Plain words, uncommon sense
Vancouver Opera ran a contest a couple of months ago called Operabot. The Operabot contest invited animation students from North America to produce a 30-second to 4-minute short on any of the Vancouver Opera’s upcoming operas. There are 15 submissions on the Vancouver Opera’s YouTube group that are spectacular.
http://www.youtube.com/group/vancouveropera
Here’s one of my favourites.
Scent Marketing vs. Social Media via Neuromarketing by Roger Dooley on 10/30/09
The other day, Ad Age’s CMO Strategy Section ran a column by Harald Vogt on scent marketing. Vogt may not be entirely impartial on the topic, he is the founder and chief marketer of the Scent Marketing Institute, but he makes some good points when he questions why so few marketers employ olfactory marketing strategies […]
When Langdon Cook’s book came across my desk, I immediately wondered why James and I hadn’t written this book. But now that Langdon beat us to it, I’m happy to simply tell you that Fat of the Land: Adventures of a 21st Century Forager is a fascinating look at how foraging for your food can be shocking to your friends but also deeply satisfying.
Langdon Cook was a senior book editor at Amazon.com until 2004 when he fled corporate life and shacked up in a little cabin in the woods. Fat of the Land is about how he lived off the grid and foraged for food.
The prose is a mix of literary humour and travel writing. The chapters are divided up by the seasons and each features some type of foraging for wild edibles and ends with a recipe. The first chapter I read was on crab catching.
James and I regularly go crab catching. And by crab catching, I do not mean with a trap, I mean with a wet suit and cooler. James is the catcher and I’m the keeper. He swims out and dives down for the crabs. When he has more than he can hold in his hands, we meet in the shallow water. I wade out with the cooler, he puts the crabs in, and I snuggle them in ice and then wait for the next two.
In BC, you can keep 4 crabs per license and they have to be 6.5 inches across the carapace (don’t quote me on that, get the ruler) and male.
Various friends have come with us to participate in the catching. They enjoy the eating and, if they are fast learners and get the hang of spotting the crabs in the sand, then they also enjoy the catching. It’s tricky. I can spot the crabs but I can’t hold my breath or dive down in a controlled way. I float like a cork.
After we have our limit, there are two options. Cook them on the beach. Or take them home and cook them on the stove. Either is acceptable.
The winner of this year’s Scotiabank Giller Prize, the most coveted Canadian fiction award, was announced last night in Toronto. And the winner is … Linden MacIntyre.
The Bishop’s Man by Linden MacIntyre is a story of crimes and cover-up in a Cape Breton Catholic church.
Scotiabank Giller Prize news announcement
Quote: Of the winning book, the jury remarked:
“The Bishop’s Man centres on a sensitive topic – the sexual abuses perpetrated by Catholic priests on the innocent children in their care. Father Duncan, the first person narrator, has been his bishop’s dutiful enforcer, employed to check the excesses of priests and, crucially, to suppress the evidence. But as events veer out of control, he is forced into painful self-knowledge as family, community and friendship are torn apart under the strain of suspicion, obsession and guilt. A brave novel, conceived and written with impressive delicacy and understanding.”
See Amazon’s Giller Prize page where the books are available for purchase.
Price wars typically hurt the retailers involved, and often times their suppliers, especially if the cost cutting is shared by the two parties. The Amazon and Wal-Mart recent decision to deeply discount a key group of titles just seems like a race to the bottom. What are they really trying to achieve with this? The suggestion in the New Yorker article is that deeply discounting a select group of things brings people to the store, and then you can sell them more stuff once they’re there. This has been the Wal-Mart model for years. Appear to be “the lowest price is the law” (on a lot of things) and you get people there for the discount, but once they’re there, they aren’t going to price compare, they’ll just purchase the non-discounted products as well.
What the two companies appear to be fighting over is a selection of bestsellers, but James Surowiecki argues that it’s really customers.
Quote: So you might wonder why Wal-Mart recently decided to start its own price war, taking on Amazon in the online book market. Wal-Mart began by marking down the prices of ten best-sellers, including the new Stephen King and the upcoming Sarah Palin, to ten bucks. When Amazon, predictably, matched that price, Wal-Mart went to nine dollars, and, when Amazon matched again, Wal-Mart went to $8.99, at which point Amazon rested. (Target, too, jumped in, leading Wal-Mart to drop to $8.98.) Since wholesale book prices are traditionally around fifty per cent off the cover price, and these books are now marked down sixty per cent or more, Amazon and Wal-Mart are surely losing money every time they sell one of the discounted titles. The more they sell, the less they make. That doesn’t sound like good business.
Not good business, if you’re involved in selling books and you’re not Amazon or Wal-Mart. For the two behemoths, they’re only taking a hit on about 10 titles and the impact on revenue is minimal, if they can bring in other sales. The price war is also worth the publicity. Wal-Mart certainly wasn’t top of mind yesterday but I’m thinking about them today. (Nasty thoughts, but thoughts nonetheless.)
Four new books arrived on my desk today.
Looking forward to reading this weekend.
If you heard my interview on CFAX 1070 and are looking for info on BookCamp Vancouver, here’s the link:
http://bookcampvan.pbworks.com/
Just taunting you.
Chris Labonte, Douglas & McIntyre’s Assistant Publisher & Acquiring Editor, imagines a fiction program that features extraordinary writers. “Extraordinary writers willing to push the bounds of literature; to mess around with form and content and style; to bend genre and explore new ways of telling good stories.”
The result is the Fall 2009 “Imagine That” campaign and the Speak Easy podcast, hosted by John Burns.
Featured in my press kit are the following books.
Daniel O’Thunder: a Novel by Ian Weir
Heading South: a Novel by Dany Laferriere, translated by Wayne Grady
Red: A Haida Manga by Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas
Also in my kit was a reminder that Douglas & McIntyre has been publishing Quebecois and French-Canadian literature in translation for nearly two decades. Included on the list are several works by Monique Proulx (I want to read Invisible Man at the Window) and works by Daniel Poliquin.
I’m looking forward to more podcasts and great fiction. Thanks for keeping me in the loop D&M.
My friend Rachael Ashe brings photo canvases from imagination to life. She is currently working on a portrait series and recently I was in the camera light. But what really caught my eye was the altered books that she’s been working on.
If you like my photo, check out other work by Rachael.
Rachael’s Website
More Portrait Series and Other Photos on Flickr
Etsy for Rachael’s photography and altered books
Thank you Rachael for taking such a beautiful photo. And book nerds, you’ll notice that the majority of the books I picked are Canadian.
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