1001 Ways to Market Your Books.  For Authors and Publishers. John Kremer. 2008. ISBN 139780912411491.  More than book this is the bible on book marketing. John has been writing the definitive newsletter and now blog on the subject since 1980s. Thanks for the review copy John!

Pop! Stand out in any crowd. Sam Horn. 2006. ISBN 0399532765.  I vote this my marketing book choice for Q1-Q2! This is a terrific read , but its way more than that. By showing you how to find and build on catchy ideas, Horn helps make you a more engaging writer.   To paraphrase her , if you are asking people to spend their time on your content, it is your responsibility to make it worth their while. If you follow her easy step by step chapters on the many ways to do this, you should dramatically improve your communication impact.   A short and easy read, it is still just stuffed with great ideas worth  a lifetimes worth of work stuck inside. Buy , read and re read this one, its a library keeper.

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Isaac Newton. James Gleick. 2003. ISBN 1400032954. At various times of his life Newton was a reclusive, paranoid, antisocial cleric/scholar at Cambridge who as he rose in esteem,  grew increasingly ambitious, autocratic and demagogic.  It seems he travelled very little, probably never saw the sea , yet set down the answers to tides and the creation of tide tables.

The trials of an author,  trying to recapture the life of persons who lived at that time in what was a very rural England with only had one large city London,  can only be imagined.  Records were scant to nonexistent, most of the population was illiterate, books were published rarely and read by few.  The language was Old English yet most of what Newton discovered required new words to describe it.

Lesson learned for me was the extent that Newton explored alchemy (which became very useful when he was put in charge of the Royal Mint) .  He struggled to reconcile his theological research with the preachings of the day, having decided that the “Holy Trinity”  was just not based on the ancient writings he had translated and that the Church had manufactured stories over the years. This was a real problem because at one time in order to remain at Cambridge he was supposed to be ordained as a priest.  Newton also hid the bulk of his findings away for many decades, refusing to publish them, yet railing against those who “rediscovered” the materials on their own and published them. Letters flew across the country, positions were taken, hatreds grew.  When Newton grew in esteem and power, he became a real tyrant in his positions against all others. It was pretty heady stuff in its day.

If you are a scientist or just  curious, this is a a useful book. Not an easy read, through no fault of the author. But it is short.

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Style. Toward clarity and grace. Joseph M. Williams. 1995.  ISBN 0226899152.  A very good handbook to better writing. A very useful addition to Zissner’s On Writing Well.  I expecially enjoyed the references to good writing that tended to break the rules, while still showing that they author knew all the “rules”.   If you feel that your concise albeit clear  writng is tends to being boring,  this book will  to help you  add interest and style to your work.  Not a light read, it is more useful to you if you have some work that you wish to edit at hand.

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Shakespeare. The world as a stage. Bill Bryson. 2007. ISBN 9780061673696.  This completes my task  to read everything Bill Bryson has written so far. A book on the life of Shakespeare is always going to be a small book, since so little was written down about him.  Bryson does a good job of organising and relating what is known, what is surmised and what is made up about “The Bard”.  This is a quick, easy  read I enjoyed. Yet the book seemed to be missing much I could bite on – which is more likely due to the subject than the author.   I was intrigued by the whole story wrto debunking Francis Bacon as WS with its genesis in the nutty thoughts of a US spinster, who seemed gifted at bending influential peoples ears and wills.

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Blog Blazers. 40 top bloggers share their secrets. Stephanie Grenier.  2008. ISBN 9780981085203.  OK if you want to really be businesslike about your blog (or your companies blog), this is one meaty little book.  If you have no ambitions/questions/ideas about blogging, skip this post.

Take my example, I read the book slowly, enjoying the nuggets that each of the bloggers shared.  When I finished the book, I had a full day of work ahead  to  add the first five things to what I was already doing with this blog. My support guy wishes I had never read the book I am sure, since I have another ten things to do next update day.

This book reinforced and dramatically increased my utility and usage of Twitter, Stumbledupon and de.lic.ious  . I updated my Digg account and picked up that  RSS feed to Google Reader – awesome.  I have new ideas about trackbacks, retweets and commenting.

This book is likely the leadng best practises on blogging repository at the moment.  If this is

something you care about, you need this book.

You can get it on Amazon.com

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Mimesis. The representation of reality in western civilization. Erich Auerbach. 1953. ISBN 9780691113364.   Aurebach was a

ctives

Book cover via Amazon

The First Five Pages. A writer’s guide to staying out of the rejection pile. Noah Lukeman. 2000. 9780684857435.  I picked this up as potentially a resource for us in editing compelling emails and white papers.  There is some very good info on that buried in this book. However, if you want to write for profit and publication, this is a terrific little all round resource. I admire books like this ( Strunk and White, Zinsser and Co) that are able to quickly, simply and so easily get to the heart of what could be a complex subject like editing/rewriting.  To me, it is the mark of true masters to make the difficult easy to understand. Lukeman is an agent who has also been an editor- he knows the business and lays out the goods. The book is organized from the easiest to fix to the most complex. You become sympathetic to the underpaid editors being crushed by piles of unread manuscripts.  Telling stat.  Only 11 books out of 50 000 published a year sell a million copies. I am now off to slay a few adverbs/adjectives.

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Image via Wikipedia

Kick-Ass Copywriting in 10 Easy Steps.  Build the buzz and sell the sizzle. Susan Gunelius. 2008. ISBN 9781599182537.  This is a very useful book. First she provides you with a  Copywriting Outline which immediately helps the small business person identify the holes in their approaches to copy.  She shows how and why writing copy is different from all other writing. (At Rocket Builders we run into this issue all the time with clients who get off on the wrong foot with their copy)  By reading this book you will obtain much better clarity about copy and an increased appreciation for how hard it is to write clear useful, consistent copy.  She has taken a small business B2B focus – which makes this book useful to a vary broad audience since the examples are simple, believable and in small enough chunks that you can learn from them. A long way back I learned that it takes a real expert to translate a complex process into simple steps.   She has made one of the clearest statements about why too much information slows your sales process, ” Extra words can confuse and slow down customers.  Write for those who have little time to read.”  This is one book every marketing manager should have on his desk, it will be well used.

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Literary reflections. James A. Michener.  1993. ISBN 0812550528.  Mitchener on Mitchener, Margaret Mitchell, Ernest Hemingway Truman Capote & others.   I am slowly building my collection of writer’s tools.   This one is a loosely organized set of insightful essays showing Mitchener’s growth as a reader and writer.  His life experiences are shown, but only briefly (giving me a desire to know more) He gives us some of his most useful writing tools and work attitudes. His thoughts on  writers that had great impact on him was what I found  revealing. Some writers I had read, but others I had not. He has caused me to want to read those ones too.   I am learning just how much homework these successful writers put into becoming skilled craftsmen.   This is an easy delightful read, well worth the few hours required (definitely not one of his “big” books).  Unexpected treats are his poems sprinkled throughout.

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