Brand yourself

Unfortunately, I spend a lot of time at work talking (if not thinking) about branding and “branding issues,” despite usage of the word “issues” being a pet peeve of mine. Could you get more vague? I prefer “ramifications” or “complications.” But this isn’t about that.

Andrea’s changing jobs soon, and in preparation she’s taking some Illustrator courses, and in taking some Illustrator courses, she made a logo for my blog!

I find it very romantic that she knows my favorite fonts. Additional thoughts on brand integrity here.

Write a toast

An old one:

Congratulations to Andrea Helmbolt
for her proficiency in shooting a Colt,
her ability to catch every detail
while sending me millions of emails,
her skill at scanning Craigslist
for any connections that may have been missed,
her success at growing not older but wiser,
oh yeah, and her promotion to Manufacturing Supervisor!

And a new one:

Here’s to our travels and our trials,
our foils and our fables,
to our wagers and our winnings,
and our year of new beginnings.

Here’s to what has been
and to what will be:
Let’s go back to Vegas.
I feel I’ve got some luck left in me.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

Write on location

PHX to SFO: You with the disorderly blonde side-bun, you with the iron-straight hair and square spectacles, you with the orange ball cap and orange plaid shirt and orange beard and orange ponytail. You in the bangs and mustard sweater and job at ModCloth, and you, flirting with her.

SFO to PHX: Have people changed? They all look the same. The same pale, heavy women wearing neon green, the tough guys in Looney Tunes and Disney swag, the children in purple. Everyone in jeans. Sandals, cross-trainers, loafers. There is one fashionable booted passenger on this flight. Everyone looks comfortable, I think, like themselves.

Note: I’ve been meaning to do this for months on a college campus or at a church—somewhere applicable to my novel where I could find out how teenagers dress these days—but this week I found myself in an airport and thought I would give it a go. Photo courtesy TheeErin.

Try a newspaper blackout poem

Note: Inspired by Austin Kleon’s book Newspaper Blackout. When Andrea found this book in a sidewalk free box and brought it home for me, I was already a fan of Kleon’s blog and had read several of his poems (mostly horoscopes), so I knew how entertaining and moving they could be. The technique is really not all that different from just writing a poem from scratch, if you ask me. But I like his attitude toward it: the book includes an introduction to the history of blackout poetry (not that he knew it when he started, but bloggers made it clear to him that he had not invented the genre), and the preface is so positive. When he says: “This is not hard, anybody can do it, I didn’t mean to do it, you should do it,” I thought, “Well, you have to say that.” But what he didn’t have to go on to say is: “You should do it on the bus instead of Sodoku, this will cure your writer’s block, you should use the creations to create something more” (he rightly doesn’t suggest that anyone else will get a book of them published). I felt like his case was so strong it must have been truly felt.

Also note: It’s not as easy as it looks, which is probably why he didn’t feel too silly publishing a whole book, which includes a tutorial.

Revisit your roots

I dreamt last night that I was writing my novel. I was on a bus scratching down notes in a steno pad and I seemed to know what I was doing. Then my alarm went off and I spent an hour hitting the snooze button trying to get back into the dream to read what geniusness I’d written.

Tonight Andrea and I went to Modern Times to hear Cindy Crabb, the author of Doris, read from her most recent collection. Doris was my absolute all-time favorite zine in high school and college (runner-up: Cometbus), and Cindy was my past hero. She read about abuse and community and hope, which, like a crush, can make you show off and be the person you want to be. She told a story about how when her racist/sexist grandparents turned “about 92″ they started becoming more open-minded and curious about the world, culminating in her grandfather asking for the first time how gay men have sex and the answer blowing his mind. Certain words she pronounced oddly, such as “tacit” and “bereft,” as though she’d learned them by reading and had never heard them spoken, reminding me of the words I’ve put in poems which I’d never use in conversation, like “ascendance” and “pellucidify,” and the time when I was mortified to learn that all my friends thought I’d repeatedly misspelled “dreampt” in my zine on purpose. She reminded me of my zinester roots (the roots of all blogs, really), and though I may have so far failed as a feminist/socialist, at least I’m a much more accomplished bisexual.

Also, in my dream, my assistant was played by Ryan Gosling.

Note: Image copyright Cindy Crabb.

Call it even

I can’t believe there’s an ad on my blog! (If you’re logged in to WordPress, you won’t see it.) Sadly, it’s not even relevant. Also, this implies that they’re not checking page views before deciding where to place ads, since very few people read this blog. Or do they? Am I more popular than I know? Is checking my stats page just once a day not enough?

I don’t like ads, but then again, I don’t like paying for stuff either, so we’ll call it even.

Love your library

Now that I’m officially in Marketing instead of Editorial, I feel ready to post about this very important topic. (But who am I kidding? There’s not that big a difference between Marketing and Editorial). A few months ago I noticed in my Facebook sidebar an ad for Check Me Out, a page sponsored by Random House Library Marketing. Their stated purpose:

Do you remember what number you were on the holds list for Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol or Janet Evanovitch’s Smokin’ Seventeen? Don’t let that happen to you again, be the first to check out new books from your local library. Like CHECK ME OUT to get advance news about what the hot new Random House titles will be so you don’t end up at the bottom of the holds list.

The difference between Check Me Out and the team’s other Facebook page appears to be the audience: library patrons vs. librarians themselves:

We are the Random House, Inc. Library Marketing team, dedicated to putting good books in the hands of those who know them best. We are here to help collection development librarians across the country select the best adult titles for their libraries. We keep libraries in the know about what’s big, what’s new, and what’s breaking ground in the world of books.

Both Facebook pages lead back to this blog, which includes suggested reads for Black History Month, tips for choosing Book Club books (including an entire book club catalog), a call for librarians who want to be guest reviewers, and clips from films which feature libraries, for starters. The site’s been up since May 2008 (introduced as “Random House Library Services,” not “Marketing”), and I have no idea how many more like it are out there from other publishers.

I love it.

As a “publishing professional,” I rarely like to admit among colleagues, authors, book-sellers, or others in the industry (who are many of the people I know) that I get most of my reading material for free: either by “super-using” my public library (as Andrea makes fun of me for calling it when I request books from other branches, manage my library account online, or download ebooks) or selling books back to my local used book shop for store credit. I looooove my library, and I love trying to think of ways to make it more economically feasible, for everyone involved, to fully embrace the library model. How can all readers get their books for free, while still making it possible for authors and artists and editors to be paid for their work? I love that Random House is embracing and respecting their library customers by using their resources to market directly to librarians (and by “market to them” I mean “produce fun and helpful stuff specifically for them”) and encouraging library patrons to continue to use their libraries to the fullest extent they can. They know that libraries are huge customers, librarians are the force behind One City, One Book programs, and not all book club members are willing to wait on the holds list.

(For a not-so-bright perspective on the same topic, just Google “HarperCollins library ebooks.”)