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Last night I went to the Centre to watch a great, joyful set by The Swell Season (here’s a video from their new album–that must have been uncomfortable to shoot).

The opening act was Thomas Bartlett, the lead singer of Doveman. Meme-trackers may recognize him from his charming 2008 cover album of the entire Footloose soundtrack. He was a chatty performer, introducing each song with an explanation or anecdote.

He told the story of a song called “Angel’s Share” off the new Doveman album (you can hear it on their MySpace page). The Angel’s Share is the name of a tiny bar in Manhattan’s East Village, which is what Bartlett was originally writing about. He discovered that the bar is named after a piece of distillery jargon. From Wikipedia:

Angels’ share is a term for the portion (share) of a wine or distilled spirit’s volume that is lost to evaporation during aging in oak barrels. The barrels are typically French or American oak. In low humidity conditions the loss to evaporation may be primarily water. However, in higher humidities, more alcohol than water will evaporate, therefore reducing the alcoholic strength of the product. In humid climates, this loss of ethanol is associated with the growth of a darkly colored fungus, Baudoinia compniacensis, on the exterior surfaces of buildings, trees and other vegetation, and anything else that happens to be nearby

Comparing the Wikipedia article to the name of the bar and song, I see there’s some disagreement over where the apostrophe goes. I suspect that Wikipedia is correct, in that this is brandy or wine or whatever for all the angels, not one in particular.

At the book launch last night, my brother reminded me of this awesome New Yorker piece entitled “Subject: Our Marketing Plan”. It’s written as an email from an intern to a book author, and simultaneously pokes fun at so many things:

• Web marketing and its endless jargon.
• Authors’ very common anxiety around promoting their books.
• Tightening belts, cost-cutting and staff turnover at publishers.
• General workplace incompetence

Here’s my favourite bit:

Do you blog? If not, get in touch with Kris and Christopher from our online department, although at this point I think only Christopher is left. I’ll be out of the office from tomorrow until Monday, but when I get back I’ll ask him if he spoke to you. We use CopyBuoy via Hoster Broaster, because it streams really easily into a Plaxo/LinkedIn yak-fest meld. When you register, click “Endless,” and under “Contacts” just list everyone you’ve ever met. It would be great if you could post at least six hundred words every day until further notice.

I should mention that, perhaps because our publisher handles mostly technical books, they ‘get’ the web, and have been very pleasant to work with on a promotional (as well as every other) front.

As regular readers know, I recently co-authored a business book. Though I once wrote some humongous manuals as a technical writer, and we previously wrote a 100-page ebook, this was my first grownup book. As you might expect, I learned some lessons about the process. On the day of our book launch, I thought I’d share eleven lessons with you:

1. It’s way more work than you think it will be.
2. A co-author is an excellent idea.
3. This may be obvious, but if you get a publishing deal, you’re immediately on a schedule. There’s no looking back. If you want to write the book on your own time, write it first and then look for a publishing deal.
4. There’s probably just enough time to write the average book in a year and a half of evenings and weekends.
5. If I had to divide up the process, I’d say it’s 40% thinking and research, 30% writing a first draft, and 30% rewriting and proofreading.
6. Don’t be precious. As a professional writer, the more I’m paid to write something, the less likely I am to receive credit for it. So I’ve learned to be fairly fire-and-forget about my writing. It’s probably not worth the emotional effort to argue with your editor or publisher about small stuff. Win the big battles, and let go of the rest.
7. Once you submit a first draft, a ton of people touch your book. Our book had an editor, technical reviewer, copy editor, proofreader, production manager, graphic designer, cover designer and indexer (a soul-destroying job–I speak from experience). That excludes the marketing people and the publisher himself.
8. You’ll never have enough time to make the writing as good as it could be.
9. I forget where I heard this, but there’s so much truth in this quote: “Publishing isn’t an industry, it’s an organized hobby.”
10. Amazon punishes publishers for missing publication dates. So publishers tend to initially set a publication date which is strikingly far into the future. Don’t let this panic you.
11. This was something I already knew, but it’s worth mentioning: don’t write a book to make money. For the vast majority of authors, it’s not a moneymaking proposition. Write a book to spread your ideas, to earn ‘because-of’ income through speaking, consulting and so forth, or to get the perceived endorsement as a capital-a author.

Over on our book blog, I wrote a longish post about the hot social media topic du jour: sponsored tweets in your Twitter stream. Here’s an excerpt:

Things get punchy whenever people explore monetizing a new channel. Let’s begin by thinking about some other controversial forms of advertising in social media, and how sponsored tweets might relate:

• Static ads on blogs - Not particularly relevant. In my experience, the majority of income from blogging comes from one’s archives, not the front page flow.
• Sponsored posts - The blogosphere dabbled with these for a few years, but I rarely see them anymore. This could be because I don’t read the sort of blogs that would employ sponsored posts, or because they’re utterly forgettable, but I don’t think they’ve caught on in any significant fashion.
• As in RSS feeds - This is somewhat germane, though I usually see these ads not as separate feed items, but rather as add-ons to existing posts. Sponsored tweets are standalone units of content.
• Ads in IM conversations - In a way, this seems like the most relevant comparison. That said, I’ve never actually seen an ad in an IM chat. I mostly use Skype or Google Chat, though. Maybe something like Omegle will start inserting one-line text ads into its hosted, serendipitous IM conversations.

There’s also the Facebook Beacon debacle, among others. In short, people’s tolerance for advertising in their social media channels feels pretty low.

I know it’s a bit lame to excerpt and redirect you, but what can I say? It’s a busy week ahead.

Over the past week, I’ve been contacted about three new (or at least newish) web series. Vancouverites will recognize a bunch of locations in these first two. The first is a comedy called The Jim–here’s a teaser (rated PG for strong language):

The second is The Vetala, and seems to be a bit X-Files-esque. Aesthetically, this feels heavily influenced by Battlestar Galactica. Here’s the first episode:

The third is the slickest of the three, kind of a sci-fi show featuring a girl and her wolf entitled Riese. Again, the first episode–note the great costuming:

Here’s a Georgia Straight piece about Riese.

These can pretty much be presented without comment. It’s really fate that’s cruel in this first one (courtesy of James Mirtle):

There’s no question as to who is cruel in this second video. Those are some serious anger management issues.

The player’s name is Elizabeth Lambert–here’s an ESPN report (auto-playing video ahead) about the match. They rightfully raise two questions about these incidents: why aren’t the teammates of the fouled player standing up to Lambert, and how did she make it through the whole game with only a yellow card?

UPDATE: Phillip sent along this New York Times article in which Ms. Lambert responds to the video. The reporter goes pretty easy on her.

As you may have heard, the Amazon Kindle has finally come to Canada. Chalk up another late victory for the digital content ghetto that is our sprawling nation. We join the likes of Kyrgyzstan, Libya and Oman as countries able to use the gadget.

I’ve played with a Kindle a couple of times, and they’re pretty nifty things. You can store about 1500 books on them (have I read that many books in my life? Surely not) and the battery apparently lasts for two weeks worth of reading. Amazon offers about 300,000 books at US $12 or less, and you can get a bevy of newspapers and magazines online as well.

And yet, I don’t want one.

Cost, Backlog and Snobby Appeal

First there’s the cost. With taxes and import fees, the Kindle is going to cost at least CAN $325 before you buy a single book. Given that you might save an average of $10 per book by buying digital versions, you can start realizing cost savings after buying about 30 books. I wish I read more, but 30 books represents at least two years worth of reading. And who knows what options will be available by then?

Yes, it’s thrilling that I could carry a ton of books with me on the go. But, I don’t have a too-many-books-to-carry problem. I have a not-enough-time-to-read problem. I have at least five or six Audible credits waiting to be used because I’ve got a backlog of audio books which I haven’t listened to yet.

Plus, I’m totally unexcited about yet another electronic device which requires recharging. Plus there’s the ‘valuable object’ problem. If my bag gets stolen and there’s a book in it, then no big deal. If my Kindle gets stolen, then that’s a bigger problem.

Finally, there’s the snobby appeal of having your walls lined with bookshelves, and those bookshelves lined with books.

It’s a cool object, and I can see why lots of people want one. If I ever go back to school, for example, the idea of having all of my text books on one device sounds awesome. Still, I’m not salivating about yesterday’s announcement from Amazon.

Do you want a Kindle?

Today I saw Whip It, the rollerderby movie directed by Drew Barrymore. It felt pretty ordinary to me, and would have been disappointing without the excellent Ellen Page and Marcia Gay Hardin. The critics generally liked (but didn’t love) it.

Confronted with a very rainy afternoon, I lingered for a couple of minutes in the lobby of the cinema. I looked over the eight movie posters in the lobby, and was surprised to see that five of the films they promoted had been directed by women. I snapped some bad photos on my iPhone, and made this unpretty collage:

The films are, in order of my dodgy collage:

• It’s Complicated
• H2Oil
• When We Were Boys
• Amelia
• Whip It

Of those five films, three are mid-level Hollywood flicks, one is a Canadian indie and one is a feature-length documentary. How surprising is that result? In 2007, of the 13,000 members of the Directors Guild of America, only 7% are women. I don’t claim that my little lobby survey has any sort of authority, but it’s at least a little encouraging. The role of director has always struck as one of the last bastions of near-total male domination.

I’ll admit a little of my own sexism here: I was surprised to learn that best movie I saw all year, The Hurt Locker, was directed by a woman. Kathryn Bigelow has made a minor masterpiece in that movie. I wonder how many other war movies women have directed over the past fifty years?

Let’s end the week with a bit of hockey magic. Owen Nolan (the only player born in Northern Ireland playing in the NHL, as it happens) defied his 38 years last night and scored a top ten goal of the year:

Of course, those two mincing Tampa Bay defencemen made him look pretty good, but it’s still a fantastic goal.

Can I get an amen?

That’s good news. I wasn’t looking forward to selling little USB drives at our book launch if the actual books got held up in customs.

They smell a little odd, if you stick your nose right in them (as I always do with pretty much everything). That’s probably just because they came fresh and direct from the printer.