This is one of the most engaging and popular blogs which generates literally thousands of comments a month and I imagine hundreds of thousands of visitors. It is funny and insightful and the author is clearly a talented writer with a good future. She has just signed various deals for a book she will publish in 2008 and here's a precis of the business so far from Media Bistro.

So much for the "blogger

book

deal" bandwagon being over

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.

Yesterday I was in Ireland for a board meeting of Gill and Macmillan. This involves getting up at 5am, suffering the indignities of Terminal 3 at Heathrow and the airline BMI (whose motto is 'The UK's most punctual airline' - it was punctual and that is really important but everything else was...), hanging about at Dublin airport for the traffic to lighten (I do think Dublin has the worst traffic jams in all of Europe - up there with Bangalore on a bad day), and then an hour to the office.

But it's all worthwhile to spend time with a highly professional, highly creative, and totally engaging team determined to do the best possible job in what is intrinsically a small market.

To fully understand modern Dublin you need, in my opinion, just two guides. First you should grab a copy of David McWilliams brilliant book on modern Ireland The Pope's Children, so called because nine months to the day after the Pope's 29th September 1979 speech to the Irish people in Dublin's Phoenix Park there was the largest ever number of births - a tribute either to Pope John Paul's virility or the aphrodisiac effect of religion. This signalled the beginning of the Celtic revival. And second, to understand the true vibrancy of modern Dublin simply click on this video about Dublin coastal development.

Earlier in the week I wrote about the potential for Dutch rugby. Amazingly I now discover that the brightest young hope in English rugby is Dutchman Tim Visser. Watch this space.

I also received this from an occasional commentator on this blog. I wonder when it will dawn on Gerard that it may not be a media conspiracy which is blocking his success but that readers aren't that interested in buying his book.

Just got my "royalty" statement from the publisher. GINNY GOOD sold 24 copies worldwide in the last six months and I bought at least four of the copies, myself...so that's what? Less than one copy a week? Yes! I get a dollar for every copy sold, though, so in six months I made enough to pay for almost two of the four of my own books I bought. Yippee! Oh, but wait, I didn't actually get the twenty-four bucks 'cause I still owe $1,800 on the $2,000 "advance." Rats. At that rate I won't have the advance paid off until I'm a hundred and eighteen years old. Oh, well. Here's the latest "review" of The Audio Book of Ginny Good:
http://thommalyn.blogspot.com/2006/09/audio-book-of-ginny-good.html
Here are four more...and a bunch of other reviews of the real book:
http://everyonewhosanyone.com/ggrev.html

When you write a great book, whether it makes money or not is superfluous. The morons who run the media and entertainment industries will understand that one of these days. Or not. G.
Gerard Jones
http://everyonewhosanyone.com/audio/GGch00introm.mp3

And finally a link to a brilliantly funny website promoting a book published by a brilliant (albeit competing) London publisher Piatkus Books. Have a good Saturday.

Simon Greenall's piece about publishing in China (which I blogged here) prompted Macmillan's archivist, Alysoun Sanders, to dig into our records. This is what she found.
 
'Unlike the relationship with India, the history of Macmillan in China has not been documented at all, but I found evidence that the first rep and school traveller for Macmillan & Co Ltd in China, Fred G Whittick was appointed on 1 July 1907 - almost a century ago - and according to the agreement with him sales to China in the previous year, 1 July 1906 to 30 June 1907, were approximately £2,700. Enough to justify employing a traveller, I suppose.'
 
£2700 in 1906 when inflated in line with the retail price index equates to £193,396.72. I wonder how many general publishers have that much invoiced business in China today?

And now for the plugs.  From Pan Macmillan - Picador to be precise. Cormac McCarthy's new book, the post-apocalyptic The Road, has received a rave review from the New York Times.  Too long to include in its entirety, but this will give you an idea of the reception that we're expecting for this astonishing novel. 
'In The Road a boy and his father lurch across the cold, wretched, wet, corpse-strewn, ashen landscape of a post-apocalyptic world. The imagery is brutal even by Cormac McCarthy’s high standards for despair. This parable is also trenchant and terrifying, written with stripped-down urgency and fueled by the force of a universal nightmare. The Road would be pure misery if not for its stunning, savage beauty.

This is an exquisitely bleak incantation — pure poetic brimstone. Mr. McCarthy has summoned his fiercest visions to invoke the devastation. He gives voice to the unspeakable in a terse cautionary tale that is too potent to be numbing, despite the stupefying ravages it describes. Mr. McCarthy brings an almost biblical fury as he bears witness to sights man was never meant to see.'

This, from a bookseller review on Waterstone's Online, says it all:  'Both terrifying and beautiful, it is about us all, about the best and worst of humankind, and it would be impossible to recommend it too highly.'

And some more from Pan Mac, courtesy of Camilla Elworthy.  In a brilliant address to the assembled ladies at the Windsor Festival on Wednesday, Major General Barney White-Spunner, talking about his forthcoming history of the Household Cavalry, Horse Guards, shared the following information from the book:  In Windsor in the 1850s 'nine soldiers would sleep, eat, wash and store their equipment in a room measuring 28 by 16 feet. They were allowed one roller towel per week between them and their bedding - straw stuffed into palliases - was only changed every two months. Washing facilities included a wooden tub, which stood in the middle of the room and also passed as a urinal at night. There was no running water and no washrooms and even as late as the 1860s the regiment opposed the introduction of water closets as they became blocked with the bundles of hay issued instead of lavatory paper. This last commmodity was eventually issued on the basis of one sheet per soldier every four days.'
No wonder we were so often victorious in battle – the enemy probably ran away from the stench.

Dinner last night with a very old (old in years we've known each other, not in any other sense) friend, Roger Law, who co-founded (with Peter Fluck) Spitting Image, a satirical TV series featuring puppets made by the team. The final series was aired over ten years ago but it still remains in people's consciousness - evidenced not least by the length and depth of the Wikipedia entry I linked to above and which is constantly updated and amended. If you have the capacity to view video links I do recommend that you follow the links to the songs. Some of them are offensive (I don't think my South African colleagues will thank me for reminding them of the Apartheid-era South Africa song), all of them are politically incorrect and all brilliantly performed.

Later today I'm seeing another old (this time even younger) friend, Charlotte Mendelson, to discuss her new book due out on 4 May next year, 'When we were bad'. She works for a competitor publisher (boo) as an editor at Headline Review but she still finds time to write the most brilliant fiction. Her first two novels are already in Picador in paperback and there was some debate about whether she was too young to write such important books. Bah phooey I say and if you go this link and scroll down you can hear her (and Joanna Trollope) being interviewed on that subject.

Back in the London office and spent a happy hour deleting the 311 emails which had accumulated in the two days I was away from my laptop. It's a good feeling when the still-to-be-answered emails fit onto a single screen.

Prior to the Frankfurt Book Fair everyone in London, New York, Oxford, Melbourne, Delhi, Bangalore,Mexico, Tokyo and Basingstoke is putting finishing touches to sales material, appointment and schedules and travel plans. One of our most important presentations is BookStore and the prootype I've seen looks great. Fingers crossed for a successful fair in every way - more next week from the floor.

Today's potpourri:

Adam Ant's Stand and Deliver has instigated a wedding. A fan went down on one knee in front of where Adam was signing at Borders in Glasgow yesterday and proposed!  I don't suppose you can see the happy event on this link but it gives an idea of his popularity.

Another author, Lisa Scottoline, invented a new publicity wheeze. She has been in London promoting her new hardback Dirty Blonde.  While here she managed to fit in some detective work in the best style of one of the characters from her novels.  Finding out from the in-house hairdresser at the Ritz that Bill Clinton was staying there, she charmed his bodyguards into getting a copy of her book to him.  Two days later she was summoned to his room, and they sat chatting while he was packing his socks!

Last week saw the pub quiz launch of the latest edition of Barry Turner's Statesman's Yearbook. I thought some of you might like to test yourselves with some of the questions. Incidentally, the team from the BBC won. Here you go:

1. How many people are there aged 100 or over in the world
a) 29,000 b) 290,000 b) 2.9 million?

2. What is particularly notable for Brits about Liechtenstein's national anthem?

3. In 1999 how did a recently suspended Air Botswana pilot die?
Did he
a) Jump out of the air traffic control tower into the path of an incoming plane
b) Crash an empty passenger plane into the airline's two serviceable aircraft at the main airport or
c) Die in a shoot-out with the airline's chief executive

4. What does 'Venezuela' mean?

5. In 2001 did King Mswati I of Swaziland order all virgins in the country a) to abstain from sex for five years
b) to have five children each to help boost the population or
c) to come to the royal palace a week later for a panel of experts to find him a suitable bride?

6. On which island in the Atlantic Ocean is McDonalds banned?

7. In which country were the handful of traffic lights removed a few years back because they were considered to be eyesores?

8. For how many years did the longest-serving editor of the Statesman's Yearbook edit the book?

Still in Johannesburg where Spring is bursting out and sports fans are bemoaning South Africa's bottom place in the Tri-Nations Tournament in spite of being the only team to beat the New Zealand All Blacks. Whenever I am here and talking rugby I ponder one of the mysteries of the world. Why isn't Holland a major rugby-playing country? With respect to the Dutch Rugby Union Association Holland makes almost no impact. And yet...sponsorship would be huge (internationals are played in Dublin, Edinburgh, Cardiff, London, Paris and Rome - why not Amsterdam?); the fans would love another opportunity for rugby chauvinism; the Dutch team could be filled with Afrikaners and nobody would be any the wiser from a language or a physique point of view - and if by a miracle Holland were to win the Northern Hemisphere tournament then I'm certain that Germany would have to join in, thus adding a further 100 million to the rugby-watching world.

We're still working through the plans for our Southern African businesses for the next few years. The most surprising thing to me has been the realization that broad-band technology has so far had so little penetration and the debate about this is hot. When it does happen, as it surely will, there will be an explosion of digital creativity, learning and publishing adventure. It will happen fast and Macmillan in Southern Africa will be the leader in the new world as it has always been in the traditional worlds of publishing and education.

Flying back to London on Virgin this evening all being well.

Arrived first thing this morning for strategy and board meetings of Macmillan Southern Africa. Issues include:

Only 45% of the Mocambique population is literate.

South Africa itself can only boast a reading age of a 9-year old or better for 85% of its people.

Life expectancy ranges from 31 in Swaziland to 47 in South Africa.

There are only 30 university campuses for a population larger than Germany's and not one appears on the top 200 list of universities.

Apparently computers in schools remain in the classroom for no longer than one term before reappearing on market stands etc.

Two retail book chains control 70% of the consumer market (CNA and Exclusive Books).

I could go on about the difficulties and challenges of the region but of course these things don't take account of the gees (or siel) of the people. You'll need to brush up your Afrikaans to check these out.

Now the good things:

151,000 copies of the Macmillan English Dictionary sold last year and which is also available free of charge on the Department of Education website.

More than 1 million books sold in Mocambique.

Wilbur Smith's Triumph of the Sun sold more copies in South Africa than any of his previous titles (and that's saying something). Incidentally he was in Swaziland recently researching the reed dance which will feature in his new book, The Quest.

I could go on but have to return to the boardroom to work out how we can fulfil our mission - To offer learner and teacher support for all in Southern Africa.