A few months we had a debate here as to whether I should allow Google ads to appear. Those who disapproved told me so. Those who couldn't care less didn't. I decided to let the ads run a bit just to see what happened. I can now report that we've earned a princely $30 from people clicking through - but Google keep the money until we pass $100. They have however forwarded us 40 pence just to check that the system works and I am very proud of this first fruit of a new income stream for Macmillan. The ads rotate but yesterday one in particular caught my eye:

“Buy Macmillan Publishing, Full Range available now online: fast, reliable, secure."

As a colleague remarked, The only thing that matters in publicity is that they spell your name right (which remarkably they have) but are we really fast, reliable and secure?

http://www.auravita.com/ is where to go if you're really interested. These guys could put the investment banks out of business if they succeed in selling us!

For those who have had the honour of never attending the Frankfurt Book Fair it's hard to describe the enormity of the experience. Probably the most worrying statistic is that there are more than 10,000 journalists reporting on the fair - and there really is very little news to report so far. I guess they'll just have to make something up as usual.

There is suprisingly little technology in the main hall and I have had to beg the use of a terminal to write this from the wonderful Thomson team. On the other hand the amount of hot air is at normal levels.

The Macmillan team is assembling. One delay so far where a guinea fowl ran into the engine of a jet leaving Zimbabwe thus delaying our key director's arrival. One other logistical nightmare unfolding is our need to supply large quantities of books for Kurdistani primary schools. Our plans were initially wrecked by the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, made worse by the row between the Turks and the Kurds and finally delayed by the start of Ramadan.

One issue which doesn't seem to be going away is the price differential between US and UK editions of college textbooks. Because of the very high used-book market in the USA publishers need to build in to the price the decline in sales over the life of an edition. The used-book issue in the UK is less severe (although growing at a frightening rate helped on by traders on ebay) and thus prices have been kept down. This disparity will have to close if we are not to see significant international arbitrage and the resulting diminution of authors' royalties. Yet another challenge for our industry to resolve.

Flew to Frankfurt last night. Prior to the opening of the Book Fair on Wednesday there are a number of meetings, conferences, arrangements to be fixed. I'll report later in the week.

Meanwhile on the plane I spent time reading the British Library's IP Manifesto. Here is a summary of the main recommendations:

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.