Herring's evil plan
Look, my book is at number 7 in Amazon's charts, thanks to my colleague's despicable plan to embarrass me and shame me within the publishing world. Unfortunately it's number 7 in Amazon's very specific Film, Television and Music Biography chart, but hey, I'm above Alex James, and nipping at Richard Hammond's planet-destroying heels.
posted by Andrew Collins @ 11:29 AM
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28 Comments:
Thank goodness Mr Herring doesn't use his powers for evil!
count me in for a copy also!
Hammond has the lowest secondhand price.. you win!
(Actually, Humph wins that one.)
It sounds like that Alex James book is a bit of a stinker. I suppose there's only so much you can write about cheese. (Not pun.)
Waterstones in Liverpool City Centre didn't have your book Mr Collings, so I came home and ordered it from Play.com this afternoon (the free delivery swung it over Amazon) so I hope that this one counts to your total as well.
I really liked Alex's book [review: here].
I've not idea how they calculate book sales, and whether they include online copies. Let's see.
Andrew, I'm making an assumption here admittedly, but I get the feeling from reading your columns that you may be a Naomi Klein fan. You've created quite a successful 'brand' for yourself though, haven't you, Mr. Wherediditallgoright (TM), or is that ironic and therefore ok? Much as the striking black cover and red and white text of NK's works in no way constitutes anything as vulgar as a 'logo' surely?
Yours cantankerously,
DougieJ
www.samedaybooks.co.uk have copies and free delivery - they also run Methvens in Worthing where Mr Collins appeared on Friday of course.
This post has been removed by the author.
Sorry, previous post full of typos. Too busy for all this.
Let's try again:
DougieJ, I am a great admirer of Naomi Klein's. No Logo was a landmark book, which opened my eyes and ended my patronage of Starbucks at a stroke. I am still working my way through The Shock Doctrine, which I'd say is actually an even more important piece of work, as it goes way beyond corporations and fingers governments all around the world. So, yes, your assumption is correct.
I'm unclear as to how you think my admiration of Naomi Klein runs counter to what I do. If I am a successful "brand", it's certainly not through exploiting anyone, to my knowledge. If anything, it's a cumulation of many different strands of my work. (If I am a "brand", please tell me what that "brand" stands for.) I'm self-employed. I mostly write, but sometimes broadcast. I can assure you I spend no time whatsoever thinking about my "brand" - I'm more concerned with where the next paid job is coming from.
In 2003 I registered the name of my book Where Did It All Right? as a domain name, because the original idea was to provide a photographic adjunct to the book (see: Photo Album) and to give readers a platform to share their own childhood memories (see: Archive). Since then, I've written other books and the blog has become the focus of the site. The name remains. This does not make it a brand in the sense that it brands the rest of my work. I have never called myself "Mr Wherediditallgoright", as you suggest. (Mostly because I call myself by my own name. Is that a brand?) This website is the only part of my work outside of the book with the same name. If that constitutes "branding", then shoot me. It's a non-profit-making website. I don't sell my own books off the page - you won't find a direct link to Amazon, as per other authors' sites, and I actively encourage people to borrow my books, pass them on, or buy them second hand. (At the signing in Worthing on Friday, I signed a number of old books, some of them second hand.) Also, I won't make any money from sales of my current book as I have to earn back my advance before seeing a penny of royalties, which seems unlikely in the low-selling circumstances. If sales of That's Me In The Corner tell me anything, it's that my "brand" counts for very little!
I suspect your comment was left to wind me up. Congratulations on that.
Can I just say, to take the nasty taste away, that I took you (in book form, obv.) on a nice work jolly this week, and enjoyed it ever so much. I laughed out loud twice at the dinner table - I was on my own - which was very good, as it made everyone else at the hotel think I was just a little bit bonkers. Well done.
Normally I'm not swayed by advertising, but I've been taken in and spent some of my birthday money (can't believe I'm now 40!!) on your book from Amazon.
Looking forward to having to try to explain who you are when it arrives. Anyone care to help?
Bought mine from Play too. I might have bought it anyway, but with two kids under three I don't get much time for book learning nowadays.
I'm hoping to catch up on news and culture from the period 2006 - 2010 in a few years. Hope to read your book before that time though.
I know Herring is pushing this partly to wind you up AC, but you'll find plenty of people agree it's a good gesture.
I've just bought the Adam and Joe Song Wars album on iTunes too, though have now realised they're paid by licence fee payers for their efforts. Have I been duped?
Apologies everyone for the 'nasty taste'. That said, because Andrew is so clearly a thoroughly decent chap means he maybe gets away with saying fairly controversial things without challenge, albeit in a much nicer way than I did. For example, in a recent Word column he referred to 'media turncoats' like Nick Cohen for daring to question the shockingly casual acceptance (often overt encouragement) by the Left today of a murderous ideology it should oppose without question. I defy anyone to read his book 'What's Left' and not feel at least a twang of recognition that much of it is bang on. Andrew apparently is staying the course regardless of the murky waters it leads to. Much as that softly spoken Deep Green crusader George Monbiot gets away with quite unbelievable misanthropy in the name of 'saving the planet'. Anyway, you'll be glad to hear this is my last post and I won't spoil it for everyone again.
DougieJ.
DougieJ, if I had any problem with your post I wouldn't have published it. I published it, and responded to it. You're welcome to continue posting, but that's up to you. I take it very badly when accused of being a hypocrite. Call me Andrew Ridgeley to Richard Herring's George Michael and it will annoy me, but I'll get over it. Call me a "cunt" as a couple of particularly eloquent, anonymous folk have done on internet forums over the years (Andrew Collins is a cunt" went one thread), and again, it'll get my goat, but I will move on. However, suggest I am a hypocrite for liking Naomi Klein while having a website and a book of the same name is another matter. That needs challenging.
I'm happy to come across as "a decent chap", but this is not some kind of ruse by which to peddle dangerous views! I have come to realise, since leaving the BBC last year and finally being free of the impartiality yoke, that my views are way, way to one side of most people's. Some of my views I don't even bother to air in mixed company. Very few of them do I air on here anymore (having been stung in the past), and very rarely in Word.
The truth is, Dougie (and I haven't read What's Left yet), my views are not absolutes. My views waver, and change, and reflect new information. Other observers of the political landscape are much more confident in their views than I. Yes, I am a "woolly liberal goody two-shoes", but one who finds the Guardian way to conservative and the RSPCA not kind enough to animals. I have some problems with George Monbiot too - his raging column from last year in which he shouted down the 9/11 conspiracy theorists was particularly irksome. I parted company with Nick Cohen, but he's just one of those media types who gets more conservative with age, before our very eyes. I'm certain his views reflect many on the left. The waters I swim in, Dougie, are "murky" indeed. Aren't yours?
Yes, but as part of the Hitchens, Cohen, Aaronovitch tendency that's a given isn't it? Whereas my point is that similar difficult choices on the Left get a much easier ride. I thought you had a good idea recently in Word with the feature about 'Is this left, and is this right?'. It's a subject that should be discussed more widely I feel. Certainly, 'we're all Hamas now' and the like was the final straw for me and meant all bets were off in terms of previously understood political allegiances.
My comment about the branding of your book was not to criticise this- brand to your heart's content as far as I'm concerned. I guess I should have posted it on Naomi Klein's blog (if such a thing exists) but yours is I'm sure much more entertaining.
My point is really to highlight the irony in NK's book 'No Logo' being a very effective form of branding itself with it's instantly recognisable colour scheme and typeface. Designed to increase recognition and shift the product just as surely as Jordan's autobiography and the like. Again, I don't object to this, but I do take exception to, yes, the hypocrisy of this.
I guess we're even- I haven't read 'No Logo' and you haven't read 'What's Left'!
DougieJ.
My guess is that No Logo would seem rather quaint now, so commonplace have its ideas now become (sweatshops=bad, Nike=profit-driven, Starbucks=selling an "experience" etc.), but it was incendiary at the time. As for the "logo" on the front: you'd have to sell the book with a plain or typewritten cover, ideally printed on a home printing press and sold off trestle tables to truly sidestep the machinery of big business, but we wouldn't be talking about it, or Klein, if she had. Radiohead eschewed logos at the same time. Radiohead were on EMI.
Bearded Ian, what about "the guy who sometimes fills in for Mark Kermode on Five Live"?
Andrew, apropos of absolutely nothing I've just stumbled across a forum from 2001 discussing the NME and Q that you pop up in halfway through when (and you appear to be just as wound up by anonymous posters then as you do now!) I was searching for Steve Sutherland's Dogshit/Diamonds review.
Now, having read That's Me In The Corner (the original edition, bought when it came out, if that qualifies me for a special badge) and that thread (http://www.angelfire.com/super/sotcaabits/forums/nme01.html) I wonder if you have ever considered how your career might have panned out IF you had had that 2nd interview for the NME editors job and then got it?
I have done as instructed by the evil Mr Herring and purchased another copy of the book - but have inadvertently bought the old edition which has Mr Herring's name in it. So whose side am I on?
Jon
I would buy it but I already have the blue covered, less affordable version!
Well done you, you deserve it, even if it takes the cunning of Herring to get you there, your book was more entertaining than many better selling books I've read.
Looking forward to getting mine from play.com, I borrowed it from the library when it first came out.
One week on, and I'm afraid that you've slipped down to #36
Hey, I'm number 2,102 in the overall Amazon charts! That means only 2,101 books are selling more than mine.
(It's a fool's errand keeping up with online-based charts, be they Amazon or iTunes. You could waste your life doing it.)
I tried to buy a copy today at WH Smiths but they didn't have any in. So off now to Amazon it is. Play.com may be cheaper but for 3 of my last 5 orders they sent completely the wrong thing.
Hi Andrew,
I ordered it from play.com last week too. Do they publish charts, judging by the posts here you should be kicking ass over there. Be ware the powers of Herring. Mark
I think we have a split-vote situation here. As I explained on the podcast, I am unlikely to make any royalties on the sales of this book as you have to earn back your advance first, which only happens if you really shift copies, as I did, many moons ago, with WDIAGR? Those days are gone. So unless everybody had bought it in the same chart-return shop (wherever they are - I've no idea), it was never going to get in the Top 10. I am truly grateful to anybody who made the effort and slapped the money down on the counter, real or imaginary. I hope you enjoy the book.
And in belated reply to Jason's hypthetical, if I'd got the NME editor's job, I might one day have been poached by Emap for either Select or Q, and would thus have had something of a wage hike (which never happens if you just rise slowly through the ranks). Maybe this would have convinced me to stay with Emap, rather than leave when I got ill in 1997 (I simply weighed up my health against the paltry wage I was being paid for my commitment to the job). I'm really glad I did leave, so I'm really glad I didn't get the NME editor's job. History looks after itself.
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