Andy Budd has a good little post on the dark side of the publishing industry — yes, even having your cover turned out on the shelves costs money.

But, actually, some stores will put your book on display if they really like it. We know for a fact that Kuhaku was prominently and happily displayed at some of the store-front, prime-space "New Arrivals" desks. And lord knows we didn't pay a cent for that.

During my brief stint with home-spun distribution here in Tokyo, I know that having Kuhaku face-out kicked sales up a few notches. At many stores here I was also sure to include a "shelf talker" with the package. Compared to stores that wouldn't give us the cover-out luxury, sales were probably a good 30-40% less. More so without the shelf talker. And sales at Book 246 in Aoyama-1 Chome, which once gave us cover-out preference and now doesn't, have dropped precipitously.

So Mr. Budd is most definitely correct in advocating flipping those books you love to show their covers — chances are that's enough to shift the sales in a positive way.

One of the things you sacrifice as a small publisher is reading purely for pleasure. Either that, or your wife and kids go neglected. I've kept on pretty good terms with Yuko and the kids but feel like a turd when I think of how little I read for myself. I enjoy working with words every day — it gives me a craftsman's high — but I find that I rarely pick up a piece of literature just for fun, and when I do, it sits unfinished on the bedside table for weeks.

Which is all just a round-about way of saying I finally had the pleasure of reading the first issue of the new literary journal A Public Space. Craig has already written about issue #1 here, so let me jump to the Focus section, which dedicated nearly 50 pages to modern Japanese lit. Imagine any other American magazine doing this — almost 50 pages on Japanese literature! And not all of it Haruki Murakami, either. While the king of Japanese fiction is interviewed by our friend Roland Kelts, there are other writers and translators amplifying the discussion and several translated stories appearing in English for the first time. I hear that each issue will focus on a different country, which is a brilliant idea.

Murakami, Masayuki Shibata and others talk about the US in these pages, and it was refreshing and surprising to listen to them. At one point, Roland asks Shibata which book depicts the dark side of the American dream especially well, and Shibata answers Trout Fishing in America. I bet you could ask 100 — no, 1,000 — American literature scholars the same question and never get that answer. And yet, it makes sense. Brautigan's book was all about "demystifying the myths of America," as Shibata puts it.

And here's another exchange between Murakami and Kelts that I loved:

* A heartwarming bedtime story for children of the iPod generation.

* David Pogue on Bill Gates and life after Microsoft. Sneer at the man and call him all the names you want, he's still unloading surreal amounts of cash in a systematic and thoughful way. Whether or not his questionable business practices can taint the motives behind his philanthrophy is left as a moral thought problem for the reader.

* Netscape, in an effort to hop on the "user generated content" bandwagon (ala, Flickr, Digg, etc), releases a beta of their meta-news site. Stories are submitted and voted up to the front page by users (ala digg) but the twist is they have a bunch of editors sitting behind the scenes filtering high-quality content up to the top of the page.

It' s been a week or so since this site has launched and, well, the buzz seems less than spectacular. Considering this site has probably gotten millions of visits over the last week, there ain't a whole lot of action going on. Seven comments? Forty-five votes? And that's on the front page.

* The Guardian launches a printable Internet edition. (via Daring Fireball) Updated every 15 minutes. Would love to see what sort of back-end they have producing this thing.

* Conan O'Brien vs. Bear (??) (via Coudal)

Today I asked a well-known bookstore to host a reading for our next book, a novel called Last of the Red Hot Poppas, which will be out in September. The store's quick, polite rejection tells a lot about what we're up against. Here's an excerpt:

I am sorry, but there is no way that we can schedule a reading by an unknown novelist at the store in the fall ... It is very, very difficult to do fiction here unless the person is a name brand. Even for fairly well known fiction writers, we get, if we are lucky, twenty people not related to the author.

Fair enough. I understand their position. To be honest, I don't even care, because somewhere deep inside of me I know that going about this whole publishing business in the same way that the big New York firms do — spend loads on marketing, sign brand-name writers, do six-week book tours, etc. — is both demeaning and suicidal. The reason we got into this industry in the first place was to exploit the blind spots of an industry grown obese with bad books and sloppy distribution policies, not to imitate the biggest players.

Just wanted to point you to some excellent reviews of New Orleans books on our Voices blog by Colleen Mondor. She's reviewed seven books so far, including the whole Neighborhood Story Project series from Soft Skull Press, and we'll be running more over the coming months. If you're on the fence about a certain book, Colleen will swiftly and persuasively push you off the fence and toward the nearest bookstore.

Check out our second illustrated canned coffee review from Tokyo artist Dirk Schwieger.

Who knew canned coffee could be such a muse?

We try to provide excellent customer service here at CMP. If someone has a problem with an order, or their shipments are lost, we try to respond to their enquiries with replacements the next day. If you're a small publisher/business, I can't imagine *not* providing customer service above and beyond the call of duty. It's one of those areas where trumping the bigger players is trivial thanks to our size.

Here's two cases of recent customer service I've encountered that have made me think that maybe the world isn't completely falling apart:

1) InCase. I bought an Incase laptop bag about two years ago, and the plastic buckle on the shoulder strap broke one day near Korakuen. I emailed Incase and was told they didn't make that bag anymore. And furthermore they didn't carry the straps. Well, a laptop case without a shoulder strap is almost useless to me, so I responded with a hopeless "What should I do?" email. My Incase contact said she'd scour the warehouse and let me know if they found anything. Fast forward two weeks — a new strap arrives at my house, free of charge, in the US. Will I be buying from Incase again? You bet.

2) Safari Books. I've been using Safari for about 1 1/2 years — ever since I started working on the Buzztracker web version in Winter 2004/2005. For some reason, I had canceled and created new accounts along the way and one account got lost in the shuffle. Since I was already a subscriber, I didn't take conscious notice that there were two of the same charges appearing on my two credit cards each month.

Recently I was the unlucky recipient of credit card fraud, and after combing over recent transactions, I finally noticed the duplication. I emailed Safari and they were not only quick to respond but checked the logs and refunded me for about eight months of unused account billing! Considering this was entirely my error, this ranks as one of my best customer-service experiences ever.

Certainly better than when I had to beg Bic Camera to take back a 20" Apple Cinema display with three glaring dead pixels smack in the center. And better than last week when I dropped my Powerbook off to be fixed and had it returned to me, still broken!

Join Bruce and David Rutledge at Book Buffs in Denver this Thursday at 7pm for a reading and talk about the making of Do You Know ... Book Buffs isa great store in south Denver, filled with beautiful first editions and original prints from local artists. Rumor has it the Rutledge brothers may be packing Colorado Rockies Mardi Gras beads as well.

Remember that series we ran last summer on "What Laura Ingalls taught Japan"? Well, it has been accepted for the latest edition of the Children's Literature Association Quarterly. Congratulations Noriko!

And for those who missed it, here is the five-part series:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5