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“You must be here for the rebranding project.”
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(Submit your own here.)
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Take my word for it that the image at right — sorry I don’t have a better version — represents the painting The Dead Christ supported by the Virgin and Mary Magdalen by Marcantonio Bassetti (1588-1630). It’s a work that the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge wanted to purchase for £175,000.
Now consider the second image, the [...]

In a distant kingdom long ago a prince was born. He grew up quickly, as children do, and soon the king and queen assembled the most talented people from throughout the realm to tutor the boy in all the arts and sciences. In time he became a man who was not just tall and handsome [...]

Can we agree the whole branding thing has got out of hand? I wish that branding had never left the cattle corral. These days, instead of selling an actual product you sell the idea of the product. So you spend all your time working not on the product but on the idea of it.
Today even [...]

I received this unusual e-mail recently (subject line: “you ruined my life, sorta / an offer for karmic balancing”). I have edited it somewhat to conceal the identity of the author. I have no memory of the incident the writer describes. I will say that I think I have generally been courteous in rejecting manuscripts. [...]

Tim O’Reilly makes some points in its favor.

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Today’s guest post at ForeWord Magazine is about how book publishers can increase traffic to their websites.
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The next installment of my series of columns that is running at Foreword Magazine this month is up. This one looks at why publishers should try to optimize direct online sales. The next column will look at some ways to improve numbers from this segment.
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Getty Images has come up with an odd, inventive, and intriguing take on the streaming music service (pandora, last fm, etc.). Getty’s Moodstream combines audio with shifting still and video images. The user dials up a “mood” by adjusting sliders for such qualities as “happy” vs. “sad,” “calm” vs. “lively,” and so on. (Or you [...]

“If Folly link with Elegance no man knows which is which …” — William Butler Yeats

Read at Work : amusing
The all-important author photo : lessons from Capote
It’s difficult to talk coherently about typefaces without some sense of the history of typography
Nipplephobia : watch out, they’re coming to get you
Books flying off the shelves in Spain
PhotoShop [...]

Want to bribe the New York Times Book Review into reviewing your book? If so, you’ll have to come up with something better than these examples of book review swag.
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Book publishing has always been a little backward in some aspects of marketing. For example, while a graphic designer might produce several covers for a book, these are usually reviewed only by a select group of decision makers involved with its production and marketing. I’m not aware of many focus group tests, even for titles [...]

No, not op eds — op ads. I had forgotten how pervasive op art was in advertising of the 1960s and 1970s. It was also a period of increasingly globalism, as design fads trends quickly spread from one culture to another.
Italy produced some of the boldest op art ads, such as these ads for a [...]

Among the words I’d like to retire, toward the top of the list would be branding. It’s not, of course, that I’m opposed to marketing, or creating a coherent and persuasive product or company identity. Helping products find appropriate audiences is good for everyone; in the book world, you don’t want books going out to [...]

Stephen Page, publisher and chief executive of Faber and Faber, writes in an article in the Guardian that “the industry is closer now to a tipping point that would see a dramatic reduction in range, a shortening of writers’ careers, and a reading culture that errs towards mass forms of entertainment alone.” He is talking [...]

Recently there has been an increase in calls for the inclusion of ads in printed books (this “On the Media” report, for example, touches on the idea). There’s a degree of desperation in this — supposedly it would help to address the difficulties of making publishing profitable. Alongside these calls has been the inevitable hand [...]

BLURB: A brief noise that embarrasses everyone.
– Tom’s Glossary of Book Publishing Terms

A curious aspect of book publishing is that publishers have never quite figured out what the best way is to sell books. Not only is the industry cursed with a byzantine distribution system, but publishers routinely repeat the stale promotional techniques of past [...]

If I was still doing trade book publishing I would recommend to my authors that they try blog touring. Conventional book tours have their place, especially for developing bookstore relations and to some degree local media, but a virtual tour via blogs would certainly reach a much larger audience. The return from that audience would [...]

Ten Questions is an occasional feature in which folks involved in some aspect of publishing kindly oblige my interrogative impulses. Today I’m talking with Jeffrey Lependorf, who serves as executive director of two three different nonprofits, Small Press Distribution, based in Berkeley, the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, based in New York City, [...]

Publisher 010 Uitgeverij has made what I think is probably a smart decision to put their 2004 title Dutch Type by Jan Middendorp in Google Book Search. Of course we have seen public domain books in GBS for some time (by the way, it is absurd for Google to claim any proprietary rights at all [...]