What's the Brand? Author or Title...

Since I've been reading my friend Joel's column, Warady's Riffs, Raves and Rants on Marketing with some regularity, I feel like I've ingested enough information to notice the difference in branding between the new books SuperFreakonomics and What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures.

Why has Gladwell never written a book called After the Tipping Point? I'd even debate that Outliers was in fact an extension of Blink. Both are success-making books of sort; a prime lesson from the former was that while first impressions from laypeople can't necessarily be trusted, first impressions from experts more often can. The latter also implies that practice, practice, practice is often behind the lucky breaks that fall into successful people's laps.

But despite that connection, the books were never tied together. Why? Because Gladwell is the brand. That's why they can now publish unrelated columns with little worry of failure.

Levitt and Dubner are seemingly not there. Otherwise, I think the title of their new book might have been less derivative. Not that I don't want to read it--and others too, it's the #1 book on the New York Times bestseller list.

My next quandary--where would I have put them had HarperCollins offered me an event? I thought I might have a shot, since Levitt lives in Chicago. I even had a connection with the Milwaukee-area Business Journal. I'm actually on my way to sell books for a partnership event with them and the Milwaukee Public Library for Jeffrey Krames' new book The Unforced Error. I can only imagine the crowd if it were for SuperFreakonomics.

Another little detail--it took me several minutes of searching to determine how to spell the book's title. One word or two? Caps? Was the spacing stylistic or the lack of it part of the word coining? Because Morrow almost always wrote the book's title in caps, it was only on the fifth ocurrence of the title that I saw that the F was capitalized. I believe I've been spelling it wrong previously. All is now correct in the world of SuperFreakonomics, and it will now give me great joy to spot misspellings, such as I already do for Rachael Ray and Stephenie Meyer, both of which have e issues in their names that are often not caught in proofreading.

No, I Haven't Read That Not-Yet-Released Book Yet

There are many things I can do with my time, but one duty that calls to me (siren-like) is cleaning the galley shelf. I want to make sure the upcoming titles are clearly visible (eye-level is best) and the older books are gone.

In a new wrinkle, both the cases we use in our break room are rather unstable. If we pile to heavily, the shelf collapses.

In my previous post, I mentioned that I'm not seeing the hotter titles that I once did. And yet our galley shelf is totally filled with just-released and soon-to-be-published titles. So what are we seeing?

1. Thrillers, especially from first-time authors, or genre authors with hopes for breakout.

2. Book clubby (I like to call it middlebrow, and I don't mean that in a bad way. I mean, readers often like it, but while it's considered significant enough to possibly get reviews in the highbrow media, they are usually mixed.)

3. Totally depends on the rep. John Eklund at Harvard/Yale/MIT is obviously feeding us more books than other reps, where we're much lower on the radar.

4. Certain publishers seem to distribute much larger selections of books to indie bookstores than others. Overlook has likely flooded bookstores with galleys for their novel A Quiet Belief in Angels. By "flood", I mean three. It's a evocative serial killer thriller (a series of grisly murders in a boy's Georgia hometown, he grows up to be a New York writer, only to be privy to another crime linked to the murders back home), with enough literary overtones (like the author is British) to perhaps get some critical attention and handsells.

What are we not seeing:

1. Established track writers in the thriller genre. We used to see a lot of these. Published less than once a year and fully not at dependable bestseller levels, or changing publishers? Then we'll see them--Joseph Finder comes to mind.

2. Serious nonfiction. For the nonfiction areas I like to read (perhaps you wouldn't call them serious) such as urban planning and city histories, behavioral psychology and economics, I'm not seeing much. The cooking lit (foodie books) seem more likely to be found, well the memoirish stuff. Cookbooks, on the other hand, almost never.

If I read history, I'd be out of luck. This almost deserves its own post.

3. Small-print fiction from large houses. Exceptions include pet projects, and books that are expected to start out small and grow over time.

And what of the high-profile literary books? We're seeing them, but often one copy. And as I mentioned before, it would not be fair for me to hog them all. That's not what they were meant for. One of my booksellers (actually more than one) mentioned working for a chain bookstore and never seeing advanced reader copies. Oh, they were getting them, but all of them went home with the store manager.

Sometimes it's not such a bad thing. There are wonderful surprises on the galley shelf. But sometimes you just want to read Superfreakonomics or the new collection of Malcolm Gladwell essays (both currently set for 10/20), which is odd, because I have a subscription to The New Yorker.