Just posted an entry on our Voices blog about a unique New Orleans cookbook some of you folks might be interested in.

Craig is expecting to see a finished copy of Last of the Red Hot Poppas this week. With our first two books — printed in Iceland and Minnesota, respectively — I was the first to see them, but since we opted to print in Japan this time, Craig will get first glance and then try to convey the nuances of the book to me over the phone. Obviously, we're a bit jittery this week.

This project is a first in many ways for us: First novel, first book with just one author, first time to print in Japan, first time to have a dust jacket (one that unfolds into a poster!), first time to hire an outside marketing team, first time to use postcards for promotion, etc., etc. I've learned a lot in the last few months. And during this time, some thoughts about publishing have crystallized for me. Here's a quick, incomplete list of what working on Poppas taught me:

1. Even a novel is a collective work. I used to think that a novelist was 99% of a novel. It's just not true, especially if you're shooting to make a literary object. The designer, artist, editors and printers all go a long way to shape the book. One of the things CMP will not do is allow a writer the right to reject a cover. It's a fairly standard right conferred on novelists, but we opted to keep total control of the design. Because of that, Poppas is edgier, more interesting and will appeal to a whole different kind of reader than we would have drawn with a more conventional approach — or so I believe.

2. The sewn-in bookmark is part of our marketing budget. As we entered further into the world of blurbs and book promotion, I have been thinking a lot about how we differentiate ourselves from the pack. In the end, I believe it's by putting more money into production, refining the book, making it beautiful. That way of thinking helped us land a distributor with our first book. I believe we are better off spending $750 of that last thousand bucks on the book itself and the other $250 on marketing. It means we might not jump out of the gate as fast as others, but we'll slowly win the respect of readers.

3. Imitating large NY firms will bring certain failure. As we put Poppas together, we had lots of discussion about promoting the book, and some of that discussion inevitably centered on what other larger publishers do to promote their work. The more I learned how large publishers promote their books, the more I felt that to imitate them would be to bring certain failure. Yes, we send review copies to Kirkus and Publishers Weekly like everyone else in the industry, but beyond that, we need to use the Internet far more than the average publisher to build a community (not just sales), we need to do events in a unique way (not just typical readings) and we need to find low-cost ways to reach you (email newsletters, blogs and postcards, for example). Other publishers use these tools as well, but for us they are vital — we can't bank on reviewers reading our work, and we can't expect media to pay attention to us as much as we'd like, so these smaller tools are sometimes all we have.

More on the book itself soon.

IV
Newspaper front-page statistical information design in relation to the current Middle East conflict.

On serial numbers, WWII, german tanks and simplicity in calculations and statistics

Kottke has some nice words for Beautiful Evidence, the newest book from Edward Tufte.

My copy arrived about three weeks ago, and I've had just a few sparse moments between getting Poppas finished to peek at it. One thing that that struck me immediately, however, (besides being impeccably produced, bound and printed) is the care that's gone into merging the editing and images and typography. Almost every paragraph is set to be contained on the page or spread it starts on. That is to say there's nary a paragraph running between spreads or onto the reverse sides of pages. In fact, it's so well crafted, looking for pages that aren't "perfect" becomes a sort of treasure hunt. And even when you track one down (spread 130-131), they're obviously unavoidable.

You can tell Tufte loves making these objects. Even if you have no interest in statistics, buying his books as specimens of typographical and editorial elegance is worth the price alone.

III
NYTimes to redesign by 2008. They're also closing a printing plant and removing 250 jobs in the process of saving $42 million a year. So continues the slow shaving away of the analog newspaper industry.

An overwhelming collection of publishing statistics.

While many are quite dated, it's still an interesting read.

"2002: 10,000 new publishing companies were established." A statistics of which we are a part of.

My favorite stats on small publishers:

5. They've published an average of 7 titles each.

6. In 1997, they earned an average of $420,000.

7. Half of the high income small publishers earned over $1 million in 1997 working out of home offices.

12. They produce 4X as many nonfiction titles as fiction titles. Juvenile and poetry are the most popular fiction genres. Self-help, how-to and business lead in the nonfiction categories.

18. On average, they pay $465.17 for a simple cover design to as much as $3,533.26 for a complex cover design. Typical cover costs range $450 to $3,000.

22. It takes an average of 531 hours to produce a book-422 hours for fiction, 550 hours for nonfiction.

24. An average of 10 to 15 hours are spent designing a book cover.

25. On average, 61 hours are spent in the editing process.

26. On average, 29 hours are spent producing a news release for a new book.

28. Graphic design consumes 13.5% of the budget for fiction titles and 3.7% of the budget for nonfiction titles.

And finally just a quick thought on this monster of a book:
Mac OS X Internals: A Systems Approach. It's 1600 pages (!) and retails for $64.99 (on Amazon, so, perhaps $70+ in "real" stores). If anything screams to me "Release me as a PDF" it's a 1600 page technical manual. I know tech books run expensive but I can't help but think they'd do well to sell a price-adjusted PDF of this beast. Then again, there ain't much sexier to a programming tech-fetishist than a systems bible that's actually as big as a bible. Now that I think about it -- maybe CMP should pitch to design a leather-bound hardcover $200 edition?

Poppas is at the printers, rolling around in hot ink.

We've been comparatively hush-hush about Poppas. Not for any particularly good reason, just that we've been a focused machine of editing and designing these past couple of months.

Editorially this thing is tight. Design wise this is probably the most playful I've gotten with any of our books. Gone are the tired 'ole serif'd titles! Gone is the Minion! Gone is the hyper-small size!

What's in? A collection of beautiful Japanese papers. Professional attention to book-binding and production. A giant, commercially unmarred original piece of artwork from Leslie Staub. Fedra Sans. Jannon Moderne. A new, improved, innovative take on the obi (belly band).

It's exciting, and I'm over here holding my breath waiting for the finished product to roll hot and steamy off the presses. It's scheduled to be in my humidity soaked possession in a little over a week.

In the meantime I'm distracting my 8-year-old-can't-wait-for-christmas like self by putting together the Poppas sub-site for chinmusicpress.com. That should hopefully be up and running within a week or so.

I designed Do You Know out in the open, naked for all to see. And while fun, it was a touch awkward and made the whole design process a little more self-concious than I'd like it to be. So Poppas was done privately, and I'll be going back over the design publicly. Which is probably the much more sensible way of doing this sort of thing.

We at Chin Music Press like well-made things. Whether they be clean, usable websites, "literary objects," encapsulated macrobiotic essences or overpackaged silver bullets of caffeine, it is a shared, if somewhat obsessive, attention to detail that unites our motley crew. It also attracts other kindred spirits to explore the full extent of the CMP universe.

Recently I, the lowly intern, was given the task of making a shelf-talker for some bookstores that have shown a great outpouring of support to our little press. When I presented the higher-ups with my little paper sculpture, they were quite impressed. So in an effort to document our unprecedented and unexpected take-over of the publishing world, Bruce has asked me to blog about my own hobby and obsession — paper art.

This new series in Adventures in Publishing will take you to the bleak, lamp-lit sanctuary of Franciscan illuminators to the folk art of Japan and China. We will trudge through the realm of novelty and really just stay there. Basically I'll show you how to make books, origami, shelf-talkers and other forms of paper art while pontificating on seemingly disparate topics laced with obscure references.

You can think of me as sub-inspector Gaff, you won't understand everything I have to say and you may not even like me, but you just might find your unicorn.

Who knows, you might just become become a well-known paper artist (dum dum) and I might just be able to hold-off the onset of this "paperless" office that I've heard about for the past decade. Win-win.

Soft skull to begin offering ebooks. "You could call them ePamphlets. Or iPamphlets. We're calling it Soft Skull Samzidat ..."

Google cracks down on Linkfraud, which is good to hear considering we had some not-so-wonderful experiences with Google AdWords.

And ... Enrico's lost (or new?) page from his coffee review.

And on our front -- Poppas is currently being run through the presses here in Tokyo. More very soon on the development and design, I promise!

For publishers, NPR combines with The New York Times and Oprah to create the holy trinity of book publicity. Well, thanks to Jason Berry, author of our forthcoming Last of the Red Hot Poppas, Chin Music Press and Do You Know crept into Monday's All Things Considered. We're watching the traffic generated by the links to our site and will report back if anyone is interested.

I knew it. The Germans are to blame.

Loop(2006)

Cartonbox is a fresh three-piece unit coming out of the Shibuya scene. I came across them by a happy accident. D (of "DandAn") was invited to an art show
opening in Ballard, WA, a Seattle outpost known for quality live venues, taquerias and a cupcake factory. The show, put on by OKOK, a vinyl toy, art and apparel shop that moved to Ballard recently from Capitol Hill, featured drawings, paintings and prints by an L.A.-educated Japanese artist named Heisuke Kitazawa, a.k.a. PCP. D proceeded to meet the guy:

D: Hi, nice work. 日本人ですか (are you Japanese)？
PCP: あ、日本語話せるの (Oh, you speak Japanese)! Meet my friends, they are playing a show tomorrow.　I do their album covers.

PCP's friends — Hidenori, Shohei and Yoshiko of Cartonbox — had decided to tag along when they heard that PCP was having a show in Seattle, and through PCP's connections (he's done album cover artwork for a local band here called Mercir, for one), they got a date to play. It was strictly a one-off, DIY gig, but what the heck, they had always wanted to play in America, and here was their chance.

Catching up on blogging today while our office printer churns out the 300+ pages of our next book, Last of the Red Hot Poppas, for proofing this weekend.

Those outside of the Seattle area will probably not be familiar with the case of baby Riley. In a nutshell, and at the risk of losing some of the nuances, a mother took her baby out of a hospital without permission because she wanted to buy some time to decide whether the kidney surgery the hospital said was necessary really was the only option. The state issued an Amber Alert, saying the baby was in imminent danger — which he wasn't — and when the mother was caught, she was jailed. The state did its best to paint the mother as a loony, but we hear from a trusted source that she was just a caring mother who took great care of her kid (cloth diapers, no less) and wasn't comfortable being marched down an inevitable path by the medical community. The American health care system can be a bureaucratic nightmare, as too many of us know firsthand, so she took drastic action.

I and many others petitioned the governor to delay the surgery to make sure it really was inevitable. Caring parents shouldn't be forced into health care decisions for their kids by a system that is so focused on profit and liability issues that healing is almost an after-thought.

OK, I'm finished ranting. The point of this post is to show how to say nothing in 158 words. Here's the response I received from the governor's office today, days after the court-ordered surgery had occurred:

A friend sent this piece on the long slow death of the Bush administration. Nine-hundred and twenty-seven days to go ...

The latest issue of the Kyoto Journal has a great review of Kuhaku by reviewer and novelist Ellis Avery. It's not online, so you'll have to pick it up at your local bookstore, which is easy to do if you live in Japan. Here are a couple of snippets:

What better way to invite a reader to explore the lavish surfaces and lonely depths of contemporary Japan than with a book so well-designed it whispers covet me from across the room?

OK, Craig is taking a cold shower to calm himself down. Note to Craig: Let's splash that across the Kuhaku page on our site, huh? More from the review:

Inconclusive in the best possible way, by turns pointed and generous, Kuhaku paints a shifting portrait of a shifting place ...

(Canned coffee is) a tender and lacerating catalogue by David Cady.

David now joins Craig in the shower. And finally, Ellis calls our glossary a "slyly digressive oddbox of delights."

Shower time.