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29 Dec 2006: More Romanian plaudits
Hey, I missed this! You remember that The Romanian was included in the Guardian's best of 2006 roundup. Well now that nice Paul Burston, author and Time Out gay and lesbian editor, included The Romanian in his picks of 2006 in the Independent. In the Boxing Day edition he writes:
"Bruce Benderson's The Romanian (Snowbooks): Benderson's painfully candid memoir reads like a modern-day De Profundis, with Wilde's Bosie replaced by an impoverished Romanian."
posted on December 29, 2006 09:36 AM | link | Comments (0) | Leave a comment
28 Dec 2006: My cultural confession
So despite wrestling with a number of weighty and erudite volumes over the Christmas period, the only book I read all the way through was...
Continue reading "My cultural confession" »
posted on December 28, 2006 09:19 AM | link | Comments (0) | Leave a comment
25 Dec 2006: A Christmas Tale
Just over two thousand years ago, on this very day, Santa Claus started work. No one really knows, but judging from his fondness for fur-trimmed clothing and his taste in pets, many people think that Santa must have grown up some distance from where his future employer, Jesus, was born. In the early days, Santa preferred to dress in green and had a dark beard, but gradually, because of Inflation, he needed more money for presents, which were expensive, and eventually he was forced to accept a sponsorship deal from Coca Cola, who made him dress in their corporate colours (and dyed his beard white to match).
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posted on December 25, 2006 12:57 PM | link | Comments (0) | Leave a comment
22 Dec 2006: Bendicks competition: part one
I had to leave the office at noon today because Kogan Page (who we rent space from) shut up shop early (it's only Christmas; what's the fuss? Humbug - should have stayed open even later. Er, not really), and I ran out of time to do everything I wanted, including to post the photos that people kindly sent in for the Bendicks Chocolate competition. And wouldn't you just know it - I can't access all the photos from home over my webmail thing - and I've turned my office pc off to save leccy over the break so I can't log in remotely. Doh. So here is a first installment of some of the excellent photos we received and the rest will follow when I'm back in the office.
Oddly enough there seemed to be a disproportionately high number of cats who enjoy our books. You know it's only a matter of time before we publish one of those '100 Ways To Tell Your Cat I Love You' books...
At the top going to huge effort - a sign! A Snowman! are the marvellous Castle Hill Book Shop who even have a snowbooks link on their website to all our books, lord love 'em. That there in the middle is DoveGreyReader herself. And then there's a couple of rascals at the bottom.
Thanks to those who entered - your chocolate should be with you by now! Enjoy!
posted on December 22, 2006 02:29 PM | link | Comments (0) | Leave a comment
22 Dec 2006: The last word
I looked through the Bookseller's round-up of 2006 in today's edition, and although I'm ashamed to admit it I did have a little pang of disappointment when we weren't mentioned. We did win that award, after all, and we have had tremendous success with our books. But then I turn to the very last page, and this wonderful snippet was at the bottom of the page:
Always with the last word. Happy Christmas, everyone.
posted on December 22, 2006 09:32 AM | link | Comments (0) | Leave a comment
21 Dec 2006: Bounteous feast of data
WELL this is interesting. We've just got access to EPOS data for the first time - the volume and value of sales that actually go through the till, rather than that which we ship to customers' warehouses and stores. Some of our sell through is very good - like Adept which has shipped 50,000 units and sold 41,000 units, or Boxing Fitness which has shipped around 10,000 units and sold 7000. The remainder, of course, is stock on hand in customers' warehouses and stores. But there is one book which shall remain nameless which has only sold 34 units having shipped 359 (originally we shipped more than 2000 but had high returns on it - can't imagine why with that stellar sales rate.) Boo.
So this heralds a new era for Snowbooks of knowing what our sales rates are. It will help us to know whether we should reprint a title, and will help to forecast returns. Looking at our Christmas sales data, by my reckoning, if we have, say, 50% of the Christmas stock remaining in store returned to us, that will come to £28,000 which will need crediting in the New Year - which is about a 20% return rate. Now you can figure out roughly what our Christmas sales have been - and overall they've been great (although some lines had the potential to do so much better). Who knows what the actual return rate will be, but if they are this high, sales next spring/summer have to be even higher to accommodate them. Better get my selling hat on, then...
posted on December 21, 2006 01:31 PM | link | Comments (0) | Leave a comment
20 Dec 2006: Short Forster
Here is a short EM Forster story that I came across today and enjoyed and at this time of festive cheer and sharing of gifts thought I'd share it with you. Whilst we're all 'ooh, Second Life', 'ahh, networked communities', and 'eee, efficient Microsoft small business server enabled workflow' it's still important to remember that we are people and can do things with our hands. It's why The Crafter's Companion is doing so well. This story, The Machine Stops, should be read if your server crashes and you haven't taken a backup (which you should and you are bad if you don't. This is not a masked indication that we don't take back-ups - we do because we are not stupid). Oh, and if you enjoy this, why not buy our own collection of excellent EM Forster stories The Celestial Omnibus, heh.
Credits to EMForster.de.
Part I
The Air-Ship
Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds. An armchair is in the centre, by its side a reading-desk - that is all the furniture. And in the armchair there sits a swaddled lump of flesh - a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus. It is to her that the little room belongs.
Continue reading "Short Forster" »
posted on December 20, 2006 01:49 PM | link | Comments (1) | Leave a comment
18 Dec 2006: Cultural desert
Although it's stupid (is it stupid?) I've been quite nervous about blogging now there are comments. Previously I could just blather on with no fear of comeback - the worst that could happen is that no-one would read my garblings. Now it's all different - so be nice to me, especially as this post is in response to Scott's challenge to declare our cultural vacuousness. Here are my confessions:
1) I still mainly only listen to the Cure. Sure, I listen to a lot of other stuff, but not with any level of dedication. I listen to Cure songs most days. I am a freak. Mum, you said I'd grow out of it, but like my fear of spiders I haven't. If anyone knows the Cure and think they would like a new edition of songwords to be published by the world's most Cure-friendly small publisher, email me and I'll sell a kidney to pay the advance.
2) I don't like road movies.
3) I can't stand Virginia Woolf. Oh, god, except the one *we* published. Oh yes, *that* one is brilliant.
4) I couldn't for the life of me understand why anyone would or could read Proust.
5) I think Martin Amis is boring.
Phew. I feel like a weight has been lifted. Plus I've managed to lever a picture of the WORLD'S GREATEST BAND EVER into the blog.
posted on December 18, 2006 06:01 PM | link | Comments (3) | Leave a comment
15 Dec 2006: EeeeeeeePod
I don't know why audio makes things so much more exciting, but I'm thrilled to share this link to an interview with our own Anna about her book The Crafter's Companion on uber-famous (in crafty circles) Craftypod. She speaks about the genesis of the book, working with the various illustrious contributors, talking about why people craft (which can be for the joy of the finished product, and for the process itself). She also talks quite beautifully about the rise of the crafty blog and how this amazing online community has grown. Hey, and she says I am a Very Supportive Boss! 360 degree feedback right there!
http://craftypod.wordpress.com/
posted on December 15, 2006 06:29 PM | link | Comments (0) | Leave a comment
15 Dec 2006: Wizard at Work
We're putting comments back on. But first we need to do some lever-yanking, spanner-bashing stuff behind the curtain. So if anything looks weird, it's probably my fault. On this weblog, I mean. If stuff outside the website looks weird, consult a doctor. Or, y'know, just roll with it. More soon.
We've wanted them back for a while, because a blog isn't a good blog unless it engages with its readers, and has conversations instead of just talking to itself. We originally turned them off because we were getting overwhelmed with comments, many of them off-topic or otherwise unsuitable, and the job of managing them was starting to detract from our primary job, which is publishing lovely books.
After numerous requests, and much subsequent soul-searching, we've turned them back on. Please use them wisely so that we can keep them open, and if anyone offers you any ~v14Gra, just say no.
Here's to lots more conversations.
posted on December 15, 2006 02:31 PM | link | Comments (1) | Leave a comment
14 Dec 2006: Three top tens
Lists rule. Snowbooks would not exist without lists - or, at least, I would never get anything done. You can tick things off them, and use them to remember stuff, and gee yourself up by seeing how many things are on your list. They can also be used to rank things in order of preference ... and today our books appear on at least three such lists.
1) Sue and Jane's Plotting for Beginners is number 2 on Trashionista's all time favourites of 2006. They say:
"Brilliantly-written and heartfelt hen-lit for the over-50s, I loved this very funny book. Plotting for Beginners is a wonderfully funny novel about starting again after your children have left home, your husband is AWOL and you want to fulfill your dreams... found this an enormously satisfying, well-written and perfectly-plotted novel with a main character who's as lovable and funny as Bridget Jones - if a tad more prone to a hot flush..."
2) Adept Ex Machina Omnibus is in this weeks top ten Small Publishers Bestseller chart. Buy now from Waterstone's!
3) The Romanian by Bruce Benderson was Simon Callow's top book for 2006. He says:
"Bruce Benderson's harrowingly autobiographical The Romanian (Snowbooks) is one of the most devastating and unsparing accounts of amour fou I have ever read, providing at the same time an extraordinary glimpse into Romania's past and present."
And that is the power of lists.
posted on December 14, 2006 03:51 PM | link | Comments (0) | Leave a comment
13 Dec 2006: Christmas bonus extravaganza treats for YOU
Oh, you lucky people.
So, we had a chat with some VERY nice people at Bendicks-the-lovely-chocolate-company. Poor Bendicks people: they have so much chocolate, and it just wants to be loved. All they want is to find good homes for their chocolate. Is that too much to ask? Is it?
So, charitable souls that we are at Snowbooks, we've decided to help them out. And help you out too. The first 25 people who email me will get a selection package of Bendicks chocolate worth £25 (read it, people, £25). The chocolate is for you to eat; no strings attached. All we ask is that you send us a photo of you enjoying a Snowbook. Very good photos, with particularly amusing captions, may well appear on this very blog.
So... go go go! This will sort the RSS feed subscribers from the boys...
posted on December 13, 2006 09:57 AM | link | Comments (3) | Leave a comment
13 Dec 2006: Office Party
You'll remember that one of our gang, Anna, is based in the US. The internets, Skype and her weirdly early rising patterns mean that we barely notice that she's in another country - with one notable exception: work-related socialising, or as I like to call it, Enforced Fun. So at our Christmas Works Do last night we decided, in real-world Second-Life stylee, to appoint an avatar. Here is our virtual Anna, hard at work at the end of another long day:
But hooray! The whistle goes and it's on with the Christmas gladrags, and straight down the pub for a nice beer an' a tab.
That's the spirit, Anna!
Next up, a hearty sit-down meal. Phew, that's a lot of pizza for one small panda-avatar.
Easy tiger! Table dancing *is* fun, you're right, but careful not to fall down.
And the time-honoured end to a company night out...
posted on December 13, 2006 09:27 AM | link | Comments (0) | Leave a comment
11 Dec 2006: Weekend roundup
We had lots of mentions over the weekend so I thought I'd pull them together here, as an excellent displacement activity before I start on my to do list.
First up, an interview with PK Rimbauld aka James on our new store in Second Life.
Next, a very kind mention on Scott's blog about our design services who says we are "creative, clever, commercial and full of good ideas." Eee! And in the same place, DoveGreyReader mentions our most brilliant of novels The Miniature Man. I tell you, that book is one of the best in the world and I want people to read it - so I offered three for free. Two have been claimed so one is still up for grabs - email if you'd like a copy.
And that's about it. On with the to do list, then...
posted on December 11, 2006 08:38 AM | link | Comments (0) | Leave a comment
10 Dec 2006: This week I ha' been mainly.... geeking out
Because our distributors, LBS, look after our inventory, ship our books, bill our customers and then collect the precious, precious money, they know how our business is doing in quite a bit of detail. Kind people that they are, they share this with us by giving us access to various reports about stock and sales and debtors. In fact they let us have access to three different systems: the live, production machine that offers ugly, but very up-to-date, text-only reports - think computer display from 1985. Next is a repository of prettier, off-the-shelf reports on their report2web system. And finally, they even have a cognos-fronted data warehouse where you can drag and drop to your heart's content until you've made the report of your dreams. More than enough for anyone... you might think.
So what have I been doing this week? I've been writing a little application that takes their pretty reports, downloads them, strips out the formatting and indents, the titles and sub-titles, the various other foibles, then fills in the blanks, labels everything clearly and stores it in a database - one that resides on our server. The slightly weird, slightly sad thing is that at the end of all my effort, I end up with something that I suspect looks exactly like the raw data LBS produce those pretty reports from. Somewhere, they have a database which looks a lot like mine - except theirs contains other people's data too, so they can't let me have access to it. If the report2web system is matter, then I'm trying to create anti-matter - so that when my application meets theirs the whole lot cancels out and we're left with the raw data that we need to create our own, in-house reports. Which makes me kind of the opposite of a programmer. An anti-programmer? A software reverse-engineer? And to think I planned to be a good, old-fashioned astronaut.
posted on December 10, 2006 11:31 AM | link | Comments (0) | Leave a comment
08 Dec 2006: Simple pleasures in life: an empty intray
My 'to do' box is nearly empty. And my 'to do' list only has 20 things on it. Admittedly some of those things will each take about six months, but that's ok. That's my new pen there, too, which Rob got me for my birthday. I can now write nice, neat letters to people, and sign letters in prussian blue ink like a proper lady grown up. Coupled with the fact that I can also use the prefix 'Mrs', that gives me practically invincible levels of social standing.
News from SnowTowers: two things of ours appeared in The Bookseller this week. One: a brief article about James' Second Life launch. Two: a letter following up on the two letters about BIC codes. Click below the line for the unedited version (that makes it sound racey. It's just more rounded.)
Also we have an excellent advert in Private Eye for How Very Interesting. This is advertising's last chance; if we don't get lots of sales from this we really aren't going to advertise again, ever, ever, because this is a perfect ad in the perfect publication for the perfect product. I will keep you posted.
Continue reading "Simple pleasures in life: an empty intray" »
posted on December 8, 2006 06:03 PM | link | Comments (0) | Leave a comment
05 Dec 2006: Snowbooks in Second Life
Yes, the rumours are true. Snowbooks are thoroughly chuffed to announce that we now have a grand, whiz-bang, fully interactive and rather pretty presence in the much-discussed online world Second Life.
Some of us have been playing around in Second Life for a while, but we thought that with all the recent hullabaloo it was about time we actually got involved, so please trip over to www.snowbooks.com/secondlife where you can find out all about our new bookstore, or, if you're already a Second Life user, just click here to teleport over. See you all there!
posted on December 5, 2006 04:10 PM | link | Comments (0) | Leave a comment
05 Dec 2006: Kicking ASS
I always knew it. I have ASS - and now the world knows too. Without a hint of a snigger (although I know you're laughing, Emma D, I know) an article in this week's Management Today covers ASS - Accelerated Success Syndrome. And guess who's case study number 4? Oh yes. I quote:
"MT has identified a generation of high achievers who suffer from the modern malady of ASS... ASS sufferers didn't start out disillusioned... ASS sufferers have no regrets on quitting corporate life..." and so it goes on. I can't copy out any more, I'm laughing too much. Genius.
Anyway, [dries eyes], aside from the excellent acronym entertainment, it's a really good article. I would direct you to it but it's only in the print edition (December 2006). Oh, and there's a really flattering photo of me because the nice photographer cleverly concealed most of my hips behind some books for which I will love him forever. (Although facewise I look a bit like an angry hamster.) Some quotes about me:
"Emma Barnes, 31, joined the Kingfisher fast-track scheme in 1999...she was so keen to start that she volunteered to join the business eight weeks early."
Yes, yes I did. Oh, if I knew then what I know now.
"Her swift promotion through the ranks led her to become B&Q's youngest ever buyer at just 25. 'Kingfisher's tag line for the management development scheme was senior management within seven to 10 years,' she says. 'It was very compelling.' But her big promotion left her cold. 'I was absolutely over the moon for a day. The I had a huge crash because that was everything I had set my sights on and I had achieved it, and nothing had changed - life went on and I was still working really hard.'"
Compare that to the high I had after we won Small Publisher of the Year. Now *that* was a worthwhile achievement and far from delivering a fleeting high has sustained me ever since. Anyway. I like the next bit best:
"Already feeling disoriented, Barnes suffered a severe setback when a strategy she had masterminded went wrong in implementation. 'All of the people who said it was the best strategy forgot they'd said that; they all distanced themselves. I got a two on my performance appraisal and suddenly all bets were off. I felt absolutely abandoned and devastated.' The experience was her first introduction to how a company actually works."
Yep, 'how a company actually works'. Oh, except...what's that? We appear to be building and running a company that doesn't work like that? It is possible; it makes better business sense and it is unforgivable that the majority of companies are run the way they are. Don't stand for it. Don't develop a thick enough hide to cope with it. Don't get bullied. Walk. Get out of there. Leave them to it. Find another way to spend your life because it really will be time to retire before you know it and what will you have done?
posted on December 5, 2006 01:22 PM | link | Comments (0) | Leave a comment
02 Dec 2006: #2 in the TooEasyByHalf series: building a website
This one is for my dad who has had to put up with Frontpage and other web editors for far too long. Web editor programmes are like those bookkeeping packages which have lots of bold primary colours, rounded edges, oversized 'click here' buttons and screens that look like cheques. They look easy to use, but the childish, oversimplified interface just confuses me. I want to understand the double entry journal; they have five multicoloured icons. Quickbooks, I'm looking at you.
Anyhoo, this tutorial is nothing to do with bookkeeping. This is how I write websites. I am the absolute opposite of a techie, except I am very stingy and impatient and I'd rather spend an hour or two reading big thick IT books than pay, or wait for, someone to do things for me. Honestly, if I can do it, anyone can. I guess that reading this through will take about an hour, but if you're of a mind to write your own site it might save you about a day, which isn't a bad payoff. Obviously, if you have no intention of ever using html, move along, please, and don't click to read more.
So, here we go. One fresh new website, coming on up.
Continue reading "#2 in the TooEasyByHalf series: building a website" »
posted on December 2, 2006 02:14 PM | link | Comments (0) | Leave a comment
01 Dec 2006: Signs of life
Hooray, signs of life! Finally sales appear to be taking off a bit. We have had excellent reorders on our fiction and the Omnibus still hangs in there at number 10 in the chart. Phewo. There's still some work to be done on the non-fiction, so please do consider some of our books for Christmas presents. At least I can ask this now without a kind of warbling desperation in my voice.
I have been in or around retail for over ten years and *every* Christmas I panic. And *every* Christmas it turns out OK. When will I learn?
posted on December 1, 2006 07:30 AM | link | Comments (0) | Leave a comment