November 1, 2005

Business Opportunities Weblog | How Much Is My Blog Worth

Technorati widget for calculating “value” of your blog.

A Wordy Widower With a Past - New York Times:

nstead, the judges last month awarded the prize to John Banville’s novel “The Sea” - a stilted, claustrophobic and numbingly pretentious tale about an aging widower revisiting his past.
…
Mr. Banville - the author of such earlier novels as “Kepler,” “The Book of Evidence” and “Ghosts” - has always been a highly cerebral author who emphasizes style over story, linguistic pyrotechnics over felt emotion. His novels have tended to be willfully lapidary works, filled with dense, pictorial descriptions and recondite words and allusions: think of a self-conscious attempt to wed Joyce to Nabokov to Wim Wenders.

“The Sea” is no exception: it’s a book that traps the reader inside the gloomy, narcissistic mind of its narrator, Max, subjecting us to his tendentious thoughts on everything from freckles to women’s feet to the philosophical “otherness of other people.”

…

it remains, in the end, a chilly, dessicated and pompously written book that stands in sharp contrast to the vibrancy of many of this year’s other Booker nominees.

Ouch. Shoulda stuck with MY LIFE by Bill Clinton.

Now this is a highly cost-effective review, telling readers don’t bother with this book even if it won the prestigious Booker Prize.

This article sets out a good agenda for tinkering.

12 Ways to Increase Online Sales:

12 Ways to Increase Online Sales
Improve the sales effectiveness of your site with one of these guaranteed ways to turn visitors into buyers.
July 26, 2005
By Derek Gehl

One of the core values at my company is “Test everything; assume nothing!” That’s because we know that after all these years on the internet, you just never know what strategy or angle is going to work best for you…until you test it. This applies even to your star-performing strategies, because there’s always room for improvement.

The bottom line is, testing is the only way to discover what works–and what doesn’t–on your website, and it’s the best way to start increasing your sales exponentially. And if you take the plunge and use just one of the following tests, you’ll learn just how true this is, especially when you start seeing a dramatic improvement to your bottom line.

Publishers Marketplace: The Latest Deals:

Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, and Studying Shakespeare author Laurie Maquire’s WHERE THERE’S A WILL THERE’S A WAY: Or, Everything I Know in Life I Learned from Shakespeare, articulating the great themes of Shakespeare’s plays and shows how they illustrate and are relevant to the familiar life stories of modern times, to John Duff for Perigee , by Emma Parry at Fletcher & Parry (US). John.Duff@us.penguingroup.com

This is something I would like to write! Great idea, hope execution is as outstanding. I’ll be watching for this one.

Publishers Marketplace reports:

Washington Post writer and long-time Pentagon correspondent Bradley Graham’s THE WARRIOR: Donald Rumsfeld’s Long March, the story of what shaped Rumsfeld’s pugnacious character and drive for change, from his wrestling days in high school through his stints as a Chicago congressman, senior insider in the Nixon and Ford administrations and corporate CEO, to Peter Osnos and David Patterson at Public Affairs, for publication in fall 2009, by Esther Newberg at ICM (world).

Trying to pre-empt the field for the big Rumsfeld book? A lot can and will happen between now and Fall 2009.

It is clear that Rumsfeld is going to be the subject of many biographies as a pivotal player in the history of the Global War on Terror/Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism. What is less clear is how he will fit in … will he be the Henry Stimson, the George Marshall, the George Patton of the history of GWOT?

The author of ‘Jarhead’ talks about his book’s adaptation to film:

Anthony Swofford’s gritty memoir of the first Gulf War, “Jarhead,” was an unexpected best seller in 2003, prompted by media raves. Now, the 35-year-old former Marine Corps sniper is receiving even more attention with this Friday’s release of a big-budget film version of “Jarhead” starring Jake Gyllenhaal (as Swofford) and Jamie Foxx.

Swofford, a former Portlander who relocated to New York, visited Seattle as part of a national tour to promote the film, which has returned his memoir to the paperback best-seller lists.
photo
Anthony Swofford

Ensconced in a suite at the Fairmont Olympic Hotel, the author proved to be an intense, wary figure in a business suite without a tie.

That pretty much wraps it up!

It does look as if JARHEAD is going to be must reading, and viewing, for anyone interested in the Gulf War and Iraq.

So if the traffic at Rennes-le-Chateau is actually driven by HOLY BLOOD, HOLY GRAIL, can Dan Brown sue Teabing?

Sydney Morning Herald
Dan Brown has a lot to answer for. While the upper echelons of the bestseller lists may be enjoying a respite from The Da Vinci Code, a small village on a hill in southern France is having no such luck.

Nestled in the foothills of the Pyrenees in the Languedoc region of France, the tiny hamlet of Rennes-le-Chateau is being overwhelmed by camera-wielding tourists. There was a time when you could drive up the narrow road that winds carefully to the village without passing another car. Nowadays, the odds are you’ll be trailing a convoy of coaches crammed full of amateur historians.

All of which is a bit strange given that Rennes-le-Chateau is never actually mentioned in The Da Vinci Code. Where it is mentioned, though, is in The Holy Blood And The Holy Grail the book from which Dan Brown took many of his most controversial claims. First published in 1982, it never enjoyed the same stratospheric success as The Da Vinci Code, but it still made the bestseller lists and caused a maelstrom of controversy among church figures.

The speculative conclusions reached in The Holy Blood And The Holy Grail are now well known, thanks to Mr Brown. What if Jesus wasn’t killed on the cross? What if he actually went on to marry Mary Magdalene and have a child, descendents of whom could still be alive today? Perhaps then a secret organisation might have been set up to guard this sacred bloodline. And perhaps that organisation was originally the Knights Templar.

So how does Rennes-le-Chateau figure in all this? Well, it was the setting for an intriguing 19th-century mystery that sparked the interest of The Holy Blood And The Holy Grail’s authors and which eventually led them to their controversial conclusions.

Between 1885 and 1917, a handsome and charismatic man by the name of Berenger Sauniere was the parish priest at Rennes-le-Chateau. And in that time he spent the equivalent of several million dollars in today’s terms on restorations and improvements to the town and its church. Certainly enough to raise eyebrows in a quiet rural region of southern France.

Pushing Ice - Alastair Reynolds - 0575074388 - Orion Publishing Group:

Some centuries from now, the exploration and exploitation of the Solar System is in full swing. On the cold edge of the system, Bella Lind, captain of the huge commercial spacecraft Rockhopper IV, helps fuel this new gold rush by attaching mass-driver motors to organic-rich water-ice comets to move them back to the inner worlds. Her crew are tough, blue-collar miners, engineers and demolition experts.
Around Saturn, something inexplicable happens: one of the moons leaves its orbit and accelerates out of the Solar System. The icy mantle peels away to reveal that it was never a moon in the first place, just a parked spacecraft, millions of years old, that has now decided to move on.
Rockhopper IV, trapped in the pull, is hurled across time and space into the deep, distant future, arriving in a vast, alien-constructed chamber. And the crew are not alone, for each chamber contains an alien culture dragged into this cosmic menagerie at the end of time.
The crew of the Rockhopper IV know a lot about blowing up comets, but not much about first contact with ultra-advanced aliens. They have two things to worry about: can they (and their new alien allies) negotiate their way through each harrying contact? And can they assimilate the avalanche of knowledge about their own future - including all the glittering, dangerous technologies that are now theirs for the taking - without destroying themselves in the process?

Alastair Reynolds is perhaps the finest science fiction writer active today. Each book is cause for celebration. I was thrilled to get the email from Amazon telling me that my copy had shipped.

Here is that rare interesting item from the ocean of weird press releases for books and publishers. It is really quite impressive for a small publisher to get into Wal-Mart.

Black Pearl Books’ Newly Released Hip-Hop Books/New Website On Fire — ‘Legit Baller’ & ‘Hustlers’ Coming To Wal-Mart In November ‘05:

…Wal-Mart is bringing two more of Black Pearl Books’ titles (“Legit Baller” by Jerry Blackshear & “Hustlers” by Ronald Quincy) to its stores in November 2005. Wal-Mart already carries BP’s Essence Magazine Best-Seller “Slick” by Brenda Hampton as well as “Twisted” by Holland Jones.
….

Black Pearl Books continues to roll along, becoming the 1st African-American urban publishing company to enter Wal-Mart without the aid of a distribution deal with a major-publisher and has plans for 30 new releases in 2006. BP is also making book-news with book reviews from noteworthy national urban publications such as Vibe Magazine and Rolling Out Urban Style Weekly Magazine

Not sure what’s up with this rather defensive para in the middle of the press release:

Despite Black Pearl Books’ mega-success, it hasn’t come without some sour moments. But it’s clear that the company president’s positive attitude is a major reason for its continued success.

“It’s a shame that a very small number of African-American stores and distributors don’t carry our titles for their African-American customers. But I don’t get bent out of shape over it — whatever the reason, I’m confident that those who do not, will hopefully care about the needs of their readers & customers in the near future! My attention is targeted to the thousands of stores that do carry our titles. In the end, customers have no problem finding our books! My advice to African-American customers trying to support these stores by purchasing BP’s books is to simply ask the owner to get them for them,” says Hurst.

Is this simply a financial issue (some vendors regard Black Pearl Books as unproven), or is there a values or attitude split?

Update:The Black Pearl catalog reveals a strong grasp of marketing

and a weak grasp of hyphenation.