Today is the Start of Extraordinary Changes - 05/07/2011 - 8:12 AM:
Four years ago, a group of us gathered to impact the world together. It hasn't been an easy journey. Not everyone that started with us is still here; not ever reader that was supportive remembers that beginning. But that's the adventure, and I'm not sure that the path to a worthwhile happy ending is ever an easy one.
Which brings me to today. It's not an ending, but a tremendous beginning.
Today is not in itself particularly spectacular - a rather overcast Saturday morning, another weekend after a flight home from New York. But the story of the days before and after today are going to get very interesting very quickly. Since 2008, we've been working to build a coalition, to gain content for our system by branching between publishers and connecting them together. It turns out that the world may give us just such a thing. The goal was to recognize the difficulty that mid and back-list authors face in being discovered by today's recommendation systems...
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Courage as a Single Moment in Time - 11/09/2010 - 12:11 PM:
I'm in New York, again, which will be a monthly event for me from here on out. Novel Projects picked up an apartment in New York last time I was here, and we use it for extended visits to the Big Apple. I end up occupying that space either one or two weeks a month. I remember the days when one trip to New York was a tremendous deal for us. Now, we've got a place here, an office, and a whole new environment to enjoy our Roman Noodles in, at least when we're here. :) It's an interesting excercise in figuring out how
I spend a lot of time thinking in the mornings - there's only so much Angry Birds you can play on a twenty minute subway ride in to work. I've been thinking about courage. I had someone tell me once that courage comes in small spurts. You go all day with no need for courage, and then there's a 30 second moment where it's needed, and if you have courage at that one point, you act. If you don't, you don't act, and then the chance passes you by. The b...
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Life Through Facebook Posts - 11/03/2010 - 10:45 AM:
I got back from New York in September, and immediately turned around and went back again, this time from October 3rd to October 16th. Having two weeks on the ground instead of one week (our normal length of stay) was very helpful, and something I'm going to consider repeating in the future.
Novel Projects is now renting a place in New York, so that we have a place to stay for extended trips and excursions for publisher hunting; the goal was to disconnect the cost of staying in New York with the duration of the stay. In other words, make it less punishing to stay for longer durations, or with more than one person (no hotel fees). This has already paid off; Dan was able to come out to New York with me in the second week, and it was useful to have a data analyst on the ground with me. Life during these excursions to New York are somewhat surreal for me - they're completely different than my day-to-day life back home. First off, I have nothing to do but work. I don't e...
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The iPad's Impact on a New York Trip. - 09/14/2010 - 7:50 AM:
So, I'm in New York this week, and traveling with an iPad for the first time. I'm posting from it right now, sitting in a coffee shop outside Central Park at about 9:00 in the morning. Though short, this post itself is a testament to the power of Apple's little device. If I were relying on my laptop this morning, I wouldn't be posting at all; the power of this device is not only that it allows me to post from anywhere, but that it makes doing so fun.
Yesterday was also a trail run - the first presentation built and delivered entirely on the iPad using Keynote. I was so nervous about its functionality that I brought backups of everything. My host had generously provided a projector, but I showed up with my laptop, own projector, and all needed equipment to do the presentation on tools I had tested before. I didn't know if there were going to be resolution or compatibility issues with their projector, etc.
I am happy to report that the iPad performed be...
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An Innovator's Dilemma... A Book With Many Faces - 08/09/2010 - 6:01 PM:
I believe I've posted about The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen, but it deserves another look. How you interpret its message changes depending on the stage of development you happen to be in. When I first read it, BookLamp was a small company, pre-any form of investment aside from our time. Back then, the book was comforting.
"Don't worry about people stealing what you do," it said. "There are reasons that large, well-run companies need start-ups to do the new and unproven."
Now that BookLamp has been operating with some level of investment funds for more than a year, it's interesting what other sort of information you see in it. In a way, it provides a very good framework for identifying why "founders" and "investors" often clash on how a company should be run. The basic premise of the book is that good managers in an established company will fund projects that have proven revenue, with an established and large market. This is a goo...
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Really, How Hard Can Book Recommendations Be? - 07/01/2010 - 9:46 PM:
It's easy to forget just how complex making a recommendation to someone can be. Not just book recommendations, but recommendations of any kind. What sort of food will they like? What sorts of movies? How about music? There are so many variables that can influence a person's preference that it's extremely difficult to decide which to pay attention to. And to make matters worse, it's different from person to person, so solutions don't always carry over to the crowd.
I often make the comparison between what we do and what Pandora.com does, largely in the sense that we use a "book genome" style approach in measuring the contents of a book and matching it to a user. But to be absolutely honest, there's a world of difference between analyzing a song that lasts for, likely, about four minutes, and a book that will take a human hours to read.
For one, a bad music recommendation will likely be caught by the user in the first 30 seconds of the song, and at wo...
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Nancy Pearl and the Wonderful World of Books - 06/14/2010 - 6:14 PM:
If you're unfamiliar with Nancy Pearl, she's the author of the bestselling BookLust books, and is probably one of the most publicly recognizable figures in the library sciences. Aside from being an author that writes books about finding books to read, she is a regular commenter on NPR's Morning Edition, was the Director of Library Programming at the Seattle Public Library, a judge for last year's Pulitzer prize, and a legend in the book discovery world. And she was in Boise last week speaking at the local library for two days; one open session to the public, and another for the local librarians interested in reader advisory.
I met Nancy Pearl's librarian action figure, complete with "push-button shushing action", before I had a chance to meet Nancy Pearl herself. There was a stack of them on the table in the back of the room where Nancy was going to be speaking, complete with little plastic books that come in the packaging with her. I couldn't help but contemplate ho...
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