Inspiration and Misjudgements

As I await inspiration to kill off my dissertation I decided to finally try and compose a 'real' blog entry, something I have failed to do for a couple of month now I believe. To be honest I am just getting back into the online world again, spending many an hour infiltrating the endless labyrinth that consitutes the web. This will only be a brief commentary on some of the changes I have made to the blog recently.

Under the heading "Great Sites" I have added a site from the Curran boys, my very special and beloved B.C.'s brothers. Their music is up and coming and although they have had to re-arrange their band set up a few times over the last couple of month, what I have heard so far sounds really good. Hard to describe but something along the lines of Neil Young meets Rolling Stones meets Stone Roses meets Bourroughesque lyrics. Very intersting! They are called Grand Carousel.

What has got me even more excited though are the additions to the blog section. First there is the Penguin blog and as far as I know it is the first blog from a major publisher. Of course Richard Charkin has his Macmillan blog, but considering his role in the publishing world I am not considering it in the same category as Penguin. Macmillan makes most of its profit from non-fiction material, especially STM journals, which are areas leading the race for combining technological advances/developments with traditional publishing. Hence the Charkin blog is different. Anyways, the Penguin blog itself is rather weak I feel but hopefully it will get better as time goes on. They seem to make a valiant effort to answer questions that get asked by people and this does indeed encourage customer interaction, which is probably the main purpose of the blog. If they can learn anything to help sell books, then I am willing to bet my life that they see their blog as a success. Check it out, it is interesting nonetheless.

The other new addition is even better. The infamous Scott Pack is soon starting his new role of Commercial Director for the Friday Project and has been writing some very interesting blogs over the last couple of weeks. I cannot recommend this blog enough. Mr. Pack comes across as a genuine book lover who is not afraid to speak his mind and unfortunately he seems to have taken a lot of stick for this from the media and the general public. His blog has got a very interesting recommended reading list, a mention of other blogs often run by meaningless individuals like myself and just generally a different and very interesting take on the publishing industry. I am glad that there is someone not afraid to express his views and take on new challenges and I would therefore like to apologise to Mr. Pack for having misjudged him in the past.

I still don't understand why other, smaller publishers don't start blogs. I know that they probably don't have much time but if Scott Pack and Richard Charkin can find the time and inspiration than surely so can Jamie Byng? I would also like to see Bookshops have blogs, but maybe they already do and I am just ignorant. I will keep searching. My goal at this point is to write at least once a week with a kind of industry update for the masses and providing links to any interesting online material.

Thank you also to those 2 individuals that commented on the questionnaire.

M.M.