TIP: Share your bookstore's blog

One of the more wonderful parts of generating content to connect with your audience -- via blogs, e-mail newsletters, podcasts and perhaps all of the above -- is the creativity to find new homes for the same content. Trading with other author blogs is one standard source, but Ms. Obie Joe counsels to find unconventional, or un-obvious (can that be a new word?), source:

• Bookstores blogs. In anticipation of her appearance at Book Passage bookstore in California, Meredith Norton (Lopsided: A Story About Breast Cancer) posted an entry not entirely relevant to her book, but very much so to Meredith's world view.
• Expert blogs: Given the specificity of his book's topic -- concierge medicine -- Dr. Steve Knope could easily jump from one blog on CM to another (and did). But given that CM is a response to the crisis with primary care, Knope found other places within expert blogs in primary care, nursing, senior health, etc.

More later...it's Friday, and the hours are once again outmatched by the tasks....

Read-aloud words assault?

An earnest suitor, riding on the crosstown bus in New York City, reads aloud to his beloved. While she is besotted with the caress of his words, many on the bus register outright hostility. Why is reading aloud akin to hoisting a blaring boombox on that same bus?

Robert Gray was on that bus, and he shares our curiosity. While the bus situation was a bit extreme -- reading aloud like that is more of a performance than a shared pleasure -- there does seem to be divides in the literary community on standards of reading aloud. In poetry, there is a segregation between what Mr. Obie Joe calls the "slow" or formal poetry readers versus the spoken word poets whose words reflect both the paper and the poet.

Then there the readers, often nonfiction, who depend on a colloquial, barstool approach. Each anecdote they tell seem like a great story. Rick Bragg is like that, though he is also an unusually good reader of his own books, too.

The worst? Those who read with an affected or theatrical voice. Look, unless you have the silky smooth of Chip Kidd, just read in your regular voice. Like the suitor on the bus, leave it at home.

Be an early adjuster: cell phone your next novel

For publishing to survive -- not by cost cuts, but by attracting new customers -- the stories and insights will have to go in places beyond paper and ink.

Why are we book lovers so afraid of new technology? Why is there the sense that another technology displaces the importance of the story? Perhaps the dread comes from the last go-around with a new technology: movies. We all know how well those literary translations worked out.

Ms. Obie Joe has been reading with great amusement of the Dickens-type of storytelling in Japan. There, over 86 Percent of Japanese high schoolers are great readers of the modern novel -- on their cell phones. The novels are delivered, in many cases at no additional costs -- in segments. Interestingly, just as a book's sales shoot after a movie version is released, many teens buy the book version. Not so surprisingly, 10 of Japan's print bestsellers in 2007 were based on cell phone novels--successfully selling about 400,000 copies each.

Mr. Obie Joe was intrigued at the saturation of the cell phone novel; beginning in 2002, the first edition came from by Yoshi who wanted to experiment with a new market for Deep Love: Ayu's Story. The book was an instant success, and beget print books, cartoons, and a film. Each installment is Twitter-length, 70-140 words, with segments timed for delivery several times a day. (Always with cliffhangers, one supposes).

Not only does this prove technological advances will help publishing, these also reach the so-called "nonreader," ages 10-20.

No one is asking any of us who love books to be an early adopter for technology, but at the very least, let's be an early adjuster for the technology already here.

Back from bacteria

Now that each Obie Joe member has emptied out the pharmacy, we're in good health. Returning to the joy of surveying publishing and the promotion therein.