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February Letter to Nimble Authors

wfz-admin — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 01:59:25 +0000

Dear Authors,

I have decided to do a better job of keeping all of you informed about what’s new at Nimble, because I have observed that there is something of a tendency for authors to feel that you are “inside a bubble” that is wrapped tightly around author and book, when, from my perspective, you are all tightly connected to a thriving enterprise that is doing a lot of interesting (and related) things at a fast tempo. This “inside Nimble” info may or may not be of any great practical significance to you, but I hope that it will at least be energizing and thought-provoking. February has been a busy month.

On a strictly procedural note, a few days into February (slightly after the official due date, sorry!) I sent out Form 1099-MISC for all of you who are US taxpayers and received income from Nimble Books in 2008. I used http://www.paycycle.com, which did a great job for this small business at $39 for the whole project. …

Late in January, I cranked out the second volume of Joe Hind’s ten-volume THE SHIP KILLERS: THE DEFINITIVE ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF THE TORPEDO BOAT. The cover image of the first Confederate torpedo boat, the CSS David, wraps around the spine in a pretty cool way. The series has been picked up by the online bookstore at the Weider History Group’s HistoryNet.com, which has 2,500,000 unique visitors a month and growing. Now it’s on to volume three–Joe and I are chugging out a volume a month until we’re done!

The first four AGE OF OBAMA books finally made it all the way onto online bookstores, and they should be showing up on Amazon Search Inside the Book and Google Book Search sometime next month.

THREATS IN THE AGE OF OBAMA landed on INSTAPUNDIT on the 17th! http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/70038/.
Mark Curtis’s MAKING OF THE PRESIDENT 2008 (as I like to think of it, being a longtime fan of Theodore H. White ) is selling extremely well.
Nancy Snow’s PERSUADER-IN-CHIEF has been picked up by the management school at Syracuse University.
OBAMA DOES GLOBALISTAN has a great cover, thanks to Pepe Escobar’s wife, Cecilia, and we are just about to begin the big publicity push for it.

Tom Myer and I redesigned the cover of his FROM GEEK TO PEAK, a terrific book about your first 365 days as a technical consultant–very pertinent in the current climate! You can seethe redesigned cover here. The old cover (still up on Amazon — it takes a while for these changes to percolate through the system) got too many complaints about being a travel guide to Michigan! I will be the first to admit that I am not the world’s greatest cover artist, although I have my moments. I am generally open to helpful ideas, although it usually doesn’t work well when authors want to do everything themselves, as there are both technical and substantive reasons why I need to be hands-on, so that I can get the persnickety details right and so that I can maintain some common look and feel over all Nimble titles.

Pete Jones and I changed the trim size and re-launched his We Tried to Warn You: Innovations in leadership for the learning organization, his insightful monograph on what it actually takes to succeed at developing innovative products inside a large organization. (Hint: socialization). Pete is a PhD expert in user interaction and product design, and he will be editing a series for Nimble called Designing Organizations that Matter. I became interested in interaction design when I managed the “HF” (human factors) group at LexisNexis, and I continue to believe strongly in the value of the people who fill that role and provide their skills to the product development process. (I like to use Nimble to “put my money where my mouth is”, as I did with my very first book, BASIC DOCUMENTS ABOUT THE TREATMENT OF DETAINEES AT ABU GHRAIB AND GUANTANAMO, which was motivated by my outrage and anger at the stupidity and wrongness of those unfolding scandals.)

I am always looking for books on technology and business because I enjoy the topics and think that the “best of breed” in those genres can be very valuable indeed, although, to be perfectly honest, I have not yet cracked the code of how to identify the books on those topics that will be strong sellers in the Nimble business model.

In February I also added some excellent new titles to the list of forthcoming books (some of these are at handshake stage)

Dark Navy: the Regia Marina and the Armistice of 8 September 1943 by Vincent O’Hara (author of The German Fleet at War, 1939 – 1945) and Enrico Cernuschi
Secrets of the Modern World: F.W. Maitland and Yukichi Fukuzawa by Alan Macfarlane, professor in the Department of Social Anthropology at Cambridge University, author of more than twenty books and one of the great social anthropologists of our era.
Eclipses of the Sun by Jay Pasachoff, Field Memorial Professor of Astronomy at Williams College
The Cold War Saga by veteran diplomat Kempton Jenkins and
The Ultimate Guide to Harry Potter Fandom by Erin A. Pyne

Coming in March:

The Definitive Illustrated History of the Torpedo Boat, Volume III: 1900 – 1939; minor fix to Volume II
Panzerschiffe Deutschland (Lutzow) by Antonio Bonomi (Kriegsmarine Ship Histories)
The Call of Nepal, by famed jungle warfare expert and Asian linguist J. P. Cross, with a foreword by James Fallows.

I hope this finds you all well, and please don’t hesitate to drop me a note if you have any ideas or questions.

Best regards,

Endnotes for Great Powers, Chapter One (Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog)

wfz-admin — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 22:31:42 +0000

John Boyd makes an appearance in Chapter One of Thomas Barnett’s GREAT POWERS.

15. To remain “fit” . . . grand strategy needs to attract more allies than it repulses.

On Boyd’s life and influence, read Robert Coram, Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War (New York: Little, Brown, 2002); on this specific point, see Chet Richards, “Grand Strategy,” found online at www.d-n-i.net/fcs/boyd_grand_strategy.htm, and Mark Safranski, editor, The John Boyd Roundtable: Debating Science, Strategy, and War (Ann Arbor, MI: Nimble Books, 2008), which contains a foreword by yours truly on Boyd’s impact upon the field.

via Endnotes for Great Powers, Chapter One (Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog).

From Michael Tanji’s THREATS IN THE AGE OF OBAMA

wfz-admin — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 21:44:14 +0000

Michael Tanji of Haft of the Spear has edited a terrific volume on THREATS IN THE AGE OF OBAMA, coming Jan. 20 from Nimble Books. This paragraph got me excited:

No author here has been a cabinet officer and none is likely to be one, which gives us a considerable amount of freedom. No one here has to face scrutiny on Capitol Hill, which makes our jobs much easier; but by the same token none of us are beholden to parties or institutions with ulterior motives, nor are we playing our cards in a fashion designed to net us comfortable situations. If you are on a mission to change the way government works, particularly in the national security arena, this is one of the few places where some independent thinking is to be found. It is with that in mind that we offer our view of some of the more pressing threats the Obama administration will have to deal with in these early days of the 21st century.

What we’re doing, in other words, is disintermediating the national security analytic apparatus.

Forward the Fourth Fleet

wfz-admin — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 12:07:44 +0000

It’s a sign of the continued relative power of the U.S. that countries in Latin America and Africa are getting upset about primarily bureaucratic actions like the activation of 4th Fleet and AFRICOM.

Nimble Books author David Axe will be joining the 4th Fleet next week.

War Is Boring

Two weeks ago the U.S. Navy reactivated the long-defunct 4th Fleet to oversea American warships in South American waters…

And this week, in a letter to Fidel Castro, Chavez accused the U.S. of rekindling the Cold War through its actions down south. “They’re trying … to press the fear buttons,” he said.

But how scary is this? Next week I’ll join the USS Kearsarge amphibious ship for a mission to Nicaragua handing out free medical care.

Publish your Google Knol with Nimble Books

wfz-admin — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 18:08:35 +0000

Nimble Books specializes in micropublishing timely, relevant information in slender paperback formats that are available via Amazon.com. If your Knol would make the core of a good 32 – 48 page “nimble” book, let us know!

Inside Google Book Search: Do you Knol the ledge?

A few months ago we announced on the Official Google Blog that we were testing a new product called Knol. Today, we’re making it available to everyone. In addition to our official announcement, we wanted to tell you about it here because we think that Knol could be a powerful tool for publishers and authors. Knols are articles about specific topics written by authoritative sources, so if you’re an author, writing a knol is a great way to raise the profile of a topic you care about.