stir up the same connotations as their English or American counterparts. There’s even something sexy and unknown about Australian Lit. or Caribbean Lit.
