Apple Store, SOHO, Manhattan: Wednesday, October 8th, 6:30 - 8:00pm

(Facebook Event Page)

Just a quick note to let you know I'll be speaking at the Apple Store in SOHO this coming Wednesday evening.

I'll be talking about books, design, the creative process, finding time to work on passion projects and other topics, all within the context of living in Tokyo.

In particular I'll be speaking at length on the books Art Space Tokyo and Goodbye Madame Butterfly. I'll go into the stories behind how the books were made and the reasons why we make the books the way we do.

It's a free event and should be quite interesting - pop by if you're in the 'hood!

Finally found a few moments to collect my thoughts and photos from the Art Space Tokyo New York launch event last week. Thanks to all who attended! We all had a blast — the panelists were great, the attendance was great, the discussion was ... great. For me, an old hand at putting on Tokyo book launch parties, this was an exciting jump into hosting events in New York.

Check out the AST blog for all the details: NY Launch Wrap-up.

Chapter 8 of Curing Japan's America Addiction as seen through the eyes of Wordle, a word cloud generator created by Jonathan Feinberg.

CJAA will be available for purchase in a few weeks time.

Khoi Vinh over at Subtraction has written a lovely and flattering short review of Art Space Tokyo:

Whenever it is that I’ll finally get an opportunity to make it to Japan, I plan to take with me a copy of “Art Space Tokyo,” an unexpectedly stunning bit of cultural travelogue from Chin Music Press...

We've also updated our Tokyo Art Map offerings with a new PDF download for Ghibli Museum near Kichijoji.

There are a few other AST related magazine articles, web interviews and party updates that we'll be announcing in the coming weeks. For now though, we have to keep our heads down and continue cranking out Curing Japan's America Addiction.

We're at the point where we are starting to grow but still seem constantly strapped for cash. Every upstanding businessperson knows that there's only one solution to keep us growing: Interns, interns, interns!

So if you're looking for long hours of hard, anonymous work, if you're dream is to talk on the phone with a writer who is pretty ticked off that his book isn't in the Tacoma Barnes & Noble, if you'd like nothing better than to spend your summer trudging to the post office to mail off elaborately packaged cans of coffee or if picking up my egg salad sandwich on your way back from Office Max to stock up on padded envelopes sounds like almost too much fun, then don't hesitate to give us a buzz at 206-784-4700.

In all seriousness, we have an array of potential positions and assignments to offer ranging from low pay to no pay. We're looking for production people (web designers, graphic designers, editors, proofreaders), marketing and sales people and maybe an MBA student or two who want to show us all the basic business mistakes we make every day (and lord knows, there are a lot of them). At this point, none of these positions are full-time (I believe it's illegal to have full-time nonpaid interns, is it not?), but you never know — if we keep on this pace, we'll be able to add staff in the not-too-distant future.

Also, while some of our jobs require people to be in the Puget Sound area, others could be done from Timbuktu. Don't let geography dissuade you.

So call us, send your resume to me at bruce at chin music press dot com, and we'll take it from there.

A lot of the publishing industry newsletters I get in my inbox these days are either geared toward companies many, many times bigger and more profitable than Chin Music or stuck in the Old World of publishing, only acknowledging the digital shift we're in by mentioning the Kindle or some other Amazon item. Bookhitch.com's newsletter is different. It is very relevant to the Chin Musics of the world and anyone else who is trying to grasp just where this industry is headed.

Consider this brief wrap up of the latest newsletter: The opening piece contained a smattering of opinions on Amazon's controversial move to demand that publishers use its on-demand printer. The responses ranged from outraged to resigned. but nobody felt this was a smart move on Mr. Bezos' part. This kind of strong-arming is going to come back to bite him. Here's one comment:

"“I have asked my assistant to delete all my Amazon affiliate links on my nine websites, and have asked Amazon to pay any outstanding commissions because I am terminating my affiliate relationship after 12 years. And I'm trying to figure out how to notify the 70+ people in my list of Facebook friends who are marketers that if they want me to participate in best-seller campaigns, they have to offer a non-Amazon alternative (I did one the other day that offered a choice of Amazon, BN, or Powell's; I went through Powell's and it felt great)."

The piece is comprehensive and timely.

The next thing that caught my eye was one that focused on Harper Collins' plan to start an imprint that offers writers no royalties but also accepts no returns from bookstores. Fascinating. The newsletter contained an interview with an industry insider that said the idea was preposterous and a terrible way to go if you're a writer because you will end up making a lot less: "How’s zero sound? Because that’s what most authors make on royalties…even authors who are strong mid-list producers, even those who have name cache and a dozen titles in print. Publishers are good at either pushing a book into the market or leaving it to languish. One of the primary signals they send can be measured by how many zeroes are in the advance."

The rest of the newsletter talked about JK Rowlings' copyright case, what will happen if Barnes & Noble buys Borders (answer: not much), selling books for charity and the prospect of book rentals (like a Netflix for books). All interesting and well-written. And free, I might add.

Starting from yesterday, April 3rd, Chin Music Press is selling some of our books at the 101Tokyo international art fair near Akihabara. I stopped by for the opening preview on Wednesday night and I have to say I was very impressed. The design of the exhibition space, by POINT Architects in Tokyo (with whom we share office space at co-lab) is excellent. They've managed to convert a low ceiling area (200 square meters or so?) in an unused middle school into a very formidable exhibition space. The fluorescent lighting of doom is still there, but they've accented it with track lighting built into all the booths. The end result is a bright, warm space with a lot of energy. There are some excellent pieces on display and it runs until Sunday the 6th, so hop on over.

Believe it or not, this is currently Tokyo's only international art fair. This is really surprising (or maybe just sad?) considering how mature the Tokyo art world is. It's also worth noting that China's market, while much younger than the Japanese, is having many high-profile international art fairs. I attended the Shanghai biennale last September and I have to say it was impressive -- both in scope of work, range of galleries and the space in which it was held.

From the warmth of reception and success in execution, it looks like 101Tokyo is a first but formidable step in kicking the Japanese art market back in the ass, getting foreign eyes (and wallets) interested in the Tokyo scene again and helping to break up some of the stiffness art fairs in Tokyo seem to carry with them.

We have interviews with the 101Tokyo founders, as well as Tokyo Art Fair coordinator, Misa Shin in our Art Space Tokyo book. AST also covers some thoughts on the Chinese market and how Japan should react / integrate / respond to this surge in interest towards Asian art.

We're extremely excited to announce a project that has been under wraps for ages — Art Space Tokyo. The book is set to come off the printers at the end of March. To put it simply, it's a guide to twelve art spaces in the city. Some are well known, some aren't even known by those in the art world. We've used these twelve spaces as pivot points to discuss, through interviews and essays, all sorts of topics related to art in Tokyo. It's a fascinating read and I'll be posting more information on the project and how it came to be in the coming weeks.

But for now, you can get more info and take advantage of a $22-free-shipping-worldwide pre-order deal (I plan on posting something about the economics of pre-ordering too) over on the book's homepage: artspacetokyo.com. As always, thank you for your support.

Pingmag has a nice interview with Sumie Kawakami online. Sumie, as you all know, is the author of Goodbye Madame Butterfly and this interview illuminates some of the efforts she went through to put the book together.

Ping: Your stories are intensely personal. How did you get all the women to open up to you?

Sumie: The ones in the book are just a fraction of what I’ve collected: One woman, after reading my manuscript, said “I can’t accept this” and kept denying what I had written; some kept asking for revisions over and over; others, hearing that the book will be published in English, ran their Japanese stories through translation software to read it in English. Getting your own story published is a big deal even if it’s under a fake name. I feel that negotiating little details in the story with the women took much longer than the interview itself. The book also includes stories that barely passed the women’s approval and some stories have been dramatically edited due to technical constraints. In that respect, what ended up in the book is the pure essence.

I believe that at the heart of human existence is the desire to be heard and to be understood. And if the story is as intensely personal as one’s sex life or love life, the desire to share one’s story may be even stronger.

It's also available in Japanese too.

The Nippon Foundation is coming out with a list of 100 books written in English that "help people abroad correctly understand Japan," the Yomiuri Shimbun reports. Warning, mini rant ahead: How can an organization as tainted as the Nippon Foundation in a country that can't even teach it's own people to "correctly understand Japan" be taken seriously? It's like Pat Buchanan coming out with his top 100 books on multiculturalism.

Sound of scuffle, children's cries, angry whispers: Apologies. The skeptic in me overtook the publisher. But my wife just showed me the balance in our checking account and set me straight. What I meant to say was: Please, Nippon Foundation, please, pick Kuhaku or Butterfly ...

To all you Tokyo livin', book and art lovin' folk out there, I'd like to announce that CMP titles are now carried by On Sundays (WARNING: Most horrible website ever.), the fantastic and long-running select bookshop in the basement of Watrium Museum. The quirky shop is wonderful and the proprietor loves all things books and whimsical (he's hosting a small exhibition on antique microscope sets and their hand-made boxes right now!).

If you've never been to either the museum or the bookshop, it's a great Sunday afternoon trip. You can get there from Gaien-mae station -- walk up Gaien Higashi Doori away from Roppongi Hills. Watarium is about five minutes away on the left just after the pedestrian footbridge.

One of the nice things about the museum component (besides it being a lovely space) is that tickets are valid for the length of the entire exhibition. Considering most good exhibitions should require more than one visit -- especially long-running ones -- this sort of generous rationality is a welcome breath of fresh air.

The bookshop and stationery goods shop are both accessible without having to see an exhibition. There's also a small cafe hanging over the book browsing area so you can sip a coffee and spy on book perverts, molesters, paper whores and literary deviants alike.

Rumor also has it that the family running the museum lives in the pod on the top of the building.

My bro, Dave Rutledge, will be manning the Chin Music booth at the NOLA Bookfair on Nov. 10. It's free and a lot of fun, plus Sarah Inman is performing on the trapeze a la her essay in Do You Know, "A Lesson from Below." Eyebrows raised yet? Come check it out. Dave will have all four Chin Music books for sale and will probably be offering some nice discounts (especially if you buy him a beer). Hope you stop by.

Here's something from the New York Times on virtual book tours. This piece lays out very straightforwardly the constraints small publishers are under. Book tours are next to impossible for us to finance and coordinate unless the author is willing to foot part of the bill and do a lot of the legwork. When you're running a one- or two-person shop, that's just the cold reality. But then, this virtual tour idea gives you hope that we're going to be able to find alternative avenues for marketing our books. Maybe we should create a Sumie Kawakami avatar, put her on Second Life and have her give advice to distraught couples.

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.

I wanted to share this with you before it gets stale. One of the more interesting items I ran across during Book Expo America in New York at the beginning of the month was not a book, but a movie. Specifically, it was a movie made by Powell's Books of Portland, OR, about Ian McEwan's new novel, On Chesil Beach. I imagine some of you are scratching your head right now and thinking, 'Why is a bookstore making a film about a book?' That's what I was thinking as I dropped round a showing of the film and a brief talk by David Weich of Powell's and Ian McEwan. Weich had me with his opening comments, when he talked about how insular literature has become. "Sometimes it seems that we in the book industry are a bunch of lit majors sitting around talking about what we know really well and intimidating everybody else."

Weich, a Powell's employee, watched how books broke out on the national scene. They did it through appearances on Oprah, through word of mouth. But rarely were those books novels. Novelists could hope to appear on Charlie Rose's show or Fresh Air with Terri Gross, but that was about it. "An author photo on the back of the flap is about as close as most readers get to a writer," Weich said. He wanted to try and make "compelling entertainment that energizes the conversations" about books, and thus he turned to film.

Weich must be a helluva salesman to persuade the owners of Powell's to plunk down the change to make a 28-minute movie (he wouldn't divulge the budget). But what I really like about this development, besides the high quality of the movie (check it out — it's entertaining and even very funny toward the end), is the collective sense Powell's brings to it. The movie is being made available, along with posters and other promotional material, to any bookstore that asks. Thus, if a bookstore in Santa Fe or Ann Arbor wants to screen the movie and promote McEwan's novel, they can. Several bookstore owners in the audience seemed very grateful for this service, since McEwan wasn't planning a book tour.

But will Powell's films kill author readings?

I'm off to Powell's in Portland today with Roland Kelts, who'll be talking there this evening about Japanamerica. I'm hoping to ask the Powell folks about their plan to make movies about authors and their books. Perhaps they'd be interested in our own efforts in this field.

Another reading on Youtube, albeit one with a twist. And that man's voice sounds awfully familiar.

Brian Turner has put his poetry reading on YouTube, an innovative twist that comes from From the Fishouse.

We get the finished Poppas video next Monday. I'm thinking YouTube ...

Jessa Crispin of Bookslut fame writes about the death of the traditional bookstore tour in this article from The Book Standard.

As a publisher that has launched two books in bars and one in a museum, we know what she's talking about. Bookstores that just go through the motions are missing out on a resurging interest in literature that is not readily reflected in their bottom lines. Lit blogs are flourishing; people are writing and talking more about books than I can ever remember in my 43 years on Earth. And literary types are doing more interesting things to promote their books. David Eggers and his posse but on a whole show to raise funds for 826 Valencia. Jonathan Lethem publishes a limited collection of short stories and demands that the book not be sold in stores or distributed to trade journals, magazines or newspapers. These are exciting times for publishers, and that's partly why we joined the fray.

To date, our most successful reading in terms of sales was in a bar in the Upper Ninth Ward of New Orleans about five and a half months after the levees broke. It was — not coincidentally — also the most fun.

But a word should be said for the inspired booksellers out there (and Jessa mentions this in her piece): There is no reason bookstores can't hold exciting, interesting literary events, and many do. Follow the lead of Tom Lowenburg at Octavia Books in New Orleans (p.s.: Jason Berry is reading from Poppas there this Saturday at 6 pm) and put out a little wine and cheese to give the event the feel of a party; Janis Frame at Book Buffs in Denver provided a sushi spread for our Kuhaku reading, and the hour or so we spent there felt so much more like a conversation than a monologue. This ain't brain surgery folks — just make it fun and pay attention, because the people are reading, writing and talking about literature a lot these days.

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.

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.

Movie buff andDo You Know contributor Juliette Kernion is the driving force behind Holidailies, an online writing project where bloggers vow to update their blogs daily from Dec. 7 to Jan. 6. Holidailes serves as a portal for all the updates.

It's an excellent idea, allowing you to quickly check out blogs you may otherwise never stumbled across and bookmark a few for further reading.

Check out the banner at the top. We're today's holidailies sponsor.

Buzztracker gets a lot of traffic. It also costs a lot to run. The maintenance cost is mainly in servers — it takes a lot of horsepower to handle 450,000 to 500,000 unique visitors a month. But on top of servers is, of course, my salary (when I'm working on it full-time). We're wary of slapping ads on it for the sake of revenue because it was never initially intended as a direct money-making mechanism. So instead of bombarding people with Google ads, we added a simple link for donations. We figure, if you use buzztracker (and obviously, a lot of people do — regularly), then you could probably afford to give up five bucks.

The thought process was like this: if just 1% of 1% of the people who visit buzztracker.org donated $5 a month, we'd cover server costs and be perfectly happy. 1% of 1% is not a lot. At least, I don't think so. And we have enough traffic where that small percentage is, while not huge, enough to help us along and continue offering the project to the public.

So in the two months we've had the donations link up, how much money has come in? Five bucks.

Which equals 0.0001%. (Our goal was 0.01%)

*sigh*

We didn't expect an outpouring of support but we did expect a bit more than that. Call it what you like — faith in humanity, the impossible optimism you need to run a small publishing company. If anything, this feels like it's been more of a curious experiment than a futile plea for cash. What we've learned is that people don't give money when they absolutely don't have to.

So what are we to do? Making books is expensive. We'd like to make a lot more. In fact, it's rather stupid that we don't make more than we do — and we would, had we an infusion of cash. We have a national distribution network and a small but acutely dedicated team. We also like to think we have a finger on the online and digital publishing pulse. There are lots of interesting things to be put out there in beautiful little packages but not a whole lot of money floating around to do it with. Last year we stumbled through our birthing process; this year has been the year in which we defined ourselves in broader strokes, and 2006 is going to have to be the year we pull all of these bits and pieces — our books, our online work — together and find the cash to take this operation to the next level.

But for now, I'm off to donate a few bucks to all the small sites I frequent regularly.

Another Monday, another distinct lack of caffeine-focused prose.

Fear not. because we are actually doing something with the whole coffee thing. It's just we've had a lot of other things pop up in the meantime. Things like putting together a book on New Orleans in an insanely tight time-frame. But I'll let Bruce talk about that in another post.

Back to the coffee -- part of the "thing" we're working on is an eBook, which is going to be an experiment on a number of levels. It's an experiment in shoving physical media into awkward digital spaces -- especially physical media that's quite strange, image driven and awkwardly shaped. It's also an experiment in seeing if people actually care about electronic books and if they're willing to pay a rather small sum to obtain them.

Seth Godin, some sort of clean-shaven mad marketing genius, recently put out his own eBook and wrote a piece about the experience on his blog:

I'm really pleased at the great reception KnockKnock received. The first lesson is that free ebooks spread FORTY times faster than ebooks that cost money.

Of course, Seth is a bonafide Net celebrity of sorts so his give-away is certainly held to different criterion than say a small company run by a bunch of guys, sitting alone, in rooms, all across the globe, crying themselves to sleep. Regardless, it's interesting to see if the "Television Model" of publishing is enough to sustain a company giving away their goods for free. (Acland Brierty begs to differ.)

I was interviewed on WCPN, the NPR affiliate in Cleveland, Ohio. Well, actually, it was this spring, but it feels like a million years ago. Some of you were interested in hearing the interview, so here you go! FYI, it's almost 15 minutes long.

We made a rookie mistake that is delaying our official launch in North America: We put the wrong barcode on our bellyband. When Michael Cashin of Consortium called me to tell me this, it was like getting hit in the solar plexus. The rest of the day, I was in a deep, deep funk.

But then some good things happened, and we turned this problem into an opportunity. First of all, designer Bob Garlick in Vancouver offered to make our EAN Bookland barcode for a case of beer. Then he helped us find a printer in Seattle that would do the job without draining our triple-digit bank account.

Our current bellyband (the wrapper around the base of the book) has a blurb from us describing Kuhaku. That's because we didn't go out and get reviews and blurbs while the book was printing like normal publishers. We decided to publish the book first, then show it around to distributors, reviewers, etc. That's largely been a good strategy for us because people take us seriously when they see the book.

But now, with this barcode mistake, we had a chance to do two things: create a super-cheap throwaway bellyband like we envisioned in the beginning but could not quite convey to our printers in Iceland (thus the high-quality off-white paper used for our current bellyband); and include some blurbs from reviews.

This led to a discussion at CMP HQ about the cover. It's a beautiful cover, we believe. But the one thing it doesn't convey is Kuhaku's humor. Cletus in the U (who incidentally is being reprimanded for his rogue blog-post the other day) hints at the book's touches of whimsy, but nowhere is it apparent that inside there are many moments of silliness. Now, with these blurbs on the new bellyband, we think the astute reader will pick up on the humor within:

Anyone remember the spoof of the Japan Times in the early 1990s? Several renegade staffers cranked out the copies after hours, risking their jobs for the sake of humor. If anyone has a copy, please contact me.

Parts of Kuhaku were made in the same spirit as that spoof Japan Times, except our target wasn't the JT staff, but the gatekeepers � the pundits, reviewers, analysts, et al, who tell us what they think we need to know about Japan. We were out to treat Japan playfully, honestly, sometimes caustically, but not "expertly." This approach always pisses off a certain type of person, and of course, we enjoy that.

Now I'm about to do something that is probably taboo #1 for any small publisher: I'm about to review the reviewers. There are three reasons for this: We started this blog in the spirit of full disclosure, and it would not be honest to hold back this conversation from you; this could actually spark a more interesting dialogue; and lastly, I think you'll find it entertaining.

So far, our reviews have centered on Japan-based publications because, frankly, it's easier to get a book called Kuhaku from an unknown publisher reviewed in them. We are planning to take the momentum of those reviews and push into North American publications.

Up to this point, we have been reviewed in two major Japanese newspapers (English editions), two magazines, one web-based publication, our Amazon site and blogs all over the world.

The reviews on the Internet and in the magazines have been fun to read, interesting and insightful. Some get what we're up to, others don't. But they are sincere in their criticism.

The reviews we received at the papers (one positive, one negative; another just outright refused to review us) have been insightful at times, but the overall impression I have when reading both their praise and their criticism is that they are infused with a misguided elitism. It's as if the gatekeepers don't realize the walls around them have crumbled. I expected this. Too often reviews in Japan's English dailies are written by what I like to call the "literary turfer." The literary turfer is the type of guy who fervently believes that no one gets Japan except for him and Donald Richie.

So the next time you're reading a book review in the Japan Times, Asahi or Yomiuri and you suddenly are overcome by a mild sense of displeasure, check this guide to see if you are indeed in the realm of the literary turfer:

Roland Kelts and Roberto Christen report from NYC.

Roland write: "A copy of Kuhaku featured amid portions of the Upper West Side Thanksgiving Day spread last month."

And Rob chimes in with: "I told you I'd send this, so here it is." He spotted Kuhaku on the shelves of Zakka in SOHO, right in front of the "lucky cats."

From Glenngary, Glenn Ross:

A-B-C. A-always, B-be, C-closing. Always be closing! Always be closing!! A-I-D-A. Attention, interest, decision, action. Attention -- do I have your attention? Interest -- are you interested? I know you are because it's fuck or walk. You close or you hit the bricks! Decision -- have you made your decision for Christ?!! And action. A-I-D-A; get out there!! You got the prospects comin' in; you think they came in to get out of the rain? Guy doesn't walk on the lot unless he wants to buy. Sitting out there waiting to give you their money! Are you gonna take it? Are you man enough to take it?

We aren't selling real estate, but I have a feeling if we had Blake on our side, we'd have sold out of 10 runs of Kuhaku by summer and have bookstores cowering at our whim.

Kuhaku isn't a house or a piece of land. But it is a book, an actual product. And as such, it needs to be sold or else CMP starts and ends at Kuhaku. And we have way too many ideas for new books to go through before we give up just yet.

These past few months we've done a soft launch in Japan, and people seem to be really digging the book. Now it's time to push into the American market in a big way. We have distribution (see: A crash course at Consortium) and a sales team of about 40 people on our side, poised to push Kuhaku into shops around North America. I had until December 23rd to make a sales kit for this team. We wanted the kits to be visually interesting and reflective of our attention to detail. But we also needed them to be really cheap. So I set off to Tokyu Hands and, after a few hours of poking around with materials, had developed an idea of what they should be like.

COST
We were able to produce 50 kits for a grand total of (about) $45.00.

Ran over to Harajuku and Omotesando on Tuesday to stop by Nadiff and Intelligent Idiot. The book buyer at Nadiff was out but I got his contact info. I've been calling incessantly over the last couple of days trying to connect with the buyer but somehow continue to miss him. Someone finally took down my number and said the buyer would call me back. I don't hear any ringing just yet, so I may have to call again. Treading the fine line between persistence and annoyance is sometimes necessary.

This whole complicated phone dance is one of the most time-consuming bits of selling to shops and getting a chance to show your product to the people who make decisions. Once you do, it's usually a quick acceptance or denial and then you're done. For instance, Bruce just emailed me this morning with good news on a new bookshop sale:

Another good experience today at Confounded Books. Brad, the owner, cut me a check for three books (40% discount) after looking at the book for about two minutes. He loved it! He said if he were having a better day, he'd buy more, and he also said he thinks consignment stinks and he always pays upfront for his indie books.

While we chatted, he pulled a book out of the front window and replaced it with Kuhaku.

Nice people are so damn cool.

Can't agree with you anymore, Brucer; nice people are damn cool.

We sold out of books at Book 246 in Aoyama within a week of dropping them off. This is great news. They've placed an order for more books, so here's hoping they sell fast too. This last batch also contained a stack for Tsutaya at Roppongi Hills. They should be available there starting late next week.

I attended the Donald Richie talk on the art of the short story at Good Day Books in Ebisu Sunday night. Mr. Richie read four of his stories from his most recent self-published collection called A View from the Chuo Line. His reading was animated and extremely polished -- one of those delightfully rare people who can really read a story.

Good Day Books took a copy of Kuhaku to test-sell.

This week we're working on getting the book into Intelligent Idiot and hopefully Nadif.

We are getting a slow but steady stream of book orders online. Some of us awake in the morning with a small knot in the stomach, anxious about what the day will bring (read: worried if there will be any book orders). And, so far so good. We have noticed a spike in sales every time we were mentioned in another website. That leads us to the conclusion that some form of advertisement (reviews, straight ads, web links) can be effective to a certain point. But, given that we are not ones to go for direct marketing, our strategy will be more...hmm....sublime? If anybody has any cool ideas on reaching the world population at large, email us.

Kuhaku's first in-store display:

This is the first store in what we hope will be a series of booksellers in Japan willing to carry Kuhaku. This great little travel-focused bookstore is right outside of the Aoyama 1-Chome station in Tokyo. Book 246 is small, really cozy and has very helpful staff.

I'm in America right now running around with Brucer meeting distributors and trying to get the books into a couple of great little booksellers on the East Coast. (I'm also sweating my arse off doing Bikram Yoga in hundred-degree rooms.)

Back in Tokyo on the 24th of September. First order of business once I'm back in town is to get the books over to the half dozen or so art and design shops on our list of hot-spots.

More photos of book 246 inside ...

We just secured our first bookstore in Tokyo!

The bookstore, Book 246 (sorry, they only have a Japanese site) is a very cool little shop operating under the theme of "travel." It's a cozy store that offers not only interesting new and used books from all over the world, but also bizarre travel objects including bags and clocks and clothing.

We're on Amazon. It was easy. Almost too easy, if you ask me. But I'm not complaining.

No one at Amazon has seen the book. And I never had to talk to anyone. I just filled out an online application to sell through the company's Advantage program, waited about two weeks and got an email saying we have been accepted. Easy.

Four more out the door to a few publications around Japan!

Our first copy of Kuhaku to be reviewed is out the door!

We don't have a national distributor yet, which may strike you as crazy. But we're taking a grass-roots approach to distribution because we feel that connecting with smaller independent bookstores will help Kuhaku more than hobnobbing with the small press division of Barnes & Noble.

We expect to be on Amazon, which will give us reach on the Net. We'll sell the book over our own site, of course, and so far, we have a network of nine independent bookstores in the US and Japan (San Francisco, Portland, Tacoma, Seattle, Chicago, Cleveland, Boston, New Orleans and Tokyo) as well as a British pub in Tokyo. We expect to have at least 20 outlets to sell the book by mid August.

We plan to visit these bookstores, do signings, slide shows on Japan, what have you. We also will write a brief history of each store on our website. And we hope to get these stores interested in the books that will follow Kuhaku under the CMP brand. Small bookstores tend to be more open to our ideas (although we've had plenty of rejections and unreturned calls, mind you). We believe that there is something in the average indie bookstore owner that wants to buck the system, and of course, so do we.

We're out to sell 5,000 copies of Kuhaku, not 50,000 or 500,000. We believe strongly that if we work our butts off promoting Kuhaku over the Net and at these small stores, we can sell that many copies. Stay tuned.

I contacted King's Books in Tacoma, Washington, this week to see if the store would carry Kuhaku. Yesterday I stopped by to talk with Sweet Pea, one of the guys in charge of evaluating and buying used books there.

Sweet Pea is a laid back guy in his 20s, I would guess, with long red hair done up in buns. His co-worker was a similarly young blonde guy who was headed to Japan at the end of July to join the JET program to teach English in Japan. Nice coincidence.

After I explained that we're interesting in connecting with independent stores and that we'd work to actively promote sales of the book by doing readings, canned coffee tastings, drum solos, break dancing, whatever it takes, Sweet Pea explained that the store rarely buys new titles. But they'd be willing to sell our book on consignment at a 70-30 split, he quickly added. I said, fine, let's do that. And so now we have a Tacoma home -- as long as the owners agree with Sweet Pea.

The store itself is a vast, somewhat worn bookstore north of downtown with high ceilings and bookshelves that soar beyond my seven-foot reach. It offers mostly used books, but a table at the front had a few new titles, including MoveOn.org's book, "50 Ways to Love Your Country," which was front and center.

Good news from the folks at Reading Frenzy www.readingfrenzy.com. They've agreed to be our flagship store in Portland, Oregon, and will take an initial order of 10 books.

Reading Frenzy is a cool little store tucked away in the shadow of the massive Powell's City of Books. I found it while heading to the train station last Friday. At first, an erotic bookstore on the corner caught my eye (strictly for positioning Kuhaku, of course). I entered a door, thinking I was going into the bookstore, but for some reason, I ended up in the video store next to it. After awkwardly chatting with the woman who runs the video/DVD store (who had just moved from California, and who also carried a nice selection of Japanese flicks), I wandered around the corner to find that damn bookstore. But before I got to it, I bumped into Reading Frenzy, a hip little bookstore with zines, graphic novels, books and a great magazine selection. I forgot all about the erotic bookstore, chatted with the woman at the cash register about Kuhaku and left to catch my train.

A week or so went by, and the more I thought about it, the more I felt that Reading Frenzy was the right place to sell our book in Portland. Yesterday I wrote an impassioned plea to the owner, telling her how we are interested in connecting with unique neighborhood bookstores rather than enormous chains, that we'll promote the hell out of the book and help them sell, and please, please, please be our Portland flagship store. (I did not grovel, however. No groveling, just intense and forthright requesting.)

This morning, the owner wrote back that she is "intrigued" by our project and would be glad to be our flagship store in that hip but cloudy city. Initial order: 10 copies with a return option and a 60-40 split. Done.

So, when in Portland, visit Reading Frenzy at 921 Southwest Oak Street. The phone number is (503) 274-1449. Hours: Monday - Saturday: 11-7, Sundays: Noon -6.

We've been talking with bookstores and planning ways to sell Kuhaku. It's daunting but exciting. Our strategy at this point -- and it may change as we learn more -- is to sell the book over our site (more info on that coming soon) and over Amazon.com to give us a wide reach on the Internet. At the same time, we're reaching out to smaller independent bookstores in key cities, hoping they'll open an account with us and sell our book.

Most publishers use a large distributor to reach the many bookstores around the country. Our approach is more labor-intensive, but hopefully it will help us create more meaningful relationships with great neighborhood bookstores. And perhaps they'll even give us a little better positioning than the huge chains would.

Without divulging too much information about ongoing negotiations, we will probably be for sale right away in Seattle, Portland, Tokyo, NYC, Cleveland and Philly. We hope to add to that list in the near future, but we know the list will grow very fast once the books arrive. We're weeks away.