Book/Calendar Publisher is looking for a Administrative Assistant to Photo Director. See the next featured job.
Cambridge University Press is looking for a Chief Financial Officer. See other great jobs at our Job Board.
PR Odds and Ends
- Plate o'shrimp moment: I go and mention BzzAgent in my criticism of the bungled attempt to hype Lauren Weisberger online, and then the very next day, the folks who run Tom Peters' blog post an interview with BzzAgent founder Dave Balter about the book I'd been reading, Grapevine: The New Art of Word-of-Mouth Marketing. He mentions what it is that would compel somebody to talk up somebody else's products for free:
"In building the business, I thought that getting stuff would be the motivation. We actually built the Communications Development department just to have fun. But what we found was that interaction became really key to making the person feel involved and listened to. So when we ask people why they do this, they say things like, 'Well, I like to be the first to know about things.' 'I love to have stuff to talk to others about.' 'I feel involved with the brand.' 'I'm being heard.' 'I finally get to be treated as part of the process and not being a target or being captured.'"
And this, folks, is why BzzAgent gets it and, if the campaign we've seen is any indication, SoulKool doesn't. That's my opinion, at any rate, but maybe somebody at Penguin, where they've been hiring BzzAgent for a couple years now, will confirm the snap judgment...
- The publicist for print-on-demand specialists Lulu.com also gets it. Whenever we hear from her, it's not about the company or its books, but about some amusing little sideline that could actually entertain us—like the "Lulu Titlescorer," a web-based application that will tell you the odds that your book will be a bestseller based on the title. Now, I don't trust the thing, since it doesn't recognize the genius of my book but loves the standard "Adjective/Participle Noun" construction, so don't go taking it into pub comm. Still, it's entertaining.
- Another publicist who gets it: the Plume staffer who tucked a nifty black T-shirt in with my copy of Ben Carey and Henrik Delehag's This Book Will Change Your Life Again. It would've been nice if they'd sent an extra-large instead of a medium, but I appreciate the gesture, and the slogans ("Today: Claim You're Jesus / Tomorrow: Go to Prison...") perfectly capture the spirit of the book's prank-a-day ethos, also in evidence on the Benrik website, where they even let passionate readers create blogs to track their results as they follow each day's wacky guidelines for personal transformation. Just think how much SoulKool could've done for Lauren Weisberger with a couple dozen baby-Ts that declared "I'm Worth Knowing"... (And with that, we promise to stop dumping on the poor folks already. Unless they screw up that badly again.)
Email This Post
The First Word On the Book Publishing Industry
|
Interested in advertising on GalleyCat?
|
||
|
Now on
|
|
 |
|
|
