Selling a beautiful book on Malay fashion and cultural aesthetics in a coffee shop or
Penguin paperbacks among the baked beans doesn't seem such a bad idea after reading this piece by
Julie Bosman in the New York Times today. She notes that:
Books are turning up in the oddest places these days. ... With book sales sagging — down 2.6 percent as of August over the same period last year, according to the Association of American Publishers — publishers are pushing their books into butcher shops, carwashes, cookware stores, cheese shops, even chi-chi clothing boutiques where high-end literary titles are used to amplify the elegant lifestyle they are attempting to project.
With proper placement, book in other retails stores are likely to sell far better than they do in bookshops, and catch the customers who do not usually browse in bookshops. And of course:
... publishers have stumbled on advantages that often come with this territory: outside of a bookstore, a title enjoys less competition, a more inviting display space and the store’s implicit stamp of approval.
Now does anyone here have a book to market?
Selling a beautiful book on Malay fashion and cultural aesthetics in a coffee shop or Penguin paperbacks among the baked beans doesn't seem such a bad idea after reading this piece by Julie Bosman in the New York Times today. She notes that:
5 comments:
Yes, why not? Sell books at the local mamak, at McDonalds, at Starbucks, as long as they sell... and that people read good books! :)
It's about time the bookstores realise that times have changed. The bookstores should move to where the people is, rather than the other way round.
Anyways, novels and magazines have been selling at railway, bus, subway stations and airport for some time now.
An interesting observation, the local mamak/grocery stalls in JB are selling my books on euthanasia and biotechnology! Very chim stuff. I wonder who buys them and who reads them.
dreamer idiot - there should be books everywhere ....
alex - goodness. can't imagine people reading a book on euthanasia while sipping htier cup of coffee. hadn't realised you were a published author ... and then i went back to your blog and saw thay are all on amazon too. it would be very intersting to hear about your experiences with publishing and marketing your work. ... and you don't exactly choose easy topics, do you?
help help horrahelp, heffalump elphant - piglet, winnie the pooh
question for biblio mafia:
i'm revising my former column for my book. now when i quote AFP reports/media articles, all i did was just write the key word, such as 'worlds aids day' and created a link that linked straight to the media source.
now that i am revising... and the new version is in book form, i need to quote the dates and i have been googling and oogling the net for hours. AFP doesnt have archives, kalau ada got to pay mah. how lah wei?! what's the best way to get the dates of these quoted articles from the net?
SB sorry. i know this is not the place for such a q but i'm going potty and blind at home. why i so bodoh never write down in a notebook i don;t know but this is one of the hazards of writing for an online media company - you just link and link and that's it. now that it's become a book, i'm clueless! (getting the dates i mean)
ms d - there's a lot of stuff you can get through the british council online library of which i am a member (though i've forgotten my password and probably need to renew). they have archives of major british and american newspapers and periodicals and it costs only RM50 or thereabouts to join.
can you make use of the wayback machine?
and i think you've highlighted a very real problem with internet writing ... we don't tend to record out sources properly
if i feel an article if useful i always print it off and keep a hard copy. online i usually also out the name of the writer and the site name so it will be more trackable later
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