Next week, I start another 30-day Poetry Marathon… I’ll write one poem per day.
Deborah Ager. Link.
New info opiate
research shows that a brain rewards itself with a squirt of natural opiates when it comes across new information that requires interpretation
Mark Frauenfelder (via Boing Boing) Link
People buy bookcovers, not books
From Brand Autopsy:
“Borders recently tested a front-facing display strategy where more books were stocked with their covers, not spines, facing customers. Sales increased by 9.0%. The strategy was so successful, all Borders bookstores will be switching to the front-facing strategy in the next couple of weeks.” Link
From Rands in Repose:
“Anyone who has ever been in a bookstore knows that you’re not browsing books; you’re browsing covers.” (via Brocatus Link) Link
Silly me. I thought people bought books because of the words contained inside the covers.
Quote: Modern art is a disaster area…
(via Room 116) Link
Pornographers don’t sell pornography
AdPulp provides this:
“42.7% of consumer time online is spent with content sites, 28.6% is with communication sites, 16.1% with commerce sites and 5% on search sites.” Link
(For more detailed analysis visit OPA Link)
While a lot of content provider sites (i.e. news and entertainment sites) feel pressure to offer their content for free (and some have already removed their firewalls—i.e. TNYT and WSJ) the question remains—how does an organization provide “free” content without going bankrupt?
Jake McKee’s post—You’re selling the wrong thing—sited the McGuire HuffingtonPost Porn Knows What It’s For—Do You? as an answer to that question. To excerpt some notable quote from McGuire’s article:
“Pornographers… don’t seem to care much about how they do it—they’ll just find ways to give people the orgasms however people want them given… magazines… online photos, online videos… why are newspapers… having such a hard time?… they have a fundamental misunderstanding of what they do.
“The value of a newspaper is not that it gives me information; the value of a newspaper is how it selects information…”
And here’s a necessary mainstream-media-sucks, blogs-rule rant from McGuire:
“Blogs are excellent selectors of information, while newspapers are pretty clunky at it—because for the past 300 years they existed in an ecosystem where information was scarce. Now information (and access to it) is abundant.”
McGuire misses the point in the steam of his own blog-rant.
Blogs survive as scavengers of info. Blogs select and repackage recycled information. Blogs—with the exception of maybe 50 techno-intelligentsia sites—rarely provide original content. The mainstream media behemoths still provide the bulk of online content. Here’s were McGuire is correct: pornographers don’t care about how or by what vehicle they deliver the content—online or offline. Pornographers bank on three basic actions: consumption, evangelism, purchase (and repeat).
Or to put it another way: “delivering anticipated, personal and relevant [content] to people who actually want” it. (Source). Do people still consume news? Yes. Do the majority of people want to pay for it? No. How does a news/entertainment organization earn revenue online? IMHO, online advertising + products = revenue. Translation: offer ad rates (dictated by web traffic) plus and an online store with shopping cart for souvenirs related to the content the consumers want.
Targeting your book’s demographic? Or manufacturing your book’s audience?
Positioning one’s book in an already cluttered publishing arena is essential. Niching-down is another way of targeting a reader audience. Consider horror novels with all the sub genres: macabre, goth, post-apocalyptic, mystery, Victorian, etc. Authors and agents understand that before a manuscript is finished it needs to fit a market. Genre-defying books tend to be a challenge to position and are often avoided by major publishers. Is it a mystery or romance or high literature?
Cory Doctorow appears to either be a happy capitalist or a guerrilla marketeer by taking advantage of his online prominence (secure, soft market) and publishing leverage (200-copy give-aways are not cheap if one considers obscene postal rates) to penetrate a teen reader market.
“Since this book is intended for high-school-age kids, my publisher has agreed to send 200 advance review copies of the book to school newspaper reviewers, along with the same press-kit… (actually, the school kit has even more stuff — it also includes a signed personal letter explaining why I wrote this book and why I hope kids will read it).” (via Boing Boing) Link
Strategically this is a smart move—even for smaller, independent publishers. The best marketing device is the actual product. However, I wonder if offering a free downloadable preview—or entire book—would be more effective. Why bother with book reviewers? The actually end-user, the reader, is the one who will purchase the product—not the high school book reviewer.
Asehville’s Lexington Avenue street threads. (photo by Coffeehouse Junkie)
Biltmore Village Under Construction
(photo by Coffeehouse Junkie)
Is design transitive?
Hugh Graham writes that “design is too often about the transitive and the temporary.” (Transitive—the word comes from the Latin and means “passing over”) Consider how quickly designers have to change and adapt to generational demographics.
Brand Noise offers this:
“According to Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow in a new book titled After the Baby Boomers the key differences between Gen Y and Baby Boomers include that the younger generation is ‘spending more time in school, remaining financially independent… and changing jobs more often.’” Link
Now consider the Baby Boomers (again from Brand Noise):
“They comprise nearly 24% of the population, have a buying power of $3 trillion, and include many of the country’s current business and political leaders. But marketers misunderstand—and inefficiently target—this country’s 78 million baby boomers.” Link
Designers, by the nature of their craft, are communication experts and should be able to articulate ideas, brands, and identity to various changing demographics successfully providing they are supplied with reliable research. Hugh Graham agrees that change is the new norm, but pushes beyond that and proposes that “there’s a new form of change on the horizon; we’re heading into a constrained environment where the designer’s artistry and craft will have to encourage what lasts, what matters, what sustains.” Link
Can design be both transitive and sustainable? Only time will tell.
How to keep your job in journalism
According to Ashvegas:
1) Create killer content
2) Pimp your work
3) Brand yourself
Source: https://ashvegas.com/how-to-keep-your-job-in-journalism
“Independent bookstores do everything big corporate bookstores do, with only one significant difference: Independents do it better.”
Before audio books…
“Of all the repetitive, mind-numbing jobs in the late 19th century, cigar-rolling was special. “Unlike sewing clothes, mining coal or forging steel, it was blessedly quiet. And thus cigar workers, whether in Chicago or Havana, were the first ones in their time who managed to introduce that vital commodity — distraction — onto the work floor.“Using their own wages, and backed by a powerful union, they paid for a “reader” who sat in an elevated chair and began the morning with the news and political commentary. By the afternoon, he would usually have switched to a popular novel. The 100 or so rollers on the floor were his captive audience, listening as they worked.”
(via NYT — thanks AdPulp) Link
Socrates: wanted dead or alive
“Given the choice between Socrates dead or alive, Western thinkers have preferred him dead. At least as a symbol. A symbol of what? That’s where it gets complicated.”
Call me a snob, but really, we’re a nation of dunces
“The shrinking public attention span fostered by video is closely tied to the second important anti-intellectual force in American culture: the erosion of general knowledge.”
“I thought Europe was a country”
“Ms. Jacoby… said, something different is happening: anti-intellectualism (the attitude that “too much learning can be a dangerous thing”) and anti-rationalism (“the idea that there is no such things as evidence or fact, just opinion”) have fused in a particularly insidious way. Not only are citizens ignorant about essential scientific, civic and cultural knowledge, she said, but they also don’t think it matters.” Link “I thought Europe was a country”
The elegant lie
Sunday, I had the opportunity to sit in the WPVM studios during a broadcast of WordPlay. Katherine Min read from Secondhand World
Letting go
Two things happen when you let go of something; you feel the pain of its absence more acutely or you feel the freedom from the weight it once possessed in your life.
What editors do
From The New Yorker:
Editing takes a variety of forms. It includes the discovery of talent…. It can be a matter of financial and emotional support in difficult times…. an editor ordinarily tries to facilitate a writer’s vision, to recommend changes… that best serve the work…. editorial work is relatively subtle, but there are famous instances of heroic assistance: Ezra Pound cutting T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” in half when the poem was still called “He Do the Police in Different Voices”; Maxwell Perkins finding a structure in Thomas Wolfe’s “Look Homeward, Angel” and cutting it by sixty-five thousand words.
Link.
The secret lives and desires of poets and writers
From The New Yorker:
Part of the reason there were no real biographies is that little was known about Gibran’s life, and the reason for that is that he didn’t want it known.
Link.
And from Slate:
…one of the most troubling dilemmas in contemporary literary culture…. the question of whether the last unpublished work of Vladimir Nabokov, which is now reposing unread in a Swiss bank vault, should be destroyed–as Nabokov explicitly requested before he died.
Link.
From 1000 Black Lines:
- Jessica Smith, Burn it. Poetry burns well. And it is a fitting end for poetry, esp. anything from that angsty juvenile period…
- 1000 Black Lines, Thanks for the advice. I’ll burn it along with all the friendship bracelets, florescent T-shirts…. Who needs to worry about the high cost of heating fuel when burning poetry is such an affordable alternative?
Link.
Your community gathering spot
Writing tips from published authors
Books that… Take Your Breath Away
It is all about packaging, whether one likes it or not. The British design/publishing company knew that when they released their catalog of books produced in cigarette packaging.
When browsing bookstore shelves the standard trade paperback size becomes overwhelmingly boring. Packaging matters. Cover design matters. Page layout matters.
Anyone who has ever been in a bookstore knows that you’re not browsing books; you’re browsing covers. To have a chance in a sea of covers, you’ve got to have a compelling visual that grabs people.
(via Andre Brocatus) Link.
If a designer can make a book’s packaging and cover attract a reader, the page layout and text should create a literary (and art) experience with an archaic technological device–a book.
“Inspiration is for amateurs. I just get to work.”
From 43 Folders:
[Chuck] Close talks about evolving his method of working to overcome his own personality.
“I’m a nervous wreck. I’m a slob. I have no patience. And I’m rather lazy. All those things would seem to guarantee that I would not make work like I make. But I didn’t want to just go with my nature.”
So instead of painting overwrought, expressive things when the mood struck, he committed to making his epic, close-up portraits by breaking the work into tiny pieces and hewing to a grid. Not only did the grid make technical sense, it forced a lifehack on Close that would help him deal with his own tendencies. It helped get the work done…
Link.
Remember grammar class?
Of course you don’t. Based on the blogosphere, it must not be taught in schools anymore.
If you are one who remembers grammar class, this is great: Diagramming the Preamble to the US Constitution. (via Boing Boing)
If not, visit Grammar Girl: Link.
Coffeehouse Junkie 