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.
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.
As I mentioned, our book (see also Amazon) is coming out later this month. In celebration (and relief), we’re holding a book launch party on November 24. Here are the details:
Date: Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Time: 7:00pm - 11:00pm
Location: Autumn Brook Artists Gallery, 1545 West 4th Avenue (map, view from street)
We’ll do a brief talk at some point in the evening, followed by a short reading from the book. We’ll also be available to personally inscribe the many, many copies you’ll surely be purchasing to give out as Christmas gifts.
Sundry details:
Appetizers will be served.
Convenient cash bar.
Autographed copies of our book will be available for purchase for $20.
There’s lots of street parking around, or you may want to consider parking on Granville Island and walking up to the gallery. Otherwise, the location is served by many lovely bus routes.
If you’re local to Vancouver, feel free to stop by. Please either RSVP to the Facebook event or, if you’re not the Facebooky type, drop us a quick email at rsvp@capulet.com.
Our book’s release is imminent. We should have it in our hot little hands on November 20 or so, and it will be in stores virtual and actual shortly thereafter.
We’ve been doing some marketing for the book–mostly soliciting blurbs and reviews. However, we’re going to fire up our book blog for at least a couple of months (here’s the RSS feed), and have plans to make a short-lived podcast that will feature readings from the book.
We adapted our book site from our old ebook site, which is why it may look familiar to a few of you. My first blog post over there is about a lack of magic beans:
We can often, however, divide our students into two big groups: those who get it, and those who don’t. Those who get it nod when we talk about the exciting possibilities of Foursquare, and say they’re inspired by the case studies we share. Those who don’t tend to fret about and focus on perceived barriers like copyright and privacy. They look for reasons to discount social media as a viable marketing channel.
On a related note, we were debating as to whether we should set up a Facebook page for the book. I wonder if it’s worth the effort, given that we don’t have the bandwidth or attention span to make it a longterm, sustained online community.
A Matter of Priorities
On another related note, at BookCamp Vancouver, I participated in a panel with the lovely and super-smart Monique and Deanna. Somebody asked me why, when they visited this site, they couldn’t find any information about the book. Given that we were advocating that authors need to become more engaged online, they asked it with a certain amount of relish. I may have even seen them high-five their colleague at the back of the audience.
I wasn’t entirely satisfied with the way I answered the question, and wanted to give it another crack. To me, the stuff I promote on my site is a balancing act. I don’t want to inundate people with ‘asks’, so I generally try to limit myself to one item at a time. Before October 15, I was running a Blog Action Day badge. Now, on internal pages at least, I’m running a banner for TckTckTck.
Will I eventually stick up a little ad about the book? Yep, though if you’re a regular reader, you already know about the book. You’ll buy it, or you won’t, and the ad probably won’t change your mind. Besides–and I don’t want to sound ungrateful here–the book is just one project among a bunch of things I’m doing. So I don’t feel a need to pimp it more aggressively than I am.
Today I attended BookCamp Vancouver at SFU. It’s was a well-run, well-organized event that frequently featured an engaging exchange of ideas. It probably could have used a few more of the unconference features that make BarCamp so special. I expect some industries are more comfortable than others with this kind of open, egalitarian model, so better baby steps than none at all.
Throughout the day, I recommended a number of articles to various writers, editors and publishers. I figured I might as well gather them here in case they’re of interest. Long time readers have probably seen me recommend one or more of these articles before:
The Economy of Ideas by John Perry Barlow - From 1994, but still pretty relevant today. Extremely prescient for the time. “Even the physical/digital bottles to which we’ve become accustomed - floppy disks, CD-ROMs, and other discrete, shrink-wrappable bit-packages - will disappear as all computers jack-in to the global Net. While the Internet may never include every CPU on the planet, it is more than doubling every year and can be expected to become the principal medium of information conveyance, and perhaps eventually, the only one. “
The Next Economy of Ideas by John Perry Barlow - Six years later, and even more insightful. I’ve been saying this next sentence ever since I read this piece: “Art is a service, not a product. Created beauty is a relationship, and a relationship with the Holy at that. Reducing such work to “content” is like praying in swear words.”
1000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly - I recommend this to every artist I meet, regardless of medium. It’s an extremely elegant way of thinking about fostering community and building an audience. For some reason it reminds me of the central metaphor in Anne Lamott’s “Bird by Bird”. “A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author - in other words, anyone producing works of art - needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.”
I wanted to offset those first three from the next two because the former are truly remarkable, visionary pieces. The next two are smart thinking and worth reading, but might pale a bit by comparison.
The 10 Principles of Lean Publishing by Peter Armstrong - Some very useful thinking about what publishing can learn from software development. Includes concepts like “fail fast” and “a book is a lean startup”. Now, Peter, go write a great, simple manifesto, instead of a waffly top-ten list.
Last night, courtesy of the Vancouver Comedy Festival, we watched George Strombopolous interview Steve Martin at the Orpheum Theatre. There was no particular framing around the evening–Martin wasn’t promoting a book or movie–just a reasonably informal chat in front of an adoring, apparently sold-out crowd.
I’m not a big fan of Strombopolous’s public persona, but he’s a reasonably capable interviewer. The conversation meandered through Martin’s youth, his stand-up career, his movies and other sundry pursuit–he’s a bit of a Renaissance Man.
Though I don’t consider myself a huge Steve Martin fan, I’ve actually consumed a ton of his work. I’ve seen most of his movies (excepting those made ‘for the whole family’) and at least one of his plays, and I’ve read both his novels and his autobiography. He writes charming, readable books, and his autobiography was a fascinating study of one artist’s mind.
Having read Martin’s autobiography, a number of his entertaining anecdotes were familiar to me. Still, it was a funny evening. After 35 or 40 years on-stage, he’s just an innately amusing performer. Looking dapper in a linen jacket and striped socks, he was kind of everyone’s funny uncle. Though I’ve never made this connection before, his physicality reminded me quite a bit of Alan Alda–skinny, white hair, all elbows and knees.
An Adoring Audience
And everyone else seemed to agree. I was surprised by the youthfulness of my fellow audience members. I wasn’t particularly scientific, but I’m pretty sure the majority of the audience was born after 1976, when Martin stopped regularly doing stand-up comedy. I saw a couple of my friends from the theatre community there, which seems natural, but I was, frankly, shocked at how many people paid $60 to $185 to watch Martin chat with Strombopolous and play a couple of bluegrass tunes on the banjo. And they were so smitten. They gave Martin a standing ovation when he walked out on stage.
Maybe it’s a supply and demand question: the opportunities to see him locally, in any guise, are pretty rare.
A significant chunk of the evening was given over to questions from the audience. As they always do, these ranged from the inane to the insightful, and people frequently started by gushing about how much they loved the comedian. I could have done without this. I’d rather watch a succinct, well-run 80 minute interview–I came to hear from Martin, not his fans.
My only technical complaint is that the sound seemed pretty poor. I was toward the back of the main floor of the house, but I often had to strain to hear what Martin and Strombopolous were saying. Strombopolous, in particular, is a bit of a mumbler. If that was the best the venue could do for amplification, they might have been better off not using microphones at all.
A few random quotes from the evening:
Martin described the movie poster for The Lonely Guy as “the worst movie poster ever made”. He’s right.
“3:00pm is the worst time for comedy.”
When asked, he admitted to occasionally reading the message boards on his website. He said, “if there was a discussion forum about you, wouldn’t you read it?”
Rebecca scored an interview with Canada’s boyfriend yesterday, in case you’re looking for more Strombopolousity.
I was in a bookstore at Pearson Airport today. I was just killing time, and I noticed the usual display of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight novels with their stark black covers and gothic fonts. Er, hang on. I looked a little closer:
They’re an entirely different set of vampire werewolf novels by Kelley Armstrong. Is it me, or do those books look a little too much like the Twilight covers? Here’s the cover of Eclipse, the third Twilight novel, for comparison:
Right down to the wide kerning (or is that tracking? I never know) on the author’s name, eh? Doesn’t the design of Ms. Armstrong’s book covers seem like an incredibly cynical attempt to trade on Twilight’s success?
I forget how I found this charming blog, but it’s written by somebody who works at a used and rare bookstore. They post the forgotten bookmarks and other sundries that they discover inside purchased books. The discoveries are pretty diverse, from the mundane to the intimate, such as this Dear John postcard:
We are both at such profound transition points in our lives, and our situations are too unstable to offer the foundation necessary upon which to build the tremendous life changes that we idealistically believed possible. I want to know and believe, as I think you do, that I will always be a loving and caring friend & confidante to you - I know you would reciprocate that.
In the June 22 issue of The New Yorker, there’s a terrific profile of the romance (and futuristic science fiction police procedurals) novelist Nora Roberts. I knew she was a big deal in the publishing industry, but I had no idea how big. She’s truly a force to be reckoned with.
Unfortunately the article isn’t available online (but here’s an interview with Lauren Collins, who wrote it), but here are a few facts that illustrate her industry oomph:
She’s written 182 books.
In a typical year, she writes eight books.
There are allegedly enough Nora Roberts books in print to fill Giants Stadium 4000 times.
She estimates that the average book takes her 45 working days to write. She writes six to eight hours a day.
Twenty-seven Nora Roberts books are sold every minute.
She wrote three of the top ten best-selling mass-market books of 2008.
In 2008, she sold 18 million books.
Forbes estimated that, in 2004, she grossed $60 million, more than John Grisham or Stephen King.
The article also has some unsurprising facts about the romance novel genre. It generated $1.4 billion in sales in 2007, more than any other genre (and more than science fiction and fantasy combined).
As regular readers know, Julie and I have been working away on a business book. It’s been a long process of writing on weekends, evenings and ferry rides, but we’re getting down to the brass tacks.
I’ve got a chapter and a half left to write, but all of the other eleven chapters are complete and well on their way through the editing process. The book is scheduled to be released in the latter half of October, 2009.
Here’s what the cover is going to look like. Click for a super-size version:
Our publisher, No Starch Press, has posted a sample chapter (PDF) on their site. I’ve embedded it below:
Glancing through that chapter, I spotted a couple of errors. The final proofreading hasn’t been completed, so no need to worry for the time being.
It’s exciting to see a bit of the book laid out, and to see it on Amazon and such. I just need to finish another 5000 words or so, and I can move on to resurrecting and re-theming our ebook site.
