David Duchovny and The Marketing/Editorial Divide

There are innocuous objects which later become emblematic of systemic frustrations, an accidental center of so many Venn diagrams. Simon Spotlight’s movie tie-in God Hates Us All is one such object.

I noticed it on the fiction table at the newly opened Greenlight Bookstore. At first I thought a guerilla marketing team had placed the book. This wasn’t a novelization of a film or TV property in the traditional sense. The book in question is the fake literary phenomenon by Hank Moody, protagonist of Showtime’s “Californication.” I’ve seen the show, which posits David Duchovny as a Chuck Pahlaniuk/Bret Easton Ellis hybrid following his libido into wacky/zany adventures. The show is a pretty transparent “Entourage” knockoff as a male fantasy of wish fulfillment: an edgy New Yorker in Los Angeles, newly minted off of the movie rights from his edgy novel, adapted into an execrable romcom with Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. Moody’s talent is never questioned in the show. In fact, his agent and wife both complain about his stalled followup book. The show isn’t concerned, however, as Moody’s enfant terrible stature is merely a handy excuse for a parade of easy and topless women. This makes a lot more sense when you realize it’s also produced by Duchovny, who recently admitted an addiction to sex.

Back to God Hates Us All. What’s so particularly vexing is how this departs from novelizations. Showtime and Simon & Schuster have packaged the fabricated, ghostwritten novel itself as marketing: it’s not an adaptation, but a real novel fashioned out of the world of the TV show.

As an analogy, imagine if a movie studio built a real version of the Xanadu estate from Citizen Kane. Yes, Hearst Castle, its original inspiration, still exists. But its tangential relationship to the film (no one needs to see Xanadu to understand Orson Welles’ film, or vice versa) is similar to God Hates Us All. What is the point of the entire exercise? It’s not just marketing, but something worse: marketing which devalues its medium.

Privacy and Other Decontextualized Buttons

I love the absurdity of language. Maybe it comes from reading Beckett at an early age. Or learning French: nothing will make words seem more arbitrary than learning a whole new suite of sounds for them. Or maybe I just sit at a computer too long every day.

Anyways. Below are a list of my favorite common buttons and links that, decontextualized, make a kind of wishlist for my life in general.

	Who wouldn’t want this button? Just press it, and blammo! More privacy.
	That’s just good advice.
	I read this in the voice of Rocky’s coach, with a grizzled voice.
	The fun of transmogrification.
	Because buying $300 airline tickets gets tedious. Just pressing the button would be mighty helpful.
	I know a few people I would give this to.
	There’s something very primal and sad about this button. Who wouldn’t press it? Don’t we all want to be remembered?

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Our Sterling Cooper Draper Price

This post is for the Mad Men fans. For the rest of you, it won’t make much sense.

Sunday’s episode has received universal acclaim, and rightly so. The thrilling season finale concluded perfectly, with the newly minted Sterling Cooper Draper Price setting up shop in a hotel suite. I actually cheered when Don said, “Who the hell is in charge, a bunch of accountants trying to turn a dollar into a dollar ten? I want to work. I want to build something of my own.”

Since advertising in the 1960s is a fitting parallel with publishing in the aught-years, I thought I’d bring up the question: who’s the SCDP of the book world? The new outfit with an intriguing mix of old and new talent?

Is it Jane Friedman’s Open Road Media? Bob Stein’s Institute for the Future of the Book? Bob Miller’s HarperStudio? Quirk Books? Or one of the traditional publishers making a deft transition into the new age?

I don’t have a firm opinion, surprisingly enough. Some of the majors will prevail, some will fall, and one or two new shops will chart some serious growth.

What do you think?

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Wherein I Explain My Job Using a Dating Metaphor

At potlucks, parties, and jury duty smoke breaks, people ask me what I do. It’s difficult to explain. I work in online marketing for a major trade publisher, but with an emphasis on new media and digital experimentation. What does that mean? Perhaps my handy guide, using the extended metaphor of dating in New York, will add clarity to the matter.

Analytics
You love your baggy grey hoody. Analytics can not only quantify how often you wear it (3 days/week) but the incidence of usage cross-indexed against successful pickup attempts at bars (0%). Stop wearing the grey hoody when hitting on girls.

Online Publicity
Have a profile on Nerve.com? JDate? Craigslist personals? Now imagine your wang is a debut novel about secrets among generations in hardscrabble 19th-century West Virginia. (And your genitals earned an M.F.A. from Columbia.)

Review Coverage, Pre-Pub
“Ned? He’s cool, he works in video game testing I think, and he’s in a post-punk band. He’ll be at my party on Saturday. You should definitely hook up with him.”

Review Coverage, Post-Pub
“Jeff told you about Ned, right? He’s apparently really good at making out. He dated Jeanine for a while, and she said he drove her wild. You should definitely hook up with him at the party.”

Search Engine Optimization
This one’s all about visibility. The person with the highest visibility gets all the attention, right? Get out on that dance floor, go nuts. Tony Manero is basically Wikipedia here.

New Media
Stalking Vetting your date by Googling her name.

Mobile Media
Drunk texting.

Email Marketing
Broadly, this is about maintaining a relationship with your audience, especially useful in indicating the availability of your next title. Like when you change your relationship status on Facebook.

Bookseller Co-Op
“Hey, I’m out of cash. Spot me a beer? I’ll get you later.”

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DesignPorn #11: TED

The best way to kill a few hours? The anti-YouTube also known as the TED Talks. Below, a few of my favorites.

Stefan Sagmeister

Rory Sutherland

Vik Muniz

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The Strokes: America’s Best Science Fiction Band?

That old indie-fanboy cliché of “I was there,” which James Murphy so memorably eviscerated in “Losing My Edge”? I avoid it like the plague. Coming across a nascent scene as it explodes is pure chance, so don’t wear it as a badge of honor.

That said… I did get into The Strokes pretty much right at the beginning. I heard their first single as it hit the college radio waves the first week of its release, in the early summer of 2001. I caught their first U.S. tour, with the Moldy Peaches, in a sparsely attended Tacoma venue that September, before the LP hit stores. I have the b-sides, the early bootlegs, all that. Of course, we all know the five photogenic, wan New Yorkers became international rock stars, trading magazine coverage and backlash cycles weekly. I didn’t really care, to be honest. Is This Is was and still is a fucking brilliant record. I’ve listened to it over a hundred times and pissed off many a girlfriend with my drunken analyses of the lyrics.

So I think I know what I’m talking about when I say The Strokes is the best science-fiction band in America.

1. Look at the videos, people.

This is a band whose second music video, for “Hard to Explain,” is an 80s hodgepodge of nerd nostalgia. And the video for the single off their followup record? TRON.

“Hard to Explain”

“12:51″ (video)

2. The Artwork

If I’m pretty sure Interpol hates naming their songs, I’m definitely sure The Strokes don’t care about their disc artwork. The aesthetic of the records, EPs, posters, websites, etc. is purposefully all over the map, as if to call attention to the fallacy between rock’s sound and image. Still, guess where they grabbed the image for the U.S. cover of their debut? That’s right: the Big European Bubble Chamber. For a more recent example, take a gander at the cover for “11th Dimension,” Julian Casablancas’ single of his solo effort.

3. The Lyrics

Their third LP is called First Impressions of Earth, which sounds like an extraterrestrial’s journal. “11 Dimension” has lines like “Man was on the wings of robots” and “You’re looking for your own voice, but you’re nervous/ While it leaves you trapped in another dimension.” Sure, these guys work the old reliables like relationships, drinking, and parties, but they also explore the real shit too. Like robots and other dimensions.

4. Because Mark Mothersbaugh Is Old

I’m sorry, but it’s true. He scores Wes Anderson films now. He can’t carry the Devo torch forever. The Strokes have their own unmistakable look, like Devo, albeit with less flamboyant headgear.

The Strokes are recording their fourth album right now. I hope it’s called The Singularity.

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Amazon’s Twitter Program Good for… Everyone Else?

At the 140 Character Conference this July, one of the savvier points made was about the value of the link, and how links themselves, in a decentralized social space, become increasingly valuable monetarily. Take the Amazon Associates model: through affiliate links, you earn percentages of referral purchases. I tell you to check out the new hot book, you follow my link to Amazon, buy it (and maybe a garden hoe and a Fletch DVD), I get a small percent of your total purchase. Back in the day, we called this commission. Back in the day, we also thought Fletch was really cool.

Now Amazon’s new program, where Amazon Associates members can instantly share product recommendations via pre-shortened URLs on Twitter, is a bit problematic. Check out ReadWriteWeb’s analysis and Galleycat’s overview. Affiliate linking in a microblogging platform doesn’t allow the space for verbose disclosure. How do you know if I’m sending you to Amazon because I want you to check out a book/movie/Fletch DVD, or because I want to make money from your purchase? You don’t at present, not on Twitter.

Two options: One, Twitterers develop a shorthand for indicating referral linking. Maybe a ^ after the shortened URL? Something like this could work. It’s as susceptible to abuse as made-up retweets; as long as we start using it in good trust, it should work. (That was my Craig Newmark moment. I’m done now.)

Another idea would be to just stop linking to Amazon.

Publishers’ Bad Habits, Now Glutting the iPhone

Publishers are hungry for as much data as they can get on how the written word is consumed online and on mobile devices. (Or they better be.) Unfortunately, honey traps abound which lead to specious logic and flawed conclusions. Take the latest stats from the iPhone/iPod Touch App Store. In October there were more new book apps than gaming apps, the previous top category. Gizmodo succinctly phrased this as “iPhone Ebooks: The New Fart Apps.”

O’Reilly’s Ben Lorica, possibly my favorite media statistician on the web, breaks this down even further, noting the quantity of book apps does nothing more than glut the app store. Games continue to outsell and outrank books on almost every metric. (See Lorica’s chart.)

And let’s not forget that several of the top paid children’s book apps, like Duck Duck Moose’s “Itsy Bitsy Spider“, are listed in the games category. And why not? For picture books with light animation, the distinction between “book” and “game” disappears.

What we’re really seeing is a recreation of the industry’s bad habits in the App Store.

Another One Bites the Dust

I just found out one of my favorite Seattle independents Bailey/Coy Books is closing. This isn’t a total shock, as that stretch of Broadway has undergone a lot of economic changes in the past five years. But still depressing. Bailey/Coy was my go-to spot when I lived in Capitol Hill, and I even made a pilgrimage upon my recent visit to the Northwest. Now I know why that Fiction & Literature section was so slim.

For my Seattle friends, I’d recommend one last trip to stock up. And if anyone has a story of their local independent’s swan song, I’d love to hear about it.

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DesignPorn #11: It’s You, It’s Me

The Light Machine by Xavier Veilhan at Versailles (via The Selby)

Hand from Above by Chris O’Shea

Visual Aid Posters

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