Holtzbrinck Online

The Mystery Guest

FSG has created a trailer for their new title The Mystery Guest by Gregoire Bouillier.  Check it out, it's great.

Or if you prefer, check it out at YouTube.

Also, if you're on MySpace add Gregoire as your friend. 

The Saga of the Challenged Book

What do Judy Blume's Forever, J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, Robie Harris' It's Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health, and Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye have in common? They have all been challenged (that is, a library or school has filed a formal request to remove a particular title based on content or perceived appropriateness). Harris' It's Perfectly Normal holds the distinction of having been the most challenged book of 2005, while Morrison's The Bluest Eye was successfully challenged by the school board in Littleton, CO. The good news for those committed to freedom of expression is that, according to the ALA, the number of books slated for the chop from libraries last year was at its lowest ever. Why the decreasing number of challenged titles? Judith Krug, director of the ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom, muses that the trend may stem in part from the fact that the watchful eyes of our guardians of moral literature have shifted their gaze. According to Ms. Krug (see the USA Today article), "There's only so much energy to spend on situations or concerns outside the home ... A large majority of our challenges deal with what children are reading in schools and many adults are now so concerned about what's on the Internet that they have refocused." It seems everyone is on Myspace these days, even concerned, censorship-minded parents.

Rhetoric

A friend recently showed me a site called American Rhetoric, which archives speeches from American history, both as text and (where available), as .mp3 files.  They also have some movie speeches, although this portion of the site seems less developed than the historical section.   Go over and check it out, it's a fascinating presentation of points in history.

Media Post article: "MySpace Members Balk At Phony Profiles"

Media Post's Online Daily has nice article about how MySpace members are quickly growing wary of fake profiles on the incredibly popular site, whether it's fake celebrities who (supposedly) have MySpace pages, to corporations that create fake pages for fictional characters. This seems like a perfect example of Internet marketing where god is in the details: it all depends on how it's done, what the transparency is, and whether or not the potential user is being offered something real (even in a fake profile), or whether it's just a bad attempt by a company to trick someone into buying something (like someone who comes up to you on the street raving about Dentyne and telling you you should buy a pack at a local drugstore; hint: they work for Dentyne). But a lot of the "fictional" aspects of MySpace and blog campaigns are handled really well, like the alternate universe that's grown out a TV show like "Lost." That being said, there's a thin line between meta and me-too, and marketers need to make sure that the direction they're taking on these popular websites is more about Subservient Chicken than it is killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Excerpt: "But the very measure of these sites' success [Facebook, MySpace]--increased advertising spending--leaves the publishers facing a dilemma: Marketers' use of the sites risks diluting the authenticity and appeal of the medium that made it so successful."

Media Post article about MySpace

Vote, or die!

MSNBC is the official voting partner for The Quills awards. It's easy and free -  so if you haven't take some time and vote.

Puffy would be happy you did.

And-  if you need some help, vote for An Inconvenient Truth for book of the year.

Books while Doing Housework

While performing the more dreary of life's tasks (washing dishes, cleaning, or tending my window planter, or "garden," as I laughingly call it), I like to listen to audiobooks. This is why I'm really excited about LibriVox, a digital archive of free audiobooks in the public domain. I can listen to The History of the Peloponnesian War while feeding the cats, Notes from the Underground wile I'm doodling, or Dracula wile I'm dusting my bookcases. LibriVox reached 100 books in its catalog on August 10th, and according to its founder, Hugh McGuire, in a NYT article, it expects to have another 100 in the near future. All of these audio recordings were created and edited by volunteers, so expect a range of performance quality. Go and subscribe to LibriVox's podcast feed!

Pets.com on a Plane; Internet Marketing is Now Everyday Marketing

Last weekend, the much hyped film Snakes on a Plane opened and took home a tepid $15 million dollars at the box office. The film’s release was preceded by months of rabid Internet interest, with thousands of people creating all kinds of Snakes on a Plane tributes, mash-ups, and even T-shirts; indeed, the film--before it even opened--attained the kind of cult status which it normally takes a movie years to achieve (a la “I see dead people” or “Show me the money”). So the eventual lower-than-expected gross from the opening weekend was a bit of a shock and a genuine disappointment to many in the advertising industry. The thinking had been, because it had been so talked about and feted online, that all of that intense interest and activity would translate into dollars at the box office. Well, it didn't, and lots of media outlets used this fact to let the wind out of the sails of online marketing in general, and yet I think this is totally wrong argument. True, the online hype didn't spur people to actually go and see the movie, but this has been a classic hallmark of advertising and marketing since the industry's inception. In the past few years, in fact, there have been great examples of amazingly successful marketing campaigns which managed to catch fire with the public's imagination, but which didn’t necessarily then translate into great windfalls of cash or increased sales of the products they were ostensibly promoting. One of the best cases of this was Pets.com, an Internet company which--despite have a great marketing campaign, and memorable catch phrase-filled commercials featuring an instantly lovable sock puppet mascot--quickly went out of business. True, this was back in the dotcom era when most businesses were focused on their advertising campaigns instead of their business plans. However, to have that kind of recognition in the marketplace and have it not translate into sales is, unfortunately, common in this industry. Taco Bell's tremendously successful "Quiero Taco Bell" campaign from a few years ago was also a huge success with the public, but it didn't end up selling more tacos. Same with the Budweiser "Whassup" campaign; everyone knew the catch phrase, and loved the commercials, but it didn't end up selling any beer (in fact, sales of Budweiser actually fell during that period). Snakes on a Plane is merely the latest example of what has been common in traditional marketing for years, proving that catch-phrases and cultural awareness do not always translate into dollars and cents. In fact, for me the real hallmark of the Snakes on a Plane phenomenon is that it shows that online marketing has truly come of age, and that it is now on equal footing--with all of the positives and negatives that that brings--with traditional marketing. Internet marketing has now become everyday marketing, and all of this recent schadenfreude about the soft debut of Snakes on a Plane should be tempered against these facts. And in terms the catch phrase of the old Pets.com ads, “Because pets can’t drive,” I guess that’s why the snakes were on the plane…

To Be Young & Educated

Microsoft has acquired exclusive rights to provide banner advertising and sponsored links for Facebook until mid-2009. Phil Leigh, president of Inside Digital Media, speculates in a NYT article, "It's basically a consolation prize ... But Facebook is also a legitimate test bed, a place where Microsoft can test new technology in a commercial context." (Microsoft lost out to Google in a bid to provide search functions and advertising to MySpace.com earlier this month.) Facebook's "young, educated spenders" will be treated to new marketing technologies (involving "banner ads, animation and interactivity") developed by Microsoft come this fall. EVERYONE wants a piece of this demographic.

Henry Holt's Quill Nominee

"Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee" by Charles J. Shields and published by Henry Holt has been nominated for a 2006 Quill Award in Biography/Memoir.   You should go over there and vote for it so that at the end of September I can put up a post congratulating them for winning.   

Here's wishing the best of luck to Mr. Shields and "Mockingbird."

Where's the Bass?

While listening to a playback of what will undoubtedly become a punk classic, one of the recording band members, whom I'd just met, started to talk about how great it is being able to listen to music on his iPod and how he rarely uses his turntable these days. This got me thinking about my old LPs and tapes, long neglected but not completely forgotten. For those of us who can't bear to get rid of our vinyl and cassette collections (and don't have the technical expertise to patch together a transfer system of our own), there is the Teac GF-350. It will transform your records into CDs. An article in the NYT walks you through the process. Unfortunately,  the Teac suffers from a few serious drawbacks. The sound quality for record transfers is "reminiscent of a car radio;" the bass is nearly nonexistent; and it cannot be hooked up to your stereo. Tape transfers fare much better. I think that I'll skip the Teac and get a turntable instead.