During BEA, scores of publishing types celebrated their accomplishments and plotted future successes. A smaller number of brave souls discussed projects that didn't work out the way they had planned--the most valuable kind of publishing intelligence.

GalleyCat caught up with Doubleday/Knopf's online director Jeffrey Yamaguchi for an exclusive interview about what he learned from unexpected results during a campaign for Michael Crichton's novel, "Next." Yamaguchi also runs the website 52 Projects.

Yamaguchi told this story at the excellent "7x20x21" event, a BEA presentation curated by Ryan Chapman and Ami Greko. They chose seven industry professionals and gave each speaker seven minutes, the chance to choose 20 slides, and 21 seconds to talk about each picture.