Dear ???? Sump,
My name is Clifford Guy Wislowski and with over 35 years? experience in corporate bookselling I?m writing to you now to improve your business forever. I have one simple message: I want to make you and your authors obscenely rich.
Let me introduce you to IndolentBooks.com? ? a new way to market your titles to millions of profligate book buyers around the world. Indolent Books? is a new kind of promotional business that utilises a massive multiplayer online game centred upon a book shop known as Indolence?. Using it?s wide-ranging social network of customers, booksellers, reps, writers and reading groups, players will gain access to the best books in any given genre, be able to build libraries of exceptional content, talk to your authors and take part in running and attending book launches, promotions and much, much more.
Players can also opt to run the shop, help manage its finances and sales campaigns, hire and fire staff, help to break new books with some wild gossiping while shelf stacking or simply dump stock on publishers when the year-end figures look truly bad for the shareholders (I?m sure you?ll know many examples of ?best practice?).
You can have fun ratcheting up the discount and use your own MIS to get the low down on what?s selling and what?s not. Dump all those crappy genres like poetry and drama, literary fiction and more. Take part in a massive staff shout out to ?send them all back!? Watch your margins soar like Afghan kites!
Players can also bitch about the management or their own writing breaks, steal stock, lie to customers about availability and generally be bad ass booksellers. They can even grouch about Amazon and the supermarkets stealing their business. Or they can be solid gold good guys and support major corporates like you! Imagine any scenario and play it out at Indolent Books, and all the while watch your books sell and sell.
As you can see, IndolentBooks.com is a savvy, sexy place to be, it?s naughty and nifty, it?s cruelly bad but obscenely good at selling your books to a huge number of online book buyers. Our latest visits are 8 million a month and we now have 14 million active user accounts generating a staggering 42 million hits per month. To join us, simply send us sixty copies of your new books and sign up for a publisher subscription for a mere $450 per title. Leave the rest to us and watch the dollars pour in and the returns disappear.
Don?t be a publosaur, ???? Sump, join the smart mammals now and avoid extinction!
Clifford Guy Wislowski
?The Wicked Bookseller Unleashed?
14 March 2006
Dear Clifford Guy,
My name is Albert D Sump and I was delighted to receive your mailshot today, straight from your excellent mailing house in Berkshire. I especially enjoyed the enclosed tub of mints and the desirable one-inch book, rather subtly entitled ?You Are the Number One Bestselling Publisher!? Accuracy is always gratifying, even if the pages of this gimmick were depressingly void ? a little like your business model and no doubt your intellectual life. I am writing now to reacquaint you with a business model called GumptionLackOf.com?.
Rented lists can be a wonderful way to reach customers, and I was especially happy to be contacted even if my forename was inadvertently omitted, I put this down to a further insightful allusion to 16th century courtly verse? However, this may be due to an outrageous omission on your part, failing to de-dupe and clean what unimaginable list you have purchased or ripped off from some swarming Mumbai call centre. I ought to add that seventy-two of my colleagues at Castell & Castell also received copies of your ingenious proposal, but fifty nine of those work in finance and what is affectionately know as Human Remorses.
My secretary informs me that your proposal is to do with the internet. We do not do internets at Castell & Castell. We do not do them exceptionally well. Whilst this strategy may smack of antediluvian lore and general corporate retardation, it is chiefly a feature of the massive conflicts of interest among my colleagues many of whom roll in to the office for a brief snooze between whisky sours and weekend romps with the dis-educated clones in Publicity. They can never be persuaded to collaborate, combine or indeed coalesce without months, years, of ill-attended consultation. This model has served us well in positioning us as the pre-eminent trade publisher of our time, unless that?s the Pinot Gris speaking.
I?m sure many publishers will be happy to part with their money and books (we love giving both away) to enjoy your wonderfully degenerative model of our trade. I can barely conceal my enthusiasm for this venture, I hope my competitors at Random House and HarperCollins quite literally eviscerate their businesses whilst pouring their pension schemes down the drain of IndolentBooks.com. However, I?m sure that they have already emptied their coffers in unsustainable advances and eye-watering discounts ? whether it be dealing with the affectionate agents at Vultures Insouciant Inc or the rampant price-slashers at BeanCans.com.
I can see a joyous digital future, Clifford, where we all invest our inheritances on gimcrack entrepreneurs like you, launder cash for online booksellers and, I truly hope, see our businesses all become virtual games centred upon the empty pages of our new number one bestseller. You go on ahead, us publosaurs are slow creatures, rush on out there to the edge, Cliff. And keep on going.
With saurian deliberations
Albert D Sump
Deputy Poetry editor
Castell & Castell
tags: Letters?from?our?editor
