We went live with goodbyemadamebutterfly.com about 15 minutes ago. Check it out and let us know what you think.

Also, you'll find at the end, once you've clicked through several pages, a ridiculous deal: We're offering our latest title, Goodbye Madame Butterfly, which will be out in September, and our first title, Kuhaku & Other Accounts from Japan for twenty bucks. That's both books for a total of $20. Anyone who has seen one of our books knows what a deal this is. Sumie Kawakami, the author of Butterfly, was one of the main contributors to Kuhaku, so we felt it was time to get Kuhaku into the hands of readers once again.

I hope you'll click through the new site and have a look around. And if you want a shortcut to the purchase page, here it is.

Thanks, as always, for supporting small press publications!

Politics brings out the cynical in all of us, but every once in a while, when a particularly incompetent or malicious regime gets its head handed to it by the voters, you understand that the practice of politics can be a worthwhile calling. It is gratifying to see that yesterday, Japan's voters handed that country's ruling parties — the nationalistic and increasingly militaristic Liberal Democratic Party as well as its creepy quasi-religious partner, New Komeito (backed by Sokkai Gakkai) — the drubbing they both deserve. They lost their majority in the upper house, and Japan once again takes a tentative step toward real democracy — as opposed to the one-party rule that has been passing as democracy for most of the postwar era.

Here's Kuhaku contributor Takehiko Kambayashi in today's Christian Science Monitor on the teetering Shinzo Abe regime. All we need is one more good push...

The Hitotoki expansion begins. Worldwide coverage to follow soon. For now, we'll start with a point far, far away from Tokyo: NYC.

We're accepting submissions for the launch during August. You can download a submissions form, or check out the site.

We have a great editor, Matt Rand, helping us watch our serial commas down in the front lines of Manhattan. Look out for a more formal introduction to Mr. Rand in an upcoming Hitotoki newsletter.

And, not to forget Tokyo, the submission process is always on, so send in your stories!

As I write this, the polls are opening in Japan. A very important upper house election is taking place. Just maybe, Japan will see the emergence of a second party and a loosening of the LDP's grip on power. Just maybe ...

Here's Arudou Debito with a podcast on enjoying the election season, sound trucks and all.

Awhile back, I wrote about a fundraiser in Seattle for the nonprofit organization Yoga Behind Bars (it was a great fundraiser, BTW — my kids are still talking about the fire dancers). Well, here's a piece on Shaina Traisman's inspired idea to bring yoga to prisoners. And if you want to learn more about her organization, check out the website. It's a great cause that should eventually spread across the nation.

Roland Kelts writes about how the cool Japan the world is getting to know via anime, video games and other entertainment exports is still being built by forty-somethings, while the country's youth seem too jaded to get involved. Check it out.

The San Francisco Chronicle recently ran a piece on a growing trend toward book readings at Fortune 500 companies. This is old news in Seattle, where Microsoft, Starbucks and Amazon have been rushing in celebrity authors and musicians for years, but the piece hints that the trend is spreading. As a publisher, I'm ambivalent about this. If Microsoft wants to book Sumie Kawakami for a lunchtime talk on Japanese women and sex, or Jason Berry on writing fiction in post-Katrina New Orleans, I am very, very happy to oblige. No question. And I think that offshoots of the corporate reading culture like authors@google could develop into fabulous resources on the Net. But I worry about indy bookstores losing more business and book-readings becoming even more elitist than they already are. If anything, we need to find a more grass-roots, less corporate way to connect with readers, because, after all, good books are still a bargain, and you don't have to be a yuppie to afford one.

It's the 2 1/2 year old project, geriatric by web standards, long in the tooth and all that, that keeps getting link love from the strangest of places. Yahoo News, France gave BT a nice link on their homepage.

And now back to the book trenches. We have about 24 hours until the final files need to be delivered to the printers here in Tokyo. Yoga and coffee (canned and otherwise) fueled design and editing to ensue.

The NY Times has a spot-on article about "feature creep," or the death of products we love by the 'need' for constant improvement.

It happens in books too. We're in the final throes of Goodbye Madame Butterfly and last week, when visiting the printers I had to make a conscious decision to hold back on going too wild with all the beautiful paper they have. A couple weeks ago I saw a book (which shall remain nameless) that scared the hell out of me. It had a light red translucent, plastic-like cover with dark red letters printed on it, wrapped over some hardcover boards that were full with four-color printing plus a garish and blinding gold foil stamping. It finished off with full color endpapers and a Tobira made of the same horrid red plastic paper on the cover ... Covered in un-kerned type pulled from what circle of type-hell, I do not know. In a way it made me want to revert to using Helvetica, Franklin and Garamond on everything. Keeping covers devoid of image. And at the most, a discrete ligature as a flourish. All in the name of keeping a book a book — a product where its analog form had achieved feature perfection over a hundred years ago.

We've been busy translating and font picking and layoutting and printer meeting and paper-company visiting over here these past three weeks. Bruce and Yuko have completed the translations and we're in the final editorial phase before layout.

We're scheduled to drop off files at the printers on the 20th, which is next Friday. We have a week to finish everything up — not impossible but no room for lollygaggin'.

For those of you who may be wondering what's happening during these final crunch days, here's a quick, edited rundown:

Editorial:

• Final translation checks
• Final edits / cuts
• Copy to layout
• Post layout cutting / copy fitting / trimming to hit our desired book size — a frantic back and forth between (mainly) Bruce and me
• Prelim editing (TOC, copyright page, quote, dedication, etc)
• Back blurb copy

Design:

• Text block size tweaking
• Body text layout, chapter headings / starts, page numbering, page headers
• Material checks on Dummy Book
• Cleaning up cover-artwork (from roughs to finals)
• Endpaper artwork cleanup
• Tobira artwork cleanup
• Prelims design — copyright page, half-title, title, tobira, TOC
• Spine design
• Back case emboss design
• Vertical back cover blurbs, etc

And then .. once all that's done we need to jump on getting the Goodbye Madame Butterfly companion website up and running as soon as possible. Plans to have it live by the end of the month. Then the PR push.

We'll have galleys ready mid-next week, so anyone who wants a review copy please contact us here.

The New York Times (AP) is reporting the Nielsen ratings group is revising how they gauge web page rankings. They're shifting from the nebulous metric hits to actual time spent on the site.

Anyone consuming newspapers or magazines online knows just how bad the attempts to inflate hits have gotten. From splitting up single articles into multiple pages to going so far as to hiring in-house designers and engineers marked with the explicit task of finding ways to make users click more. Some sites will use javascript to continually reload pages or loop through photo slideshows in the hopes that the reader has left the computer with the site open in a background window.

Hits have always been an almost pointless metric. Only slightly less so is the unique user metric. Measuring time spent on a site is still a dubious science at best, but combined with unique user numbers and return percentages things become slightly more concrete. I hope sites will be encouraged to pursue cleaner design and better user experience by this change.

The Atlantic has an interview up with reporter David Samuels discussing how we went about crafting his June 2007 profile of Condoleezza Rice. The amount of work that goes into these pieces is fascinating (a year, in this case — not surprising I suppose when you consider the lengths of The Atlantic articles).

I was lucky enough to meet David for a moment last year when he was working here in Tokyo. He was researching internet suicides amongst other things. In May of this year his piece Let's Die Together was released in The Atlantic. The calm and focus with which these young Japanese go about their anonymous group suicides is both fascinating and frightening.

If you're at work on July 5, it has got to feel like a Monday of a very short work week, so to help you through the day, we've got a Coffee Mondays review for you. Dare I say we're back? I do, I do dare.

They say the best way to enjoy coffee is with your eyes nearly closed, mouth forming a ragged "o", arms hanging limp and legs bandy. As a coffee reviewer, this is perfect for me, because this is also the pose that my tai chi teacher makes me do as punishment for being too chatty during class. She calls it the "senile orangutan." I'm kind of a master of it.

Read the rest at the world's greatest topical blog ... ever.

I put out a Google Alert for political commentator Minoru Morita a few weeks back because Chin Music is doing a lot of translations for his think tank. The links that come back are like a quick summary of Japanese political news. He's quoted in the FT about Mr. Kyuma's resignation, in the Times of London about the pension scandal, and by Bloomberg in a story on Alberto Fujimori's bid to win a seat in the upper house election. And that's just in the last few days.

Which begs a question: Why can't a political commentator so widely quoted in the international press even get his latest book reviewed by a major media organization in Japan? The book is a fiery attack on Abe, Koizumi and the LDP-Komeito coalition entited "Amerika ni Tsukaisuterareru Nihon" (loosely translated as Japan: Used and Discarded by America). The folks at the Morita Research Institute, where our translations appear each week, tell us that only one newspaper(Nara Shimbun) and one magazine (Nikkan Gendai) have bothered to review it.

Morita has published more than 30 books on politics. It's pretty clear he's being blackballed. Let's hope foreign corrrespondents keep going to him for quotes and people keep buying his book. Media monoliths here and in Japan have just one Achilles' heel that we small publishers have to exploit: They don't connect with readers on any level. They have loads of cash, but their product leaves people semi-informed and semi-distrustful no matter how hard they try to spin it.

Here's a clear sign that Google has expanded faster than its brain can handle. It has come out against Michael Moore's new film, Sicko, for being too negative about the US health industry. Perhaps Google has its own clinic next to its kitchen and cafeteria — how else could it be that out of touch?

The post would make Fred Barnes blush: "(I)t’s a shame no one focuses on the industry’s numerous prescription programs, charity services, and philanthropy efforts."

Truly a shame. Poor Big Pharma ... But don't worry, the all-purpose text ad is here to save the day:

We can place text ads, video ads, and rich media ads in paid search results or in relevant websites within our ever-expanding content network. Whatever the problem, Google can act as a platform for educating the public and promoting your message. We help you connect your company’s assets while helping users find the information they seek.

Phew. This is a relief and much easier to implement than universal health coverage.