File: Art, Life, Work

This is a post about books.

I miss writing about books, but I've put BookADay on hiatus, supposedly to get more writing done. When I manage to hurl myself out of bed early in the morning, I get writing done. Otherwise, I just get sleeping done. It's a work in progress.

I'm reading Making a Literary Life: Advice for Writers and Other Dreamers right now. I'm not very far, but one of the suggestions is to write a sweet note five times a week to someone you admire in the literary world. So, I ordered blue fold-over note stationery. I haven't received it yet, but will let you know what I think. Anyway, I decided to get ahead and think about who I would write to for the first five days. The first few are easy -- I have their works on my shelves, their words inscribed upon my heart. Jeanette Winterson, Anne Lamott, Sandra Cisneros, Nick Bantock, John Lasseter. And, writing to them scares the hell out of me. It'll be a wild ride. Once my stationery gets here.

In other book news, Dad is revising his book, Troubleshooting and Repairing Major Appliances. Buy the new one! His deadline is Christmas, which means it should come out sometime next year. The new cover was just designed. I'm attempting to upload a picture. It's pretty cool, and I'm really excited for him. Fun tidbit: I'm meeting with his editor at McGraw-Hill when Matt and I are in New York this September.

So, I finally checked out audible.com. It took me awhile because once I had found it I was so depressed I couldn't join. (That was my million-dollar idea!) I've been giving a three-month membership as part of a word-of-mouth marketing campaign headed by the BzzAgent.

BzzAgent is a pretty cool concept, by the way. People sign up to participate in campaigns -- in exchange for free stuff, you talk about what they give you and then write about what you did. The things that makes it so dynamic (and interesting for me) are the combinations of cool new stuff, talking, and writing, as well as the freedom factor. Other marketers have a specific list of things they want you to say. The same is true here (they send a packet for every campaign), but I can talk about the products/services any way I want to. If I hate something, I can tell people about it. (So far that hasn't happened. It has a secondary effect of creating brand loyalty for me to brands I never would have chosen on my own.)

Anyway, I'm part of a Bzzcampaign about audible.com. So, they signed me up for three months, and gave me three books to download at one-month increments. The sign-up was easy and quick -- the hard part was choosing which book to download. I'm normally not an audio book reader? listener? because I listened to Like Water for Chocolate years ago and hated it, hated it, hated it, but when I read the book found it to be stunning. So, I was skeptical. Audible lets you listen to snippets of books. I signed up for an audiobook at the library of a language series, but because I owe a library fine, couldn't claim it. So, I thought a language book. The one I wanted was too expensive (boo!). The site is cool because it lets you listen to snippets (most of the time, I was on a Mac, so it didn't always play for me), as well as read user comments, sort of like Amazon. They're ipod compatible, so once I settled on a book A Piece of Cake by Cupcake Brown, which is her memoir about her life on the street after being screwed by the Child Welfare System) it was easy to place on my shuffle. (It did it all for me, which was pretty cool.

The audio is pretty crisp. I don't know if this is the case of my shuffle, audible, or the audiobook format, but it doesn't have chapters, which is a pain. I can't really fast forward to other parts (the shuffle's not so great at that), but it would have been easier if it was set up like a book, with chapters. For the record, I mostly like the book. Her writing is clear and her story is moving, but she has a tendency to say things like, "And then things were looking up," and you just know that they're not. This was impactful the first few times, but now it's a bit overdone. I'm still going to listen until the end.

And, audible.com is cool (even though I'm not ready to forgive them for doing my idea better than I could have). A lot of NPR content is there. The NY Times is there (you can get it as a daily podcast for free). Their marketing blitz says that they have 27,000 abridged and unabridged titles, which sounds accurate. I think next month I'm going to download Blink, a book I've been meaning to read for awhile. You can try it, too. Here's the special offer: audible.com/bzz gets you a free download. Consider yourself bzzed.

Final work note: my boss told me the other day that we're the company responsible for putting Golden Books out of business. Golden Books! Sigh. For the record, Golden Books have since landed at Random House, so they're still publishing, but holy moly.

Ah, books.