I’m tooting the Ebury Marketing horn a little bit today. Last month, Ben highlighted the Random House Group’s fantastic widget, which is being rolled out across our frontlist and backlist titles as we speak, but as Ebury we do a lot of stuff online as well. Of course, we have our facebook profile, our author fan pages, we have run events and competitions in Second Life, but we also have a brilliant portfolio of author and book websites.

In no particular order, here are my favourite sites that we have put together in the last few months:

1. Albert Kahn

Albert Kahn was a late 19th century/early 20th century multi-millionaire and philanthropist, so spent a huge part of his fortune on getting photographers to capture some of the first colour photographs of countries and people around the world. The pictures are so stunning and the website neatly uses a couple of the brilliant (and free!) tools available for anyone wanting to put together a photography website.

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2. Russia

The fantastic first episode of Jonathan Dimbleby’s Russia aired last night on BBC2. The series charts Dimbleby’s journey across Russia as he crosses eight time zones and covers 10,000 miles, from Murmansk in the Arctic Circle to the Asian city of Vladivostok, in an attempt to get beneath the skin of modern Russia. Travelling by road, rail and boat, his epic journey takes him from the neo-classical splendour of St Petersburg to remote and inaccessible parts of Siberia. To celebrate this momentous series and our accompanying book, we’ve created a website which includes extracts from the book, videos clips and a photo gallery!

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3. Bearded Tit

I recently tried to describe the sound of a bird noise that I hear whenever I am in Norfolk. It was then that I learned just how difficult it is to do. Even though I tried to write the song out phonetically, I was at a loss as to how to make someone else read it as I heard it. Rory McGrath found a similar problem when he was writing his bird-watching memoir-cum-love story, so we put together a little minisite to let people hear some his favourite songs for themselves. What a difference a few audio files can make…

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4. Oliver James

Oliver has been brilliant at helping to put this website together. The design is very simple, but the site is rich with content – you can watch the full Britain on the Couch documentary from 1999, read articles Oliver has written dating back to 1997, read his series of celebrity profiles that he wrote for the Sunday Express, listen to radio interviews with him and find out whether he has any events coming up. Earlier this year, Oliver participated in a brilliant event with author Will Self and you should soon be able to watch the full video of that online too, so watch this space!

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5. And finally, OF COURSE, we have this here blog that you all are reading. Some posts get read by hundreds of people, some posts get read by just 10 or 20, but for me, at least, it’s been great to read what people are up to around the company and hopefully we’ll continue to see that in the months to come!

Katie - Digital Marketing Exec

Following on from Louise’s blog post yesterday about the sometimes surreal places you can find yourself in working for Ebury, last night saw 8 of us attempt to dress in 1940s glamour and head over to Platinum, a dance-club-come-strip-club-come-burlesque-club-come-bar. We were celebrating the imminent publication of Girl in High Heels, a behind-the-scenes look at the leopard-printed world of stripping. Ellouise, the stunning ex-stripper who wrote the book, treated us all to a night filled with champagne and canapés in the VIP room of the bar. What happens in Platinum stays in Platinum, but let’s just say that a good time was had by all.

Hannah - Press Officer

I consider myself a bit of a fan of the bizarre. Some of my favourite comedians are surreal and have a tenuous grasp on reality. There must also be a reason that my favourite film as a child was and still is Labyrinth. (David Bowie, Jim Henson puppets and a bog of eternal stench). My literature tastes are a little more reality based but I love Kate Atkinson for her flight of fancy of phraseology and Phillip Pullman’s alternate worlds transport me far away from my own reality in a way I adore.

I have the perfect job for someone with a love of the bizarre. Working in the marketing department at Ebury I find frequently myself doing rather odd things in the name of work:

• Buying meters and meters of orange ribbon and wrapping up hundreds of books
• Rushing out to buy armfuls of comedy DVDs and trying to find the funniest ten seconds
• Sourcing bird songs to put on a website
• Frantically ordering up increasingly more weird and rare DVDs on Amazon (you should see my suggested purchases list)
• Thinking hard about where it might be best to hide a ‘magic egg’ in Shoreditch
and last week, holding an umbrella over a pile of bread buns…

Working over such a diverse and interesting list as Ebury houses I have found that you can also find yourself at some pretty interesting events. In the last year and a half I have found myself:

• In the attic room of a ‘magic’ house in Kennington that has been made to look and feel like an old ship (complete with swaying floor)
• Being taught how to play darts by Sid Waddell, who advised me to simply drink more
• Trying to spot birds with Rory McGrath
• Talking to man in a giant top hat about existentialism at a bar in Highgate

So what bizarreness did last week bring? Well, parties hosted for The Idler books are fairly legendary but last week’s must top them all in the strangeness stakes. Back at the turn of the year it must have seemed like a fantastic idea to have a lovely May Day party in the fantastic weather that May should bring. In the event the English weather let us all down, as normal, and we found ourselves in the middle of an urban square with a giant hog roasting (a hog that had been started cooking in a church yard earlier that day and then ‘moved along’ by the Vicar), some medieval musicians and some random actors, with thunder, lightning and the inevitable deluge of rain overseeing us all. So as we huddled under umbrellas and some selflessly gave up their shelter to save the bread rolls, it occurred to me that I had the best job in the world. These are the sort of evenings that will stay with you forever and the sprit of The Idler’s Idle Pleasures was completely upheld because where else but in Britain would you find fifty plus people willing to huddle under umbrellas in the middle of a city, drinking ale, buying slightly soggy books and having a good old fashioned giggle whilst waiting for a pig to cook …?

This week? Well I’m going to a Burlesque evening at a strip club to learn some moves of course….

Louise - Marketing Coordinator

Photos from The Idler May Day party

 

 

 

 

I am often asked what my favourite part of the publishing process is. Is it finalizing a deal? Seeing a cover design for the first time? Holding the finished book in my hand? Or am I in it just for the fabulous pay?

I enjoy all of these aspects of my job – especially the fabulous pay – but nothing comes close to the feeling I get when editing a manuscript. I always feel privileged to be the first pair of eyes to see an author’s work and the dialogue I enter with an author about structure, substance and tone is a process I hold dear.

It’s also one that can be fraught with difficulties. The author has worked very hard to write the book you’re editing, and there is a lot of energy and emotion invested in it. The last thing you want to do is charge in with a red pen and no decorum. I generally follow four basic rules when doing my favourite part of the job:

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Last night’s fabulous launch party for The Good Sleep Guide was a huge success at the Wellcome Collection, Euston Road. Eighty people gathered - friends, family and journalists, to celebrate the publication of Sammy Margo’s new book. Guests all went away with a beautiful goodie bag containing lavender body lotion, soap and ear plugs and so drifted off into the night assured of a good night’s sleep!

 

 

Hannah - Press Officer

The London bookfair is one of the essential events on the annual publishing calendar and this week publishers and agents from all over the world gathered at Earls Court which now feels like the rightful home of the fair – once, hideously, we all went to Excel at Docklands which was a disaster - to talk about books and even buy and sell. Once upon a time deals were struck right there at the table, sometimes impressive ones, but these days that’s less common and there wasn’t a lot of buzz about ‘big books’ at London this year. Plenty of chat about ‘soft years’, the recession that’s here or the one that’s about to arrive and what’s ‘tough’ as well as reports of falling co-edition sales.

Nevertheless, it was lively. Downstairs among the big publishers’ stands where power people meet and greet the aisles filled up with editors rushing to meetings and International were doing their stuff selling books for export.

Upstairs, in the international rights centre where rights folk and agents congregate, we sat all day at our tables with back to back half-hour appointments with publishers from all over the world. Mostly they make it, sometimes they get lost and either don’t come at all or turn up hours later looking bewildered or worn out or both. We talk the books up, make notes from which we will compile reports back at the office and eventually send out parcels of books with high hopes. On the subject of lost publishers, spare a thought for the American editor who went for a drink at the end of the day, then got caught up in the melee of fans arriving for the Chelsea game, couldn’t get a taxi and couldn’t work out how to get anywhere from Earls Court (and who could blame her?) and ended up in Willesden Junction instead of Notting Hill. She missed her dinner….

A book fair is also a place where you will pay £4.00 for a small packet of crisps and a cup to coffee and spend a lot of time in the queue for the loo. An ever present ingredient is gossip, who’s here and who isn’t and why and what’s going on at that company and why did that person leave and where are they going? Last but not least, ever optimistic would be authors trail around in hope of finding a publisher or an agent – ‘Oh yes, you should send that to …. Jake, Ken, Judith, Carey, Hannah, Andrew or Clare (fill in the blank). No, I’m afraid they’re not here today but you can contact them by email.’ You can only hope that some day their dreams might come true.

Rae - Rights Director 

A few snapshots from the London Book Fair, which ended yesterday.

Earl’s Court all dolled up for us publishing types

The busy and beautiful Random House stand

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It’s not that easy to sell books on the Internet. That might sound like a slightly odd assertion given the vibrancy of the online bookselling scene. Amazon, of course, is one of the best-known global Internet retailing brands around, new entrants like Play.com are starting to challenge their dominant position, and even bricks-and-mortar bookshops like Waterstones and Borders are increasingly focussed on their online presence. Ebury and most other publishers are at it too.

But being able to pick up a book, flick through the pages, read the odd paragraph here and there to get a flavour of the writing… these pleasures are more or less denied the casual online browser. And yet music fans can easily enough listen to snippets of album tracks and sample new artists and genres by casually surfing the Web.

For me, at least, a thirty-something digital migrant, nothing will ever beat the feeling of weighing up a brand-new book on a bookshop table, turning it over in my hands, cracking the freshly-printed spine, inhaling deeply (yes, new books have a distinct smell to them as any true bibliophile will testify) and getting stuck in. But, for those who prefer their fun on-screen, we have the answer.

The new Random House widget is the Internet’s answer to ‘try before you buy’ – a way of looking inside not only at the jacket but at some of the content of a range of our books.

The subject of publishers’ content being made available online is rather a controversial one, leading amongst other things to the “theft” of a laptop from the Google stand at last year’s Book Expo by ex-Macmillan CEO (and my old boss’s boss’s boss) Richard Charkin. But encouraging more of our readers to sample more of our authors’ great writing ultimately has to be a good thing.

Personally, I’m still quite keen on the ‘feel and sniff’ part of the experience.

Each to his or her own, I hear you cry…

Ben - Sales Director

Despite being an avid cook, since moving into my new flat four months ago, I have been living without a stove or an oven. In the kitchen there has just been a gaping hole, waiting for that shiny appliance to slot in. Last weekend, we finally bought it. A beautiful, stainless steel Indesit gas oven. Brilliant. The first night, I made roast potatoes, on Monday night I made roast duck with a tomato and mushroom sauce, and last night I decided to make my first recipe from Delia’s How to Cheat at Cooking - lasagne.

I have to admit, I cheated at cheating. I couldn’t find any tinned mince, so I spent the extra 20 minutes cooking that all up. And there was no pre-grated parmesan cheese in the supermarket, so I had to grate my own (grating 3 tablespoons of parmesan is a pain in the ass, let me tell you!). But other than that, I followed the recipe pretty much to the letter and oh my, it was delicious! The saltiness of the sundried tomato sauce was the perfect complement to the creamy cheesy sauce. Definitely one to be repeated…

Katie - Digital Marketing Exec

Last night around 100 Dave Gorman fans came along to Foyles in Charing Cross Road to ask questions to the man himself about his trip around the USA for his new book, America Unchained. If you didn’t get a chance to come, make sure you check out the video of the event - details of when and where will be announced soon!

 

 

 

Katie - Digital Marketing Exec