Tom McMahon

US book publishers produced almost 300,000 titles last year. 300,000! Michael S. Hyatt, President & CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers, is taking his company in a new direction. Here's an extended excerpt:

It’s time to stop the madness. We don't need more titles. We need better titles. The only way this is going to happen is if publishers stop focusing on quantity and begin focusing on quality.

Last year, our company introduced some 700 new titles. I don't care how you cut it, that’s a lot of books. It is basically two books a day. Every day. All year long. Worse, 23% of our titles drove more than 90% of our revenue. Or to say it another way, 74% of our titles accounted for less than 10% of our revenue. Hello? (And, I’ll bet money that our experience isn’t unique. I’d wager that almost every other publisher’s experience is similar.)

But to really appreciate this, you have to understand that the work is pretty evenly distributed among all titles. Every title must be contracted, edited, typeset, proofread, packaged, cataloged, sold-in, merchandised, and promoted. Whether you sell a million or a few thousand, it still requires a similar amount of work.

So, based on this, we came to a fairly obvious conclusion. We can cut the title count and eliminate a significant portion of our workload, without reducing our revenue or our profit margin. All we have to do is eliminate our worst performing titles—or in the case of frontlist, the titles that are forecast to perform the worst. ...

Regardless, we feel we can do a much better job of focusing on the best authors and the best content. As a result of this exercise, we have determined to cut 50 percent of our new title output. We believe that by doing so we will put at risk less than 10% of our revenues (and even less of our margin). More importantly, by slowing down the conveyor belt, we believe we can improve the quality and more than make up for any potential decrease in revenue.

Borrowing a phrase from the Marines, “we are looking for a few good books.” We are still working through the title list and are not prepared to announce who stays and who goes. However, our ultimate goal is do a better job delivering excellent books—books worth finishing—to the marketplace.

Another odd one from Wisconsinology:

He was yet another Wisconsin author who was greatly influenced and encouraged by H P Lovecraft (click). Robert Bloch wrote dark fiction for pulp magazines and later supplemented his income by working as a copy writer for the Gustavus Marx Advertising Agency. Along the the way he helped run Carl Zeidlers' successful 1940 Milwaukee mayoral bid and created the first ever (and soon to be copied all over the nation) "release the balloons from the ceiling at the convention hall" gag. Bloch continued his work as a writer into the 50's, and then Ed happened... The revelations that followed the arrest of Ed Gein in 1957 shook the entire world and pushed Bloch into writing the one book that changed his life..."Psycho." Alfred Hitchcock bought the rights and a new genre was born and Bloch was able to establish a prolific and successful Hollywood career. He was once asked about the mechanics of horror and weird fiction, "If you see a clown in a parade or at the circus, it's a normal occurence, however if a clown comes to your door at midnight and knocks...."

Carl Zeidler resigned as mayor in 1942 to join the war effort and was killed later that year. His brother Frank was the Socialist Mayor of Milwaukee from 1948 to 1960 and just passed away a couple of years ago.

Safe Baby Handling Tips: A Book By David and Kelly Sopp

More here. The Sopps also run wrybaby.com

Where's Waldo: One of The 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–2000

All because of the naughty bits exposed when a kid dropped his ice cream cone on a lady's back.

Captain Kirk's Guide To Women

"How Does a swaggering, overbearing, tin-plated, dictator with delusions of godhood Get All Those Chicks?"     (via Mike Lynch Cartoons)

The inaccuracies are:

• The film claims that melting snows on Mount Kilimanjaro evidence global warming.  The Government’s expert was forced to concede that this is not correct.
• The film suggests that evidence from ice cores proves that rising CO2 causes temperature increases over 650,000 years.  The Court found that the film was misleading: over that period the rises in CO2 lagged behind the temperature rises by 800-2000 years.
• The film uses emotive images of Hurricane Katrina and suggests that this has been caused by global warming.  The Government’s expert had to accept that it was “not possible” to attribute one-off events to global warming.
• The film shows the drying up of Lake Chad and claims that this was caused by global warming.  The Government’s expert had to accept that this was not the case.
• The film claims that a study showed that polar bears had drowned due to disappearing arctic ice.  It turned out that Mr Gore had misread the study: in fact four polar bears drowned and this was because of a particularly violent storm.
• The film threatens that global warming could stop the Gulf Stream throwing Europe into an ice age: the Claimant’s evidence was that this was a scientific impossibility.
• The film blames global warming for species losses including coral reef bleaching.  The Government could not find any evidence to support this claim.
• The film suggests that sea levels could rise by 7m causing the displacement of millions of people. In fact the evidence is that sea levels are expected to rise by about 40cm over the next hundred years and that there is no such threat of massive migration.
• The film claims that rising sea levels has caused the evacuation of certain Pacific islands to New Zealand.  The Government are unable to substantiate this and the Court observed that this appears to be a false claim.

Click here for a more comprehensive list of resources.

An excerpt from the Andrew Ferguson review of former Ayn Rand cult member Alan Greenspan's new book:

But of course Rand was right to feel uneasy about acolyte Alan. Greenspan slowly slipped from her orbit, and though he never explicitly repudiated her or Objectivism--he speaks of both fondly, though vaguely, in his new book--he never once tried to advance her pitiless worldview from the many positions of power he has held since leaving her circle. Judged by his public performance, it's as if he'd never believed in Objectivism at all; he was, so to speak, objectively anti-Objectivist. The eloquent theoretician of unregulated capitalism instead became capitalism's highest-ranking regulator, chairman of the same Federal Reserve that Rand disdained as the parasites' protector and chief impediment to the New Man. Greenspan has earned vast praise and celebrity as a result.

More irony: I got this link from Noodlefood, whose Randian proprietor Diana Mertz Hsieh once told me "Tom McMahon, Please Kindly Go To Hell, Along With Your Friend Whittaker Chambers". I'm still pretty proud of that, you know.

At Your Age You're Having a WHAT! The Advantages of Mature Maternity

Rita tells the story:

"One look at Ellen Blonder's first drawing, and I knew I'd found the perfect artist. On the left was the profile of a portly but not pregnant middle-aged woman; and on the right was the exact same profile, but with a little foot sticking out of her belly.

And thus began a fabulous collaboration, and a fulfilling life-long friendship. Our daughters, Mia and Lisa, are 25 now, and also best friends. And while the book remains surprisingly relevant, the age of the "mature" mother seems to keep creeping up."

The Paws of Refreshment: The Story of Hamm's Beer Advertising

An excerpt from Wikipedia:

Its name (never mentioned in the commercials) is Sascha, after the wife of the founder of the company. Theodore Hamm's wife was named Louise. The Hamm's Beer bear was created by Patrick DesJarlait, an Ojibwa, in 1952 for an advertising campaign produced by the Campbell-Mithun advertising agency. For a period, a real bear named Sascha trained by Earl Hammond appeared in commercials as well. The Hamm's Beer bear was featured on endless array of signs, glassware, and tchotchkes such as clocks, ceramic miniatures, and ashtrays. It was so well-known and identified with Minnesota that the St. Paul Pioneer Press named the bear as a runner-up on its list of "150 Influential Minnesotans of the Past 150 Years" in 2000.

There's also the YouTube videos and the Onion Radio News: Hamm's Beer Bear Found Dead In Flop Zoo. I used to see the Hamm's bear all the time when I was a kid watching the Chicago Cubs on WGN-TV.

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50 Rules Kids Won't Learn in School: Hey, I'm In That Book!

I'm in Rule #24. I'm not sure how exactly, or even what Rule #24 is ("24. Never wear a hat. It makes you look like an idiot.") But hey, that's all part of the fun.

Character Map of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice

Reaching out to the all-important female demographic with this post. Chicks really dig this sort of stuff.

An excerpt from Michael Hyatt, President & CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers:

• Eventually, physical books will be printed at the point-of-sale. Some call this “distributed manufacturing.” As print-on-demand technology gets better—and, trust me, it’s already so good you can’t tell a POD book from a regular one—this is going to happen. The current model, where printers print thousands of books for publishers to ship to bookstores and then bookstores return to publishers when they don’t sell, is too expensive and cumbersome to last much longer. It’s begging for a solution.
• In the coming years, publishers will dramatically reduce the number of SKUs. It’s just too expensive and too inefficient to keep churning out hundreds, if not thousands, of books each year in the hope that some of them will stick. This won’t eliminate mid-list books (as some fear), because publishers have to be constantly looking for the next generation of writers. But it will eliminate most one-off projects. To get published, authors will have to have more than one book in the oven. If publishers are going to invest the money necessary to launch a successful book, they will want to know there are more to come.

Life of the Party: A Visual History of S.S. Adams, Makers of Pranks and Magic for 100 Years

(via the author's blog, Secret Fun Blog)

The New Book By Danica McKellar, aka Winnie Cooper: Math Doesn't Suck: How To Survive Middle School Math Without Losing Your Mind Or Breaking A Nail

(via Cheap Ass Guy for the Poor Guy)

Michael Hyatt,  President & CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers, on the decision to consolidate their 21 different brands ("imprints" in the book publishing biz) into a single Thomas Nelson brand:

From my first-hand conversations with retailers, it’s clear to me that imprints don’t mean much to them. There are too many. No one can keep them all straight. Speaking as the CEO of one the larger publishing houses, I couldn’t even keep our own imprints straight. If you work outside a publishing company, you don’t have a chance. Multiple imprints only add another layer of confusion to an already complex and convoluted industry.

Worse, with rare exception, imprints mean absolutely nothing to consumers. When was the last time you or anyone else you know walked into a bookstore and said, “Hey, what do you have new from [insert an imprint name].” No one does this. They might ask about a specific author or a specific category, but they never ask about the imprint. They probably can’t even tell you what imprint their favorite author publishes under. Imprints make a distinction without making a difference.

If it doesn’t matter to retailers and it doesn’t matter to consumers, why do we need them? I would argue that we don’t. The only people who care are usually the publishers who lead the imprint and a few authors who have an emotional attachment to the their history with that imprint. But this means nothing to customers. The sooner we start focusing on what matters to them—and the more we invest in that—the better off we will all be.

WCFL Chicago Top 40 Charts 1965-1976

Also available: WLS Chicago Top 40 Chart books

Association Island

The Elfun Society, which was the management society of General Electric back in the day, used to hold their summer get-togethers on this island. In 1952 Kurt Vonnegut wrote about it in his first book, Player Piano. Here he talks about it in this excerpt from his 1973 interview with Robert Scholes:

RS: Yes, I've wondered about Player Piano. In particular one of the things that interested me was this great summer festival that the technicians hold somewhere up in the North Woods. I wonder if there's a real background to that.

KV: Yes, there is. There was a. . . called Association Island and it was owned by the (let's see, what was it) ... there was some association of electric-light manufacturers in the early days of the electrical industry and they were friendly competitors and they met to discuss business on this island once a year and this became sort of a Boy Scout festival

RS: Uh-huh.

KV: What the competitors did not know for quite a while was that they were all owned by General Electric.

RS: Ha ha ha ha.. .

KV: And that no matter what happened to the competition, General Electric won.

RS: Marvelous.

KV: But this became in later years a morale-building operation for General Electric, and deserving young men were sent up there for a week and played golf and there were archery contests and baseball contests and swimming contests and plenty of free liquor, and so forth.

RS: So the bizarre events in Player Piano are pretty realistic after all, are they?

KV: Well, Player Piano when it came out was not a widely read book except in Schenectady, New York. The island was shut down after the book came out.

RS: No kidding.

KV: It no longer exists.

GE sold the island in 1959, and it's now the Association Island RV Resort and Marina.

An excerpt from an article by Danielle Furfaro:

Vonnegut's many novels, short stories, essays and plays contained elements of social commentary, science fiction and autobiography. He drew much of his early science fiction inspiration from his days as a public relations man for General Electric in Schenectady. He worked for the engineering giant from 1947 to 1950. "Player Piano," with its futuristic vision of corporate control and images of vast machinery, is a thinly veiled reference to the Electric City at its postwar zenith. In an interview earlier this year on National Public Radio, Vonnegut called the GE of the late 1940s, "American industry at its best," producing everything from turbines to insulators to water wheels.

"The world needed these things, and General Electric was good at it," said Vonnegut. "After the Second World War, the whole world had been knocked down, and we were going to have to rebuild it."

It was at GE that Vonnegut began to seriously write. After he left the company, his literary career moved into full swing. Yet, he refused to take himself too seriously. "I had a big family," he said during the NPR interview. "I had to write every day to pay the damn bills."

   
Two Books With One Cover Design: Star Lake Saloon and Summer People

My youngest daughter caught this when she saw the review of Summer People in People magazine. Sara Rath, who wrote Star Lake Saloon, is married to her Grandfather.

Kurt Vonnegut's Brother Bernard Invented Silver Iodide Cloud Seeding While At General Electric

Explained by everything2.com:

The cloud seeding technique was accidentally discovered by Vincent Joseph Schaefer (1906-1993) at a GE lab in Schenectady. Schaefer was interested in how ice forms on wings as planes pass through clouds. He used a home freezer to create clouds. One day in 1946, he added dry ice to his "cloud hatchery" to cool the internal temperature down. Much to his surprise, the clouds not only formed, but began to rain. Curious if this could be duplicated in Real Life, on November 13, 1946 he had a plane fly into a cloud over Mount Greylock, Massachusetts and seed the cloud with several pounds of dry ice pellets (the term cloud seeding likely got the name because the pellets looked like seeds).

A bit of a joker, Schaefer one day repeated his cloud seeding demonstration for GE brass, and he was able to get the dry ice pellets to disperse such that they "cut" GE's logo into the cloud on a rather massive scale.

Interestingly enough, Bernard Vonnegut (the brother of author Kurt Vonnegut) was an associate of Schaefer. He too was interested in the cloud seeding phenomenon. He suspected that if one could introduce a substance that was molecularly similar to ice, better results could be achieve. A literature search suggested silver iodide, which did indeed prove to be more effective than dry ice.

Bernard Vonnegut's earlier weather-related work was a project for the Army Signal Corps, wherein he worked on a project somewhat opposite of creating rain clouds. The Army wanted him to develop a method for clearing fog and overcast skies. This was probably the basis for Vonnegut's famous Ice-Nine invention in Cat's Cradle.

From Best of the Web a while back:

Author Kurt Vonnegut "has praised terrorists as 'very brave people' and used drug culture slang to describe the 'amazing high' suicide bombers must feel before blowing themselves up," reports the Weekend Australian:

In discussing his views with The Weekend Australian, Vonnegut said it was "sweet and honourable" to die for what you believe in, and rejected the idea that terrorists were motivated by twisted religious beliefs.

"They are dying for their own self-respect," he said. "It's a terrible thing to deprive someone of their self-respect. It's like your culture is nothing, your race is nothing, you're nothing." . . .

Vonnegut suggested suicide bombers must feel an "amazing high." He said: "You would know death is going to be painless, so the anticipation--it must be an amazing high."

The paper describes Vonnegut as a "peace activist" and notes that his "latest comments are likely to make many people wonder if old age has finally caught up with a grand old man of American letters."

From Powerline:

From an adult perspective, one can see that the novels are full of cheap irony, insufferable sentimentality, paper thin characters, and forgettable plots. If Vonnegut's novels have made it into the high school curriculum, as Dinitia Smith states in today's New York Times obituary, pity the poor high school student who thinks that this is what literature is all about.

And from John J. Miller:

When it came to politics, Kurt Vonnegut was a left-wing nutjob — his 2005 bestseller, A Man Without a Country, is thin in every way: a dull screed that's full of name-calling as opposed to argument. I read it because I've enjoyed several of Vonnegut's novels, especially Player Piano and The Sirens of Titan. I came away from the book with the sense that Vonnegut was depressed, not just with the state of politics in America but with life in general. He seemed to have grown weary of it and was simply waiting for his own to end.

And on a lighter note:

This is not really apropos, but it does remind me of a story. One of my best friends from high school went to Emory. When Kurt Vonnegut gave a lecture there, all the earnest young kids (there are a few at Emory, mostly in hiding) asked Vonnegut to sign their books for them. They all lined up with copies of Slaughterhouse Five, Breakfast of Champions etc. Except for one guy. My firend's fraternity brother waited on line to get his copy of "Back To School" with Rodney Dangerfield signed. People who've seen this classic of American cinema know why that's funny.

The Real Pepsi Challenge: The Inspirational Story of Breaking the Color Barrier in American Business

The Booklist review on Amazon:

Imagine the state of race relations in segregated America in 1946. Capparell, a journalist, describes the remarkable decision by the Pepsi Company to hire 12 black persons as upper-level salespeople to develop the black market. The team operated for more than four years, and in soliciting blacks everywhere, they surpassed their profit goals. Generating profits was their sole purpose. However, this is also a story of unintended consequences, including introducing diversity into corporate America, revolutionizing the strategies of niche marketing, featuring black actors in ads, and identifying blacks as an important consumer segment. Capparell extensively interviewed the six living members of that team formed 60 years ago who were genuine pioneers in overcoming prejudice within a large corporation and dealing with Jim Crow laws of segregation while traveling. This is a snapshot in time, with its profit successes but also its failures. Although it did not change the business world, it set the stage for ambitious black executives who followed them.

Bestselling author John Connolly on the process of writing:

I tend not to plan books, what will usually happen is that I'll have an idea for the first chapter, or for the prologue; For The Unquiet, say, I was wondering the museum at The Maine Historical Society and there was a junkyard which was more a less the accumulated detritus of Maine history and modern Maine history so old fairground signs and old posters and all sorts of knick-knacks and one of the things he'd acquired was the possesions of a guy called Dave 'The Guesser' Glovsky, and Dave the guesser was a little strange fat man who used to have a booth on Old Orchard Beach. And his possesions, as far as I could see amounted to a sign, which had been quite madly written saying "Dave 'The Guesser' Glovsky" and a set of big weighing scales that could take a human being and a selection of rubber bands that he would give out as prizes. Now what Dave the guesser would do, is you would come in and he would guess stuff about you, right up until the 80's you know, we're not talking about the 20's, he was doing this until relatively recently, and he would guess your weight or the brand of cigarette you smoked, or the car you drove, or your job, just by taking a quick look at you, he could tell you that. And you paid him 25c and if he got it right you lost your 25c and if he got it wrong he would give you a packet of rubber bands or hair ringlets that were worth about half-a-cent. So regardless he was up 24 and a half cent, but there was obviously an element of professional pride because he wanted to get it right. That must've been fascinating, because he wasn't just a side-show gimmick, he must've been a man who did it for about 60 years. He constantly looked at other human beings, he'd be looking at their nails, or the dirt on their fingers, or the stains on their shorts or the way they walked or listening for little words that they said that would give them away, and so that was the beginning of The Unquiet, this man standing on a beach, reaching the end of his life, realising that he can't do this anymore, that his time is passing, and getting this smell in his nostrils and turning round and seeing this stranger with to quarters in his thumbs and saying, "I want you to guess what I do for a living". And spotting the blood just in there and the dirt on his nails and this look in his eyes. That he's got these three scars, where somebody has obviously tried to take a fork and ripped through his flesh, and he looks at him and says, "you know, I can't say what you do for a living". And the guy says, "Well, you know, I've paid my money like everybody else, and I don't want no rubber bands, I want you to guess right".

"I read somewhere that the sun's getting hotter every year," said Tom genially. "It seems that pretty soon the earth's going to fall into the sun -- or wait a minute -- it's just the opposite -- the sun's getting colder every year."

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

From PJ O'Rourke's All the Trouble in the World: The Lighter Side of Overpopulation, Famine, Ecological Disaster, Ethnic Hatred, Plague, and Poverty

Hidden Picture Books For Kids

When I go to the dentist or the doctor, I always scour the waiting room for their copy of Highlights for Children just so I can find the hidden pictures. It puts me in a foul mood when I find someone's beaten me to it. Well now Dover Publications has come out with several books of nothing but hidden pictures. A great stocking stuffer idea in the winter, and a great time-occupier for those long vaction drives in the summer.

Mack The Knife's Lotte Lenya Reads German Poetry In German To You!

The description:

The greatest works of German poetry await with this boxed set, which features a 50-minute CD and a dual-language book. A luminary of German and American theater, acclaimed actress and chanteuse Lotte Lenya, reads 39 poems by Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Hölderlin, Brecht, and other masters. The 176-page book contains the German text with English translations.

And a little about Lotte Lenya herself:

She was present in the studio when Louis Armstrong recorded Brecht-Weill's Mack the Knife. Armstrong improvised the line "Look out for Miss Lotte Lenya!" and added her name to the long list of Mack's female victims in the song.

A New Book Inciting The Left-Wing To Murder: The Assassination Of Rush Limbaugh

Yes, this is a real book. Will this be the match that finally ignites the violence-prone Left? The New York Times has already given it their seal of approval. All you guys and gals on the Left, isn't it time to re-examine the peer group you're hanging around with?

If Your Name Was Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller And You Wanted A New Bookplate Who Would You Call?

Picasso.

Adolf Hitler Book Plate

Interesting, but I just gotta ask: Why would Hitler need a book plate? I mean, who would be so stupid to borrow a book from Adolf and not bring it back? (via Grow-A-Brain)

A New Bookplate Blog

It's called Confessions of a Bookplate Junkie . All sorts of odd and unusual bookplates. Fascinating.