Scott Pack Strikes Again

Unshackled from Waterstone's, Scott Pack seems to be set on making waves (and very welcome ones at that). Today's Bookseller has an excellent new opinion piece from him on the promotional use of 'novelty' items to preempt the arrival of hot new titles. Guilty as charged sir. Rather squeamishly I cast my mind back over plastic jelly fish (for a management book...), fridge magnets and phoney parking tickets that emanated from my office. I would plea that I was young, impressionable and it wasn't quite so naff back then but his point about Penguin sending out fire extinguishers to remind people of George Monbiot's book Heat (a rant on the ways we are wasting the world's resources) is trenchant and should make any publicist or marketeer guilty of perpetrating acts of tawdry trinketage squirm very, very uncomfortably. WHY do it, for f*&^k's sake?? It is wasteful, pointless and mostly fairly insulting to the intelligence of their intended recipients. Uber-marketin wizard Stephen Brown wrote illuminatingly about this some time ago in his book 'Free Gift Inside'. What's it all for?

I wrote a piece a while ago for THE Book Magazine which looked at how over-produced Leo Hickman's otherwise good book on green living was. Why go for a large format and spacious typography? Make the book smaller, lighter - use less resources, use less fuel to transport. And I also think back to my time at an environmental publisher who didn't manage to print its books on recycled papers. The publishing industry is shamefully wasteful and no section of it more so than the marketing and PR branches. Have we got the guts to change? Since starting agenting I have been pleased to find that finally I can send out Pdfs of books to interested publishers: I've sold rights to umpteen books without having to print out a single hard copy of the manuscript. Now trying to persuade journalists to read books sent as email attachments... only yesterday I was talking to the PA of one of the major decision makers for serial rights in our national newspapers to be told "there's no point emailing it, he won't read emails". You know who you are... said manuscript ended up printed out and then biked.

Waste
Waste
wot a waste it is...