We got funding for five films, and the first one (for a book I was then editing, the collected lyrics and poems of Gil Scott Heron was produced in 1999, designed by Julian House at Intro.

Sadly, tho, it never saw the light of day until very recently. Why? We also completed our Life of Pi promo, which was a giant, 8 MB download (huge at the time). This got thousands and thousands of views a day, and tanked Canongate’s bandwidth limit. They had to start paying over the odds to keep the promo up there. (Ooops. You learn). As a result, both were taken offline until a “sponsor” for bandwidth became available, or until bandwidth became free, and by which time, I’d left the company, and we’d all missed the boat.

Anyway, along came YouTube and we put it up there in 2006. My reason for posting is that it’s just had its 200,000th view, which isn’t great shakes (the Pi promo had over 2.5m views on a number of different sites, but has had very few on YouTube – probably because it’s also a game) – but we’re proud none the less.

You can view it on YouTube here – and enjoy the pretty regular comments. Or you can look at the hi-res version below, straight from the source. (It’s quite old now – 8 years – so it can be a bit tetchy. Maybe easier to watch in a new window.

You can also see the Life of Pi promo introduction below, or here in a new window – again recommended.

If you’re interested in other promos we’ve done, try these:

The Baghdad Blog, Salam Pax
Hey, Nostradamus!, Doug Coupland
Lunar Park, Brett Easton Ellis
The Long Tail, Chris Anderson
For One More Day, Mitch Albom

The idea was simple – give my film-maker /animator mates a copy of a Canongate book, a little bit of cash, and ask them to respond to the book in their own way with a five-minute short. “Pop Promos for Books”. We’d (i.e. Canongate) promote the film at film festivals (at the time I also had a couple of mates who ran Mirrorball for the Edinburgh International Film Festival), through the Canongate site (which I ran at the time) and the all-round PR and traffic buzz would be a virtuous circle for filmmaker, author and publisher alike.

I wrote a business plan for the idea, developed it a bit so that it was less film- and bandwidth-intensive; and the Scottish Arts Council awarded us a boatload of cash to take the idea further.

Anyway, we did a few of them. The Life of Pi promo has had over 2.5 million views since it launched in 2002. The Gili Dolev directed one for the Book of Genesis never saw the light of day. And this weekend, the first promo we completed, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, for one of “my” authors at the time, Gil Scott Heron, saw it’s 100,000th view on YouTube.

Now, that’s not a huge amount, but the comments for the promo and the Google ranking it achieves gives me some small glow. I was always very proud of the promo – directed by Intro’s Julian House, who is a fantastic talent – but because of the success of the Life of Pi promo, and the bandwidth costs of hosting it at the time, it never had a “proper” release until we put it on YouTube a year ago. I just wish that it had done as the business plan predicted, and sent sales of the book it was promoting – a collection of Gil’s lyrics and poems called Now and Then – through the roof.

Odell is represented by the pretty much universally brilliant Nexus Productions, home to some of the best young animators in the world. And whilst I don’t like the song, it’s a great piece of work, almost breathtaking. It reminds me of the kind of work a friend of mine, Spencer Whiting, was putting out at Edinburgh College of Art about 10 years ago.

(Odell also did the brilliant Goldfrapp Strict Machine video, the even more brilliant promo for Franz Ferdinand’s Take Me Out, some BMW work and some other bits and bobs including Madonna. Incidentally, it always makes me laugh the way the loading movie on Nexus’ site is always 62% until it loads.)

Anyway, this came via Motionographer, which seems to be YouTube for creative work. Nice idea, but shame you can’t embed it at all, or that the clips themselves are just QTimes in new windows. And that came to me via Coolhunting.

A really, *really* great site for any Penguin-philes. (Via City of Sound, and others.) And Pelicans. I’m still waiting for a wild sighting of JK Galbraith’s American Captialism. And they also have A Fletcher week section to the site. Mmmmm. Oh, and while we’re there.

And then I got sucked into this.

Doing a bit of thinking about magazine / newspaper site design at the moment. And thought it worth bringing up Subtraction which refers to the New Times Design [example page here], the grid, and lots of other stuff.

Which magazines work? Difficult. Of the literary magzines, not many. We have the New Yorker. Lots of white space, carefully crafted NY headings, but a really confusing interactive design about what is (and isn’t) a link, and tiny typesizes. Lots of different grids without much logic that I could find for why.

Looking at those with subscription models, I can’t find anything to like in Harper’s, and it resembles those programming textbooks that fill me with dread. It’s almost flattened by the weight of its own archive, but the archive is only available as PDF to subscribers. Still, when you get to content – and the confusing timeline header aside – it’s OK, if a little dry.

Almost everyone seems to have adopted wider than 800 pixels.

I like these pages on the New York Times. But pagination makes me feel uneasy. I don’t think the Guardian ever does it – do they?

And the LRB? It does feel like doing your homework. Lots and lots of text. Even some book jackets would be nice. I like the subject tags a lot, but don’t feel they’re totally integrated into the content. It’s also a shame the listing starts off with three articles outside of the subhect range. And it would be nice to see the weighting of keywords in the archive. The listings themselves aren’t particularly informative either – and share the problem of some items being described and others not. Why? Oh, I just found this:

The LRB web site currently contains an index of all articles going back to the beginning of 1998. This index consists of contributors’ names, article titles, reviewed items and issue details as well as details of how to order back issues and reprints. Apart from a few sample articles (typically two or three per issue) the full text of articles from before 2001 is not currently available online. Subscribers have access to the full text of material from 2001 onwards (with the exception of a few articles which are not available at their authors’ request for copyright or other reasons). For tips on searching and more information about what is available online click here.

I’m really going off Georgia bold.

Paris Review has a pretty confusing hierarchy and like the other sites, it’s really hard to work out what is in the archive (and available or not to a non-subscriber). But I like the way they upload images from the archive.

I don’t like the Spectator site at all, although I expect its audience does. (The headings look a lot like the Telegraph paper headings).

Economist?. Nice strong header. Kind of falls off a bit under that. But some great article pages.

Aha! Web Typography Sucks! (From SXSW) Slides and audio. And, uh, uhoh. That’s worth a whole new post.

And, finally (Josh!), I just found this going through my emails looking for the above link: DJ Shadow breaks played by a school orchestra.

Although most of HarperPress wimped out of coming down to a free night out on HC in London’s fashionable Notting Hill, plucky Julie Whelan came out and made a lot of friends. We got rid of about 250 samplers and hopefully helped get the word out about the book. Even the barman got into it:

(and check out the sign behind him that claims to be selling Londonstani – hardback – cocktails!)

These things are never really that much fun to read, I know, and are almost offerings to the blog-god to ask forgiveness for being slack, so I’ll try to keep it brief.

Pimpmyspace:
includes how to add RSS incoming.

Colour Generator chooses a palette from a photo you upload;

Booksquare on how to avoid DRM, (and ACAP)

Yochai Benkler on networked communities:

The networked economy is transforming the way we capitalize business and culture. Yochai Benkler, one of the top thinkers on commons-based approaches to managing resources, weaves together several fascinating threads to argue that decentralization and collaboration are shifting the balance of power to the people in the production of knowledge, goods and services.

Which reminded me that Lewis Hyde, author of the Gift, incredibly smart and lovely guy, and who has this week appeared in a series of conversations with Margaret Atwood (who says that the Gift is the only required reading for writers), is writing a book on the commons.

Musically, Pandora tailor makes me radio based on Moodymann and Alice Coltrane; SeeqPod sadly didn’t work when given the same task. And I have no idea how I found this. Although today I found a great record shop on Leith Walk: ElvisShakespeare which also does books and was recommended on the Guardian Blog.

Some nice publishing creativefor the anagram bookshop in amsterdam, and by saatchi for mondadori

Overview of semantic vs table css

LRB on Zidane

Michael Bierut on process:

For over twenty years, I’ve been writing proposals for projects. And almost every one of them has a passage somewhere that begins something like this: “This project will be divided in four phases: Orientation and Analysis, Conceptual Design, Design Development, and Implementation.” All clients want this. Sometimes there are five phases, sometimes six. Sometimes they have different names. But it’s always an attempt to answer a potential client’s unavoidable question: can you describe the process you use to create a design solution that’s right for us?

Businessweek on Jeff Bezos’ new direction (and first of many): leveraging latency in the network.

Oh, and finally, my reading list, recommended from the blogs:

Word of Mouth Marketing

Don’t Make Me Think

Truth, Lies & Advertising and Perfect Pitch.

YouTube founder Chad Hurley has also sought to play down copyright fears. “We’re committed to developing tools to identify the content and monetise it so [content owners] can have a new outlet for their content.”

and it made me suddenly remember a great mobile service called Shazam that I was really into 3 or 4 years (or thereabouts) ago. Shazam is a technology that has, apparently, indexed lots and lots of music, and can recognise and therefore identify tracks based on a very short clip. So, the service had it that you would hear a song (say on the radio, in a club, wherever) that you didn’t know, dial 2580 (the numbers down the middle of the phone keypad) and hold the phone in the general direction of the loudspeaker. The call cost 50p, and after about a minute, you get a text back with the details of the tune.

When I last tried it, I have to admit that despite previous successes, it couldn’t identify an obscure (but awesome) electric miles davies bitches-brew era tune that was included in a brilliant Somethin’ Else documentary. I think it told me it was something like Britney. But other than that it always worked.

My point is that Shazam never had a clear business model to me beyond the (limited) SMS use. I wondered whether PRS could for example use it to go into clubs to check up on fees being paid – but that seems a little draconian.

It’s only now that the answer is clear. Should Google be serious about identifying (music) copyright, Shazam would be a brilliant tool for doing so, and could be embedded into the upload process of YouTube. Ta-da! So, buy Shazam stocks pronto – my guess (although my predictions are a little off this month) is that it could easily be bought by Google if only to mollify the RIAA that they are trying to protect copyright.

All we need now is to extend the system to film dialogue / sound tracks (how would that work in dubbed versions? hmmm) and they’re on.

All about Shazam.

Saw RadioHead live at Meadowbank, Edinburgh. Amazing, although the visuals were a bit duff. I have to say that Johnny Greenwood is god, and whoever the drummer is (OK, I’m a fan but not that much) is one of the best drummers I’ve ever seen. Every song has a unique and memorable rhythm within 4/4 (mainly) which is even more of a hook than the melody. Brilliant. Even better was the walk home, where London road (massive main artery into the city centre) was closed down for the thousands of people to get home. Cars, buses, stranded in a sea of people for an hour. Beck did the warmup and had a hilarious puppet video which had clearly been shot and cut that day for Edinburgh.

Barnes & Noble shareholder conference call transcript. Interesting if you find it so, but a weather vane on retail, mainly in the US.

The Ted video / audio archive. Now would be a good time to go through these. “Each year, TED hosts some of the world’s most fascinating people: Trusted voices and convention-breaking mavericks, icons and geniuses. For best effect, plan to listen to at least three, start to finish. They have a cumulative effect…”

Is it right to use MySpace commercially?. Surely it just goes with the territory?

JWT’s coolhunting videos, by month. I guess these could get a little tiring. And what a shame YouTube doesn’t display trackbacks.

This is a link to the Bravia site I’ve been telling a few people about when it comes to the Bonfire Of The Brands. When combined with YouTube versions of the same it begins to get a nice texture.

Phenomenal parisian type blog.

The Times adds very little to the debate on Google’s decision to make downloads of public domain books freely available.

When FlavourPill product placed a new beer at the launch party of the long tail, I don’t think Chris Anderson was very happy about it.

Along with everyone else, I’m linking to the best 10 presentations ever, apparently. Have to say that I don’t agree with the Mac release, heretically.

Medialoper rails at Penguin (US) getting online marketing a bit wrong. And on how a spring release may have saved SOAP. Maybe a paid for torrent maight have helped? Or a better film?

NYT on Pandora and the new tastemakers.

Wired on Blurb; the Times on Lulu

(Update: Link to the promo we made for The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, with Gil’s blessing)

I heard some really sad news last week – don’t know if it’s true or not but it seems to be well corroborated online.

As well as being back in jail, Gil Scott Heron has admitted to being HIV positive.

I worked with Gil on and off for my whole time at Canongate, and was lucky enough to meet him a number of times and to go on tour with him whilst he was in the UK two years in a row, including a phenomenal gig as the Saturday night headline at Glastonbury’s jazz stage in (I think) 2001.

I won’t say working with Gil was easy – I was an inexperienced editor and publicist trying to look after one of the most notoriously erratic performers and get him to turn up to more interviews, broadcasts and signings than he would ever want to do – but it was rewarding and enlightening and to be absolutely certain – Gil knew exactly what he was doing the whole time and was in so many ways the consummate professional. (That he didn’t do things the way I wanted him to goes to show why I was the amateur.) I thought I’d share the follwing story as I’ve enjoyed telling it in the past.

One of these broadcasts, for the world service, was going out to 14 million listeners worldwide. The studio, in Bush House, had been set up with a Fender Rhodes, Gil’s weapon of choice, and the instrument there was one of the very few in working condition in the UK’s music hire shops and had been sourced at great labour and expense by a beleagured producer at the BBC. We were due to turn up 2 hours before broadcast to tune the Rhodes, soundcheck, rehearse and meet the DJ – who was clearly a major fan. The moment when we were still in the hotel in Camden, twenty minutes before broadcast, my mobile ringing off the hook from angry producers at the BBC, and Gil still in his room (as far as I knew) was probably one of the most streesful times of my life.

Then, calmly, Gil appeared, ready, denim jacket slung over his shoulder, and we sauntered out to the BBC limo that had been waiting outside for 2 hours (although my legs werelike jelly). We sat down in the car, and I couldn’t find any words to say, wavering between extreme anger / embarrassment at the idea of a no-show in front of 14 million primed listeners (and clearly, potential buyers of the book of lyrics and poems I was promoting) and yet feeling bad for hustling a man many years and degrees my senior (I was maybe 24 at the time) who also happened to be one of my all-time heroes. I had turned off my phone ten minutes before this, not having anything else to say to the producers and unable to handle the pressure. They weren’t to know if we were going to show or not.

Gil had his walkman on, and I took this as a diss to me, that I wasn’t worth listening to as all I’d done was hassle him all day long, and for that matter, all week long, and that he wanted to block me out. All I was was noise.

(I wasn’t about to argue with him. We’d been in residence at the Jazz cafe all week long – or at least once Gil and the band had cleared customs, security and immigration after missing flights, police dramas and the like. I’d been at the gigs, selling books by the barrel load, and partying with the band afterwards into the night before getting a minicab back to my flat next to a crack den in west london, my pockets stuffed with around �500 in cash each night. I wasn’t in the calmest of mental states, and i knew I’d been an earnest but stressy accompaniment to the tour.)

Then, in the back of the cab, Gil took one earpiece out, stretched a long limb out to me, put the bud in my ear and pressed play. It was a recording of a song (I think Work for Peace) from the evening before’s gig which had absolutely stopped the sold-out venue in its tracks. I told him after the gig how blown away I was by it. I hand’t heard the song before and was urging them to record it. We listened to the song all the way to Bush House, during which time I had an epiphany: Gil was in complete control, the shambolic appearance was my problem, and he was in complete control of his schedule too. Furthermore I read his playing that song to me as a peace offering, as a way of saying ‘relax, I’m on it’ and in some small way an acknowledgement of the work (or stress) I was putting into promoting a book which had required a similar amount of nerve to create. My mood changed in an instant.

We turned up at the BBC as the show started, came into the studio whilst an introductory number was played, and Gil tuned up the Rhodes with a screwdriver he pulled out of his pocket in a matter of seconds. He sat down as the interviewer gave him his cue, and proceeded to play solo, to 14m people, for maybe 15 or 20 minutes. At that moment I felt as if the whole world was listening to something incredibly powerful and immediate and I fell in love with the idea of radio. It was one of the most memorable moments of my life.

Afterwards we went out for a cigarette together at the back of Bush House, during the interval and accompanied by two or three runners desperate for us not to do another runner ourselves. I can’t remember what happened next although I guess Gil played a few more numbers, answered the questions with his usual candour, quick-wit and of course humour, and we went off to do something else. I’d love to find a recording of that show.

The next day, or a couple of days later, I had sorted out for Gil to do an interview on the BBC’s HardTalk. I knew it was a BBC4 show, and wasn’t going to be lightweight, and was so thrilled at the idea of him being on TV that I didn’t do my research into the show or its presenter. We’d been on breakfast TV in the week as well, which was hilarious as Gil was on the sofa with Englebert Humperdinck and the sofa chat was frothy in the extreme. It was only when we sat down in the studio – again with a dishevelled Gil – to do the live recording, that I thought I might have bitten off more than I could chew.

The interviewer went straight into it, asking about his drugs and wife-beating raps. I took a deep breath, but Gil was, as ever, in total control. I found the interview on YouTube a couple of weeks ago:

What’s my point? Gil proved himself a great man and human being in that time, and all the time I’ve known him. He’s been a big influence on my life before and since meeting him, and yet like any of us he has his weaknesses. His great, untold, story is of his campaign with Stevie Wonder to make Martin Luther King’s birthday a national holiday in the USA. It is also the story of his life, and I’ve read a lot of it. I urged Jamie Byng (of Canongate) last week to get the book edited and published soon as it’s been on the books for a number of years and has lost momentum. To all of his fans, Gil is a hero, but he deserves to be much better known and acknowledged than he is – beyond The Revolution Will Not Be Televised and the ‘godfather of rap’. Peace go with you, brother Gil.

Having seen the power of songs to promote TV shows, movies and even videogames, publishers and authors are increasingly experimenting with soundtracks for books. Writers like James Patterson, Michael Connelly and Lemony Snicket are giving out CDs with copies of their novels. Others, like Bret Easton Ellis, are posting music suggestions on Web sites, blogs such as Largehearted Boy (and his weekly “Book Notes” feature) or MySpace pages. In many cases, the soundtracks are aimed at appealing to younger readers.

“Publishers are really struggling with the idea of, ‘How are we going to get 16-year-old kids to read, when it’s tough to get them to even watch TV,’” says Chuck Klosterman, who has posted a playlist on the Web for his recent book, “Killing Yourself to Live.” To accompany the book about his pilgrimage to the sites of famous music-related deaths, he chose songs by the Sex Pistols and Nirvana

Not sure I haven’t mentioned this before, or probably read about it elsewhere, but the idea of an extended LibraryThing / LastFM mashup to include music would create an interesting cross-section between music and books, or films, TB shows and so on. Not sure what good it would do other than be mildly distractng though.

This does remind me of one of my favourite CDs of all time. Andrew Vachss, a (very) hard-boiled crime author with a series of detective novels with the character Burke. Burke is insane for obscure blues, and Vachss (combined with his pretty scary manager/agent Lou Banks, and their aptly-named company Ten Angry Pitbulls) put together an awesome CD of the music for one of the novels, Safe House. Buy it.