I woke up today to find my neighbourhood in mourning at the departure of Jose Mourinho as manager of our local soccer club, Chelsea FC. He's been the most admired (and fancied, I suspect) member of the Chelsea set-up. It'll be interesting to watch the team's fortunes without his leadership. I fear the worst but meanwhile enjoy this clip.

And now to the other championship race, the competition to predict the order by sales value of the Pan Macmillan top ten new titles this Autumn. Entries are still coming in on the original posting. The cut-off date for entrants is the end of this month, so get to work and encourage your friends to join in. So far, analysis shows that people are more confident about picking the least likely to succeed than the most likely. Rhett Butler's People just pipped Musicophilia at the bottom of the table. The only other title picked for tenth position was Cristiano Ronaldo's Moments but it was also put in first position by the same number of people. Number one spot is occupied by Borat but seven of the ten titles have also been nominated. The only title which has not been nominated at either number one or number ten is Ronnie Wood which, arguably, is the one most likely to be a runaway success...or not.

What will be Pan Macmillan's Special One?

Here's a traveller's tip. If you're ever in Stuttgart try to get a room at the not-very-posh but very stylish Der Zauberlehrling. Click on hotel, then XXL, and then on the room of your choice. The restaurant is also very good.

I'm here for a board meeting and to catch up with several of my German colleagues. The pace of change in the infrastructure and politics of Germany may not be particularly rapid but the speed with which digital technology is being adopted is awesome.

Our owners, the Holtzbrinck Group, have been investing strongly in fast-growing, innovative, technology-driven media businesses and the success is palpable. Social websites such as StudiVZ (which I'm only very gradually learning how to pronounce) are attracting millions of registrants and tens of millions of visits. The trick book publishers must learn is how to persuade these visitors to read (and pay for) books and other high-quality information rather than simply communicating with each other. It won't be easy but the prize will be great.

Sites such as Lovely Books in the UK and in Germany are just the beginning of a new approach to making people aware of books and sharing opinions. While this is happening we must also work closely with our traditional partners, the bookshops (see yesterday's posting), to ensure that this new generation of readers can also enjoy physical as well as digital browsing. I've yet to be convinced by any of the current crop of e-book readers (why woud anyone want yet another lump of metal to carry around?) but there is little doubt that the Internet as a marketing tool is vital and that we'd better learn how to use it fast.

One of the most innovative publishers in the world is the computer book publisher O'Reilly. They have been at the cutting edge of collaborations with Google and Amazon, with copyright-lite experimentation etc. It is therefore with great delight that I spotted this paragraph from O'Reilly Radar about the sales of computer books:

If you wonder whether it matters to publishers whether books appear in stores given that they can be ordered online, try breathing through a straw. You can get all the air you want if you lie low, but you'd better not try any strenuous activity. Retail distribution is like the alveoli in our lungs -- it increases the surface area for respiration, except in this case, rather than oxygen binding to hemoglobin, it's customers binding to possible products to purchase. People go to Amazon and other online retailers with specific purchases in mind. Despite all Amazon's brilliant work on collaborative filtering and recommendations, a computer screen just doesn't match up to a physical bookstore when it comes to browsing and the chance discoveries that spark an unplanned purchase.

What more can I say? I think the Booksellers Association should invite Tim O'Reilly to give the keynote address at their next conference.

In the staff canteen in our Kings Cross offices yesterday I got into a conversation about the death of the musical. I argued, for no particular reason, that a more obvious case was the dearth of listenable operas since Puccini packed it in. I was, of course, reprimanded and corrected by my younger and betters and thoroughly shamed by the fact that we have just published a book as a result of a contemporary opera.

David Frost's brilliant book about his confrontation with Richard Nixon follows the extraordinarily successful opera Nixon in China and the play Frost/Nixon. So drama and opera (and I'd argue musicals too) still flourish.

The game I started last Friday to guess the order by sales value of ten of Pan Macmillan's Autumn best sellers has generated a few entries and so I'd better clarify the 'rules'. The winner/s will have listed the correct order by invoiced sales value up to 31 December 2007 of these ten books. More information on each is available through the highlighted links. It would be helpful if entries could be made as 'comments' on the original posting. No more entries after the end of September so that I can then post progress on the 'runners' as the Autumn season develops. If we get too many winners I'll introduce some sort of tie-breaking competition.

Chameleon's Shadow by Minette Walters (pub September 20th)

World Without End by Ken Follett (pub date October 4th)

Trevor Glover died last week. He worked for Penguin in Australia and the UK, he was President of the Publishers Association and then became Managing Director of the eminent music publisher Boosey & Hawkes. There will be formal obituaries in the trade press next week.

I got to know him best during the 'reversion wars of the early nineties when he had returned from Australia to run the London office of Penguin and was having to live with the Rushdie fatwa affair. I was responsible for building a paperback list to support the trade hardback houses then owned by Reed International, William Heinemann, Secker and Warburg and Methuen. One way to improve the list was to publish authors whose books had previously been licensed to third-party paperback publishers, frequently Penguin. (This is a normal part of life today but at the time was considered in some way evil, or at least underhand.) The licence on a very important, albeit not huge selling, author (whose identity you'll have to guess) came up for renewal and we told Penguin that we would revert unless they coughed up a very very large advance for an extension of the licence. Trevor called to ask if our absurd request was for real which it was. He quite rightly refused to pay the advance and we prepared to publish the books ourselves. A few weeks later he called again. He'd been thinking about what it would be like to be the head of Penguin responsible for losing this particular author. He realised that Penguin without that writer on its list just wouldn't be the same and he agreed to the ridiculous refresher advance. The book trade and the world without Trevor just won't be the same either.

Peter James, whose latest hardback Looking Good Dead is his best ever, sportingly contributed to my best seller competition of last Friday even though he doesn't have a book in the list (the latest one was too early, the next one too late to be included). However, he has sent me this picture which illustrates how well Russian publishers treat visiting British authors. Tasteful or what?

Incidentally, there is no charge for entering the competition. The prize has yet to be decided but it will, I'm certain, be worth winning. Nobody is excluded, so please go to here and enter your list as a comment, not forgetting to enter the anti-spam code underneath the comment box.

Because it's Sunday I think I'm allowed a 'use of English' moan. I received this from the Chelsea Arts Club:

A dark day for England's sporting teams yesterday as Australia thrashed us at cricket and South Africa completely annihilated our rugby world cup team. It's presumably related that I woke up with the sad I think it's gonna rain today on my mind. A great song but lousy performances by the English sportsmen - and a brilliant performance by South Africa, they might just challenge New Zealand for the championship.

On a more serious note, I was delighted to see this hugely important supplement to Nature on Neglected Diseases.

I think the editor's opening paragraph sums up the issue:

"We have never had such a sophisticated arsenal of technologies for treating disease, yet the gaps in health outcomes keep getting wider. This is unacceptable." This plea to close the gap between rich and poor nations was made last month by Margaret Chan, director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), in her first major address on primary health care. Few would disagree. The tragedy is that it joins a litany of similar unheeded appeals by WHO directors-general, stretching back almost 30 years."

This supplement is open-access on the web, free to all subscribers and distributed very widely beyond, thanks to its sponsors. Everyone at Macmillan - and particularly the two thirds of our people who work in developing countries - should be proud that Nature is engaging so actively in this area.

There are many types of war. Some are fought on matters of principle. Many, I suspect, are fought on matters of comfort. For the last few decades Britain has been squabbling with the Common Market, the EEC, the EC and the EU (or whatever name it wore at the time) over matters of comfort not principle. There have been victories (France and Holland voting against the constitution for instance was certainly seen as a cause for rejoicing) and setbacks (Common Agriculture Policy for instance).

This week saw a resounding victory. The European Union has given up on its efforts to force Britain to adopt the metric system universally. We can continue to buy a metre of 3 by 1 inch timber. We can continue to have cars using petrol at so many miles per litre or kilometres per gallon. We can continue to buy a pint of milk or a half of lager.

I am told that the non-fiction editorial department of Pan Macmillan had early knowledge about this decision and with enormous foresight arranged for About the size of it by Warwick Cairns to be published to coincide. As Alexander McCall Smith says about it:

'A full and convincing account of why our well-tried and trusted traditional measures make human sense'.

This is one of the many new books hitting my desk at the beginning of the Autumn season. It really feels to be an impressive list. Here are just a few of the top titles (five fiction, five non-fiction) as selected by our top salesperson. A prize for anyone who guesses the correct order by sales value as measured at the end of December.

Once upon a time I was in charge of the reference division of Oxford University Press. It was at a time when Collins had declared a 'dictionary war' to fight over market share in the UK trade market. These 'wars' broke out on a fairly regular basis and still do. Collins had many advantages. They had more clout in the trade because of their fiction and mass-market lists. They had more marketing money. They could even afford to use Frank Muir in TV ads. All we had was our brand which reeked of authority, reliability and seriousness. The problem was how to broaden the appeal of the brand without besmirching our name or spending money.

We got lucky. A daily word quiz programme called Countdown was being launched (and twenty-five years later it's still going strong) and they had the idea of using live lexicographers as adjudicators. We were invited to supply these boffins and, after negotiations about clothing allowance (lexicographers aren't by and large renowned for dress sense) and attendance fees, we agreed. Oxford dictionaries were promoted every day to a mass audience on TV and the TV company were paying us for the honour. It was (and still is) wonderful branding.

I was reminded of this as I passed Piccadilly Circus on the way to work this morning.

The McDonald's ad in the centre must cost a fortune. This morning it was replaced by the words 'Oxford English Dictionary' and a series of sentences saying why McJobs are really good things. The reason is that the McDonald Corporation has taken offence at the OED definition of 'McJob' - 'an unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects'. They are running a petition to have the definition changed and are advertising it on their absolutely main site. Has there ever been a better exposure campaign for Oxford? Whoever decided to include McJob in the dictionary deserves to win the industry branding idea of the year award.