Year: 2006

“How’s the Book Doing?” Entrails and Tea Leaves

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Having a book published has turned me into a brain addled validation junkie.

I’m sure that when Margaret Atwood or Malcolm Gladwell release a book they have a lot of work to do – book signings, tours, interviews, and so on. But when you’re a no name author those kind of events just don’t make much sense for anyone – publisher, author, or bookstore. And book sales are notoriously difficult to track: just because a bookstore has ordered the book doesn’t mean a reader has actually bought it, so those copies may just be sitting on a shelf, waiting to be returned. So there is something of a void.

"How’s the book doing?" people ask, and while (on the advice of LS) I usually respond optimistically, the truth is I have no idea. What, anyway, would be good and what would be bad? I mean, being invited on the Daily Show or appearing on the New York Times bestseller list would be unambiguously good, but below that it’s just a matter of what my expectations are. Is 1,000 copies good?  10,000? Who is to say? And as it’s my first time around at this particular game, I have no expectations whatsoever. So LS is right in her advice: the optimistic response is better than the blank stare and shrug of the shoulders that I would otherwise give.

In this void of information, any and all scraps are welcome to the starved author. The internet, of course, is a vast source of entrails and tea leaves that have to be prodded, scried (?) and stirred to reveal their Nostradamus-clear prophecies. But something is better than nothing so, data addict that I am, I autogoogle and troll for all those scraps it provides.

Here, then, are some of the nicer-smelling entrails I have found so far (in addition to those I’ve mentioned earlier in this weblog).

That someone would pick up your book and read it is a great compliment. If they reach the end, more so. If they actually put finger to keyboard to say something about it, then that’s very heartwarming indeed. I’ve got lots of great feedback from friends, but there is of course every reason for the sceptical author to suspect these people of gilding the lilly a bit when they tell me what a fine book it is. Not that I’m ungrateful, you understand – far from it. Bring on those compliments! I just reserve my judgement sometimes.

So particular thanks goes to people I don’t know. People like Persephone, who wrote this in answer to one of those book Q&A topics  that go around the weblogs.

8. One book you are currently reading?

No-One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart
by Tom Slee. Well, actually I finished it a while ago, but I’m still
paging through it thinking about the arguments he presents. It’s very
provocative. Out of all these books, read that one first.

I can tell you, that makes great reading. Thanks a million Persephone – you are indeed a sage. Other recent weblog mentions include the Relentlessly Progressive Economics blog and the Danish Observations and Stories, who both reproduce a bit from my online excerpt. Thanks to both of them.

Then there are people who use the title for their own purposes. Kerry Howley is assistant editor of Reason Online, the libertarian-capitalist online magazine. Her article "Has Wal-Mart Peaked?" argues that Wal-Mart’s recent setbacks  in Germany and Korea may be a harbinger of troubles to come for the beast of Bentonville, and that those who fear Wal-Mart may therefore be worrying without reason.  She says…

The fear Wal-Mart inspires is nicely encapsulated in the title of Tom Slee’s recent book No One Makes You Shop At Wal-Mart: The Deception of Personal Choice. Slee argues that Wal-Mart is a scourge we bring upon ourselves by
forsaking the good of the community for the false idol of individual
choice. But it was the individual choices of individual consumers in
Germany and South Korea that sent Wal-Mart packing.

I don’t actually disagree with her on this. Wal-Mart’s global dominance is certainly not a foregone conclusion, as (among others) the Guardian recently mentioned its less-than-stellar progress with Asda in the UK, speculating that Wal-Mart may be too American to succeed globally. I don’t think that weakens my book, mind you.

Another libertarian who has (more deliberately) helped to promote the book is the open-minded Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution, who said this in a recent post about a story I pointed him to.

Thanks to Tom Slee for the pointer.  I hope to say more about his interesting new book, No one Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart, in the future.   Contrary to the title it’s about how markets fail, not a defense of Wal-Mart!

Whether or not he does say more (and I hope he does, of course, but hey, he’s a busy guy), here is the effect on my main web site of that one little mention (click for a clearer image).

Daily_usage_200608

Of course, I track my sales on amazon.com (I haven’t been tracking them on .ca and .co.uk yet, but there’s time for that to start.) During August my ranking has been bouncing around between 60,000 and 300,000 (probably 60,000 means someone has bought a copy, and 300,000 means no one has bought one for a while). Here is what the graph looks like (from my Zohosheet); a low point is a good thing. Not very legible I fear, but this is about as clear as I can make it – right click and choose View Image to see it more clearly.

Amazon Sales Ranking - http://www.zohosheet.com

Another fine thing is that you get to mix with eminent neighbours. I get a kick out of looking in bookstores and libraries at who is next to me on the shelves. At a local store, philosopher Peter Singer (The Way We Eat) of Animal Liberation fame is my neighbour. At the local library, Anthony Giddens (Runaway World) is right next door. In the online list of Working for Change resources at the University of Victoria I’m hanging out with Vandana Shiva, author of Biopiracy. This is all pretty cool.

And that’s about it I think. Or wait, maybe someone has mentioned the book in the last twenty minutes. Wait a sec, I’ll just check google again……

No? Oh well. Maybe again….

Update: apparently if you can write about sex with some panache, then going to the book store is far more rewarding (not safe for work!). Good for her.

Update again: I assumed  Kerry Howley was  a he. Wrong. I’ve corrected the references above; thanks to David Weigel for putting me right.

Andy Warhol / Supernova

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Went into Toronto today, and took a look at the Andy Warhol exhibition   at the Art Gallery of Ontario, "guest curated" by David Cronenberg.

Talking to AK beforehand, she said that the show is as much about
Cronenberg as it is about Warhol, and I see what she means. The theme
is "Stars, Deaths and Disasters, 1962–1964", and it’s
the Deaths part that is most obvious, and which Cronenberg has most to
say about on the commentary. Given that Warhol produced so much stuff
the focus on death, particularly grisly death (as in the electric chair
series and the Car Crash series) and disaster does seem to have more to
do with Cronenberg’s interests than with Warhol’s.

I went not knowing much about Warhol beyond Campbell Soup, Velvet
Underground, and the odd profile of him I’d seen. I wasn’t sure whether
I would be impressed or not – I don’t have knee jerk reactions for or
against modern art. On the plus side, I like being challenged by art –
anything that makes you take a different look at a piece of the world
deserves praise, whether you agree with it or not – and on the negative
side, I don’t have much time for sensationalism for the sake of it. But
how to tell the difference?

I’m glad I saw the exhibition, and some of the things I really liked
(the Elvis image, for example) but overall I ended up with a lower
opinion of Warhol than when I went in.

The films were the least impressive part of the exhibition. ("Blow
Job", "Sleep", "The Couch", "Screen Tests", and something about a
haircut) There is always something about yesterday’s iconoclasts that
is a little pathetic, because the most outrageous things tend to look
tamer over time (well, except for Un Chien Andalou perhaps). Most
people go through a phase of self-discovery and exploration of our
place in the world, some with more gusto than others. But most of us
don’t call it ground-breaking art and I didn’t see much in the films
beyond a desire to shock and a desire to self promote. The expressions
on some of the models/participants/actors were just "hey, look at us,
aren’t we something" and I thought – "no". The films seemed to catch
the worst of what the Warhol phenomenon is about: the circular
reasoning behind the fame and celebrity that he seemed to pursue so
relentlessly. Warhol is important in part because of the subjects of
his art (Jackie O, Liz Taylor, Marilyn Monroe); but in some cases the
subjects take on their importance only because it was Warhol who
pointed his camera at them: Warhol, in the end, is important only
because he is Warhol. The insights that the commentary gives into his
apparent shyness, his pursuit of celebrity, and his devotion to
celebrity are creepy. There is a touch of the Paris Hilton here –
famous for being famous. And if Warhol, you say, is deeper than Paris
Hilton, then he would disagree – one wall had his epigram on it: "If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of
my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind
it." The two of them share something in common.

The silk-screen images were more interesting, and occasionally more
disturbing. The best — the electric chair series (can’t remember their
real name) and some of the Liz Taylor series, and the famous Elvis
Presley images, use the repetitive silk-screen technique to fine
effect, with the sequence of images fading away, or collapsing on
themselves, giving a poignant and melancholy air to the whole image.
Others, such as Race Riot and Car Crash, disturbed me for different
reasons. Where the commentary argued that Warhol forces us to look in a
different way at the images, I’m afraid I just saw them as a
self-promotional artist taking others’ grief and distress and making
himself famous from it. His own distance from his subject did not have
the effect on me that it had on Cronenberg. He found the distancing
effect of silkscreen, the coldness of the technique, to demand a new
scrutiny of the image. I had no such reaction – to me Warhol’s
recycling of these images as art had little impact.

I’m glad I went, if only to see the iconic Presley image at full size
and in the silk-screened flesh – starting tall and bold, and fading
away into a dim greyness over time, it’s difficult not to see it as
prophecy. But I can’t take Warhol seriously as a major artist. The fact
that his reputation has grown since his death is, I suspect, mainly a
result of his contemporaries bringing sentimental memories of the their
youth into the now top-of-the-field positions that they occupy.

Developer-led Planning

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Scott Piatkowski highlights a paragraph from the local paper that reminds us how market-driven and developer-driven much of Southern Ontario’s recent city growth has been.

"Historically, in the early 90s, (the idea) was to strip away bureaucracy to make it easy for business to come down and open up without all the red tape," city planner Cory Bluhm said yesterday. "What we’ve learned from this is the opposite is now the way to go. Residents now expect the city to play a role in shaping the downtown."

About time, I’d say. The only thing worse than city hall is no city hall. Here is the full report that he is talking about.

Cool Webby Things Change How We Work

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I routinely use three different computers, and so any web-based tool is a natural for me. I don’t want to move stuff around from place to place, and I don’t really want to store home things on a work computer. So I find myself – although not without misgivings – keeping more stuff on the web all the time.

I’ve used Gmail as e-mail interface for some time, and I keep photos on Flickr, and now I keep appointments on Google Calendar.  I’ve just discovered LibraryThing (hi piefuchs) and am working out what to do with it, but I expect I’ll keep some kind of catalogue of my books there. There’s no doubt these new applications are changing how useful the web is. I recently started using Zoho Writer to write longer weblog posts, and the thing is, I could imagine using it as my main word processing program. It’s nowhere near as feature-rich as MS Word, of course – but being free, web-based, and reasonably usable, are three big things in its favour, and that’s something I didn’t expect a year ago. Zoho Sheet is pretty cool too.

One big question is whether Google’s forthcoming web-based word processing and spreadsheet programs will be any good. Their spreadsheet is now in Beta, and I’d say it’s not quite as good as Zoho Sheet (no graphs, for example). Their word processor is probably not too far off, as they bought Writely a few months ago. While Google Earth is one of the coolest programs ever, some other things they have done seem half-finished, so I don’t think it is a foregone conclusion that Google will win this particular battle.

I can really see a time, not too far off, when many people will use web-based applications for most of their word processing and spreadsheet programs. Microsoft Office is overdue for some competition from some kind of disruptive technology, and in a couple of years MS could have some real problems.

Carnival of Wal-Mart

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Starling Hunter at The Business of America is Business puts together collections of weblog posts on a couple of topics on a regular basis. One of those is Wal-Mart, and he included one of my posts in his latest collection:  Carnival of Wal-Mart III.

Among the others, there are posts about Chicago and Maryland’s new employment laws that affect (or, in Maryland’s case, would have affected) Wal-Mart employees, Wal-Mart’s failure in Germany, the Walton family’s shrinking tax bill,  and Wal-Mart’s new shoplifting policy.

Starling Hunter has worked at Boeing as an Electrical Engineer, at Exxon, at MIT’s Sloan School of
Management, and now at American University of
Sharjah, "just outside of Dubai, United Arab Emirates". His perspective on Wal-Mart is, unsurprisingly, definitely different from mine — but I do like his take on Rockonomics.