To start a new month I propose a new monthly award to be judged and given by one of the great organs of the trade press  - Publishers Weekly, The Bookseller, Publishing News - for the best piece of product placement. I'd like to submit the picture below as an example of how the marketing team at Henry Holt really used their imagination in the promotion of Noam Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival and generated a significant sales uplift. We had the Oprah Effect and now the Chavez Efecto.

I've just calculated the visitor numbers to this blog for September - 41738, slightly down on August which was a very strong month, and bringing the total visitors for the year to 221379. Comments have been quiet except on matters concerning the UK book trade and discounts and things. It's quite surprising and worrying (to me at least, but I'm sure wiser people will tell me that I am misguided) that nobody seemed interested in the entry about copyright news from Brussels and Washington - both really important for the future stability of literature, research, education, publishing and retailing but perhaps too theoretical for most people.