Smart Bitches Trashy Books | All of the romance, none of the bullshit.

I’m (personally) rather turned off by characters whose names I cannot pronounce. And let me tell you (although I’m sure you already know), this book was a smörgåsbord of irregular triphthongs and incompatible consonants. And as with any decent Swedish buffet, everything was interesting to look at, but didn’t inspire quite enough confidence to actually put in one’s mouth.

My usual tactic of calling any character with an unpronounceable name the first letter of his/her last name did me absolutely no good on Barrayar because (again, as you know), nine out of ten characters on that planet have last names beginning with V.

I’m still not sure exactly which V character it was that attempted the coup. I’m sure I had been introduced to him earlier in the book, but by the time he was facing execution, he was just another V to me.

All in all, [Bujold] spins a good yarn. The book didn’t force me to read. It allowed me downtime. But it certainly didn’t allow me to forget that Cordelia was waiting for me to continue with her adventures.

Wow! Lois is going to be the Guest of Honor at Denvention 3! Next time I stop at Barnes & Noble I’ll see if they have a copy of Young Miles and pick it up. It would be interesting to see what familiar characters are up to.

Again, I enjoyed the book, and I think you very much for having sent it. I’d give it a B-. I enjoyed the book. An “A” book would have forced me to read it in one sitting. A “C” book I doubt I would have finished. So Cordelia’s Honor gets a B (B Minus only because there were too many unpronounceable names - but who am I to nitpick?).
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Thanks Robert for the review, and glad you ultimately picked up Bujold as another author to follow. One person down, a few hundred bazillion to go in my quest to introduce the best of the best in romance and romance hybrids to everyone on the earth. Mwaaahahahahaaaaaa. 

Of course, I can’t LINK to the article because Crains’ content is for subscribers only. So let me summarize a bit and explain. According to writer Matthew Flamm, “the Internet* is gaining ground as a marketing vehicle just as traditional outlets are pulling back.” He cites the demise of newspaper book review sections and the long-ago disappearance of the Today Show and GMA‘s book segments - to say nothing of Reading with Ripa, which has been gone since 2005, much to the disappointment of a few authors (two of whom set up a blog called “Stalking Kelly Ripa” that hasn’t seen a new entry since 2005, but was still a funny concept). Oprah chooses fewer books each year for her Book Club Of Massive Sales OMG HOLY SHIT Fire Up the Printing Press, and bookstores are charging publishers more for prime locations within the store. The market, it is shrinky-dinking.

*MUST we capitalize Internet?! STILL?! For fuck’s sake. And “Web page”?! PAH!

So publishers are looking right here on the saucy wench-wide web for “targeted sites, and pitching bloggers to review and discuss titles that jibe with their concerns and sensibilities.”

I have concerns and sensibilities? Y’all. I want something good to read that’s a romance. I don’t know if that’s a concern so much as a minimum daily requirement for general blissful Sarahtude.

M.J. Rose, founder of AuthorBuzz, calls the blog world “a million little Oprahs.” And we bloggers are efficient because we are inexpensive and damn near everywhere. Everyone who is everyone has a blog, and their blog probably has its own blog at this point. And a Facebook.

Fauzia Burke, president of another online book promotional firm, FSB Associates, agrees that the relative inexpensive ad prices online, coupled with the allure of a few million eyeballs, is a powerful draw for writer and publishers alike.

But one unnamed consultant says that “publishers haven’t made the seismic shift” to appreciating and fully understanding the Internet’s use and capacity for growth in terms of book sales: “You still have publicists...trying to get an author on Today.” Flamm’s article does say, though, that Web-savvy publicists and marketers are the most sought-after niew hires at publishing houses (so if you’re looking for a job, heads up, yo) and every publishing house is trying out new methods of web marketing.

The most obvious: the free ebook giveaway. The article cites Gaiman’s book American Gods as an example - sales reportedly rose 250% after HarperCollins made the book available online for free for a limited time.

Flamm also mentions podcast-to-book phenom The Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing as a web-promotional idea, because the publisher built a Web site around the book before the book was released. I’m not sure that’s a solid example of web marketing aside from the fact that her book was originally a frequently-downloaded podcast, except that now I want to read that book because it sounds cool.

(Note: Neither Crain’s New York, Grammar Girl, Holt, or any large sword-wielding figures coerced me into making that statement. I is a grammar nerd like woot and like whoa.)

What interests me is the end of the article where Bantam’s director of marketing, Betsy Hulsebosch, mentions that the more creative campaigns take more time than money, and cites a successful campaign on YouTube for Dean Koontz’s latest book (Does Dean Koontz need a YouTube campaign to sell his books?). Flamm continues:

The expensive efforts tend to involve brand-name authors, but executives say that eventually those tenchiques will also be used for lesser-known writers. Their hope lies with blogs for now, however.

Honest to biscuits, that sentence makes me say, eloquently, ‘Huh?’ Not that I have the least bit of experience with marketing, or consider myself an expert on building any kind of buzz or even a light flatulent noise, but… Huh? Expensive efforts will be used on the big-names, but blogs are ok for now for the rest of the author pack? I’m sure that there’s all kinds of mathematical marketing data to back up that opinion, but if the cost is time and not so much money, why not make a splash on a little-known author using a big online campaign? Why not try a four-episode 3:00 minute trivia game show Flash series linked to a book’s plot for one new release, while using a different method, such as a avatar-creating module with a selection of silly names and images for another book, both for new authors? Wouldn’t it be easier to quantify the results on a new product using new marketing techniques? Why save the big splash effort for the more likely sales? (Yes, yes, I know I sound really naive. I’m well aware.) If new web marketing techniques are indeed more about creativity (and, in my opinion, sincerity) than dollars and glitz, why not seize some of that creative power and use it to build the next big thing?

Note to self: there is a reason you are not in marketing. That paragraph right there is probably it.

Yes, it totally does. And it works pretty well. You need to change the angle of the book at first, and futz around with distance, but once you figure out how the software likes it, you can buzz along at a good clip. If you get a false hit, you can search using the ISBN, which is by far the quickest and most accurate way to search. Books without ISBNs, such as very old books or ARCs, can be entered manually--you can conduct a search by entering keywords such as the title and author and it’ll search through Amazon.com’s database for hits, or you can create a blank book and enter everything by hand. It’s all quite ridiculously easy to use, and it pretty much has fields for just about every goddamn thing you can think of--edition notes, whether or not it was signed, whether or not it’s a rare edition, the condition of the book, whether you bought it used, etc. And if you misenter something, deleting or undoing changes is a snap.

So that’s the good. What’s the bad?

First of all, if you’re scanning in mass market paperbacks and use the UPC on the back, it’s going to read the barcode, but it’s not going to pull up accurate information, if it can find anything at all. Seriously. This mofo was convinced that all my Neil Gaiman books were sparkly pink butterfly hairclips, and it flat-out couldn’t find the information for most of my science fiction and romance collection. This had me incredulous at first--are you shitting me? Did these people have no idea how many MMPBs people buy and keep? The vast majority of my collection consists of MMPBs. I was ready to stab a bitch.

But before the stabbings began, we asked tech support what the hell was up, and it turns out that if you scan the UPC in the inside front cover of the paperback, all is well--it’ll pull the right information. And what do you know, it worked like a charm--of the hundreds of books I scanned last night, I got one false hit from using the UPC on the inside cover, but the rest of the time, it behaved beautifully. As far as annoyances go, it’s pretty minor, but it still slowed me down, and it irritated me that it couldn’t just accurately read the UPC on the back to begin with.

Another annoyance resides with the search function. Assuming you’re not entering an ISBN for your search, you’re going to get a list of hits. However, all you get is a cover image (if it has one, and if you have to enter the information manually, odds are incredibly high that you aren’t going to get a picture), title, author and publishing year (the publishing months are wildly inaccurate, which is not their fault, necessarily, because they’re using Amazon’s database). You don’t get any other details, such as binding or publisher. This isn’t a problem with new books, but if you’re scanning in obsolete editions of, say, Georgette Heyer, there are fifty hojillion hits even if you’re reasonably specific and include the publisher name in the search terms. You can click on the More Info link, which will shunt you to the Amazon.com listing for that item, but again, that slows me down. I want to see the binding and the name of the publisher, because I’ll have a reasonable certainty that I’ll be entering the right item into my library.

Also, it automatically enters the date you scan the item in as the purchase date. This is annoying; I’d like to have a “date entered into library” field instead, and if I’m anal-retentive enough to enter the actual date of purchase (and really, I’m not), I’ll either enter that myself, or check off a box that says “Assume date entered into library is date of purchase.”

But back to the good:

Once you’ve scanned in your books, you can create custom bookshelves. So far, we’ve created a bookshelf called “Candy” that filters for books with “Candy” in the notes. And no, you don’t need to type in a note for every book you scan in. After each session, you can sort books by purchase date, shift-click to select multiple books and mass edit the sumbitches. I imagine you can create all sorts of custom bookshelves, such as genre, binding or author. (I’m probably going to create an Anne Stuart shelf just to see how many of her books I own; goddamn that woman is prolific. Is she even human? Does white android blood run through her veins? Am I sounding kind of creepy right now? I am, aren’t I?)

All in all, though, this piece of software is a good value for its money, and so far it blows its competition out of the water--I tried a free version for Windows machines called Libra, and the webcam barcode scanner bit couldn’t work worth a shit. The closet librarian in me cackles with glee and satisfaction because I’ll finally have all of my book collection catalogued, and the annoyances are definitely, well, annoying, but not deal-breaky. If you have a Mac, you should totally give it a whirl. Just remember to scan the UPC on the inside of the front cover if it’s a mass market paperback, otherwise it’s going to think your Emma Holly novels are copies of the Velveteen Rabbit, when really, the other sort of rabbit would be a much more apropos mistake.