Soon after No Logo was released a decade ago, it had an immediate and resounding impact. Klein was inundated with calls from corporations seeking to revamp their tired brands and get the upper hand on their detractors; at the same time a whole new generation of activists was suddenly brought into action. Now, ten years later, Fourth Estate has published an anniversary edition; but what made the book into such an iconic and seminal signpost in the anti-globalisation debate?
It’s true, I am one of the tiniest working models out there, but still I have worked with great brands and magazines. When I was told I was too short to model, I put what I did have to use, and here are 5 modeling jobs where height isn’t a big thing.
Hand Modeling, believe it or not you can have a life and be a hand model, and you can make hundreds or thousands a day doing it. Forget the gloves; just take care of your assets well. Hand modeling is perfect for shorter girl who have small hands that are dainty and thin fingers and nice nail color and nail beds. Size of the nail varies, and hand models are not measured by one standard rule. Hand models are all ethnicities and their hands do not all look alike. Many products and brands from cosmetics, to dish soap use hand models. I have hand modeled for Macy’s, Bon Appétit, Women’s World Magazine and many others. How to start: Get photos of your hands, with nail polish, and without, holding products and at ease. There are modeling agencies that specialize in parts modeling; these are the agencies to target your photos and modeling comp cards to.
Favorite on the job skincare item for hands: LUSH’s Lemony Flutter cuticle cream.
Now all the hype has died down and the dust has settled, the main question that everyone’s asking is ‘What is the iPad for?’
The ever funny and insightful Charlie Brooker phrased it well in his article this morning, iPad therefore iWant:
Apple excels at taking existing concepts – computers, MP3 players, conceit – and carefully streamlining them into glistening ergonomic chunks of concentrated aspiration. It took the laptop and the coffee table book and created the MacBook. Now it’s taken the MacBook and the iPhone and distilled them into a single device that answers a rhetorical question you weren’t really asking.
Over at MacVideo.tv less rhethorical questions were being asked. In an article entitled Apple iPad: Who’s going to buy it, What’s it for? the blogger terms the tablet ‘The third device you never knew you wanted’.
I have a vague recollection of my first sketchbook. I think it consisted of a collection of blank paper torn from my mother’s diary. I remember the pages came from the back of the book, so the month must have been December. The torn edges curled slightly, there were small, discoloured holes where the stitching had been, and the paper itself was thin and transparent. I wrote my name on each page as large as I could. Ownership began here. I was about four years old and got a severe telling off, but it was worth it. Later I heard my mother tell a visitor that I loved to rip paper. I was, she stated, a nightmare. My love affair with torn paper continues to this day although it was some time before I understood that destruction is part of creativity. During the years when I used to paint full time I kept dozens of sketchbooks. I had made friends with another, more established artist who had the most wonderful books filled with effortless drawings and strong, confident watercolours. At first I tried to copy her but somehow text always strayed onto my pages, giving them a feel that was, thankfully, entirely my own.
So there you have it. After months of speculation, the bandying about of countless names and an almost endless stream of media hype, the iPad has arrived. Boasting a 9.7 inch screen, it has all the simplicity of the iPhone with a whole lot more functionality: a cross between a laptop and smartphone, it runs all the apps available on the iPhone and will surely be yet another fillip for developers’ coffers.
The basic device will cost $499 (just over £300) in the US and should be available across the world by July. But what will this new mystical device mean for publishing?
I know people have been various levels of ‘whelmed’ by Apple’s announcement. But I for one am extremely whelmed, and think this could be a really significant step for the publishing industry. Why?
iBooks video courtesy of CNET.com
1. iBooks. We heard the figures yesterday: 125 million registered iTunes accounts. This is versus an estimated 1.49 Kindle Users with an estimated 3m by the end of 2010 (true figures unknown as Amazon have chosen not to release them.)
iBooks just makes sense. It follows Law of the Internet #1 – go to where people already are. Don’t build minisites and spend $marketing money to drag them there.
Now I know Kindle users versus iTunes users is not an exact parallel, as I’m sure there are gazillions of people who have Amazon accounts, but in my mind and the minds of many people my age iTunes has become almost synonymous with digital content downloads. Amazon is where I would go to get cheap, physical books, but not traditionally to download mp3s, tv episodes or movies.
Just for another example, before we get onto CBB. Celebrity autobiographies, as you know, are the biggest sellers every year at christmas. Could Google Insight be used to predict which biogs would do best?
Here are the sales figures (as of last week) courtesy of The Sunday Times Bestseller List, for a selection of the top-selling celebrity bios.
It’s Not What You Think by Chris Evans
Last week 4 Weeks on list 14
Sales to date 167,025
My Shit Life So Far by Frankie Boyle
Last week 3 Weeks on list 15
Sales to date 220,015
JLS: Our Story So Far by JLS
Last week 1 Weeks on list 11
Sales to date 132,490
Driven to Distraction by Jeremy Clarkson
Last week 2 Weeks on list 15
Sales to date 244,925
Ooh! What a Lovely Pair by Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly
Last week 5 Weeks on list 16
Sales to date 317,350
The actual stats (skewed slightly by the varying dates of release) puts Ant and Dec out front, followed by Jeremy Clarkson and then Frankie Boyle. Does search interest paint the same picture?
I’ll admit it. I’m a little bit addicted to Google Analytics. But particularly to Google Insight. If you haven’t played around with it yet, have a go. It’s free and available to everyone.
Let me tell you why it’s great. Google Insight measures what people are searching for. So in a way, it’s a really organic guage of people’s interest level in a certain subject.
In my opinion, it’s more reliable than consumer insight surveys since it’s not a measure of what people will admit they are interested in (to themselves, or to a researcher), but of what they are actually interested in. In other words, it counteracts the oldest of consumer research problems – of cognitive dissonance.
The one drawback of Google Insight that comes to mind is that it’s not subtle. It doesn’t, for example, differentiate between people who are interested in the “iSlate” in a vaguely curious way from those who are interested in a ready-to-buy type way. Unless, I suppose you run a search on “buy iSlate” or “iSlate cost”.
Given this morning’s apparently game-changing announcement that Amazon plan to open the Kindle up to third-party apps, I thought I’d take a look to see how the “iSlate” and the “Kindle” stack up in terms of search engine interest.
Last week 4th Estate editor Mark wrote about the first of his ‘Books of the Noughties’ – Miracles of Life by JG Ballard. This week he talks about 4th Estate’s most recent success, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall.
Publishers, for obvious reasons, always say their books are astonishingly good, but, just sometimes, they genuinely are. I read Wolf Hall in manuscript in the autumn of 2008, and knew this was one. I hadn’t really known what to expect when I started it, but it was clear within a few pages that this was something not just out of the ordinary but unlike anything else being written today.
2009 was most definitely the year of the iPhone, with publishers and other media outlets alike all competing for their slice of the iStore pie. With rapid technological advancement this could all have changed by the end of 2010, but for now the iStore remains the first place to launch new smartphone content. In recognition of this, in the first of a series of pieces, Digital Diary will look at how different publishers have sought to grapple with the new platform – and what sort of content they have launched off the back of it.
Anyone interested in the ongoing debate about ebooks and how (or whether) to enhance them may be interested in this site:
What are books?
We feel passionately drawn to them. We fall in love with them. But a book is usually nothing more than text on paper. Sometimes there are pictures, perhaps even a few maps. The constraints of book technology rule out anything more.
Until now.
This story was originally published anonymously as one of the stories in Fourth Estate 25th anniversary publication, the ANONthology.
Space is at a premium in Paris, and one of the early challenges Professor F faced upon arriving in the city was lack of it. As the newly appointed director of the Department of Cognitive Studies at one of France’s most prestigious centres of higher learning, he knew that his young and expanding unit would soon outgrow the 250 square metres that had been allocated to it, and that it was his job to find room for the overspill.
The lovely Scott Pack alerted me to this neat book-based puzzle competition on the Bookseller website today.
The creator Horace Bent asks:
In celebration of the end of a wonderful decade in books, what better way to toast some of the bestsellers than to delete both their titles and their authors from existence?
The competition is open till the 31st January and involves decipering the clues in the image above. Click here to find out how to enter and read the original Bookseller post. Scott reckons he’s got the answers already. He would.
This week 4th estate editor Mark Richards pays tribute to the amazing JG Ballard, who sadly passed away last year, and talks about Miracles of Life, his Book of the Noughties.
One of the great pleasures of being in publishing is working with authors you have long admired, and previously known only as a reader and fan. In my first year at Fourth Estate I worked on J.G. Ballard’s autobiography, Miracles of Life. A concise but capacious work, fascinating about both the Shanghai of his childhood and the Britain of his adult years whether or not you are interested in Ballard the man, Miracles of Life was the last provocation of a provocateur – a gentle, human and very moving book from a writer best known for his searing and prophetic visions of our increasingly technologised future.
It was, sadly, his final book, and he died after a long illness in April last year. I feel deeply lucky to have met him and worked with him.
Read more about J.G. Ballard:
- Read about the mini-site we created to market Ballard’s Kingdom Come
- October 2007: Mark Johnson on the divisive nature of J G Ballard’s writing, and on whether Ballard was one our our “greatest living novelists”
The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers is the incredibly exciting new book from Thomas Mullen, author of the excellent The Last Town on Earth, named Best Debut Novel of 2006 by USA Today.
In the amazingly evocative narrative, we follow the Depression-era adventures of Jason and Whit Fireson—bank robbers known as the Firefly Brothers by the press, the authorities, and an adoring public that worships their acts as heroic counterpunches thrown at a broken system.
To get a flavour of the book take a look at this video – currently featuring the US jacket and pub dates. Our version looks like this and is published in April, but don’t worry if you cant wait that long…
…We know you’ll love the book as much as we did which is why we’re giving away proof copies. Click here to find out how to get your hands on one, hot off the press or the slab, whichever you prefer.
This week’s Digital Diary sees Sam comparing two new tech products from two of the industry’s biggest players, and musing over what they might mean for publishing.
With Christmas Day seeing Amazon sell more e-books than their printed counterparts for the first time ever – perhaps in part due to it being the present most teens were unwrapping that very morning – 2010 looks set to be a year of digital experimentation and creativity: one which will see a clash of the technological titans, as well as a raft of brilliant and not-so-brilliant ideas in the publishing industry.
Wasting no time in setting out their stall, Google launched their new smartphone this Tuesday, the fancifully named ‘Nexus One.’ A direct competitor to Apple’s iPhone – rather than a subtle attempt to undermine the latter’s dominance with the Android operating system as they have attempted thus far – the Nexus will have a 5 megapixel screen to the iPhone’s 3. Despite outdoing the iPhone in terms of functionality, the Nexus owes much to Apple’s simple design: besides four small buttons along the bottom strip, the phone is black with a large screen.
Due to unprecedented demand (!) we’ve decided to reveal the names of the remaining ANONthology authors in this post.
It means that anyone looking for the answers will easily locate them here.
Who wrote what
This story was originally published anonymously as one of the stories in Fourth Estate 25th anniversary publication, the ANONthology.
He was at the age that people would not think as young any more, but he was a young man to them, grandmothers or at least mothers-in-law now, with plenty of reasons to feel neglected by their married children and grandchildren. Before they had discovered him—or he them—they had gathered at the pavilion for other reasons, exchanging gossip, complaining about husbands and unpleasant in-laws, and reminiscing about their youth, but all those reasons seemed trivial now that they had him.
Continuing our Books of the Noughties series, I asked our head of marketing for an anecdote from when Bad Science was published.
Ben Hurd said this about it:
Dr Ben Goldacre has built up a very strong community around his Bad Science website and Guardian columns and in 2008 published a rather brilliant book that extends his crusade against the ridiculous and often nasty inaccuracies that prevail in the world of science. Bad Science is a superb book – it is funny, revelatory and hugely important.
The Christmas of 2009 was like nothing ever before seen in the industry. On Christmas day, ebook sales from Amazon.com outsold physical books. Perhaps this, combined with the fact that we are at the start of the first week in a new decade, is behind the waves of bloggers and commentators taking a moment to peek into their crystal ball to try to predict what publishing will look like in the future.
The final christmas wishlist is from Janice Lee, author of The Piano Teacher. Ambitious, exotic, and a classic book club read, The Piano Teacher is a combination of Tenko meets The Remains of the Day. Sometimes the end of a love affair is only the beginning…
To purchase a copy of the book, or to read ‘The Creative Gift’ – an article about The Piano Teacher by Janice Y. K. Lee, click here.
A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore,
Personal Days by Ed Park,
Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon
We hope you’ve enjoyed this feature, and if any of the recommendations inspired your christmas purchasing, we’d love to hear from you!
Click here to read other author’s wishlists.
We will be taking a short break over Christmas while we celebrate the holidays. Why not add our RSS feed to your iGoogle homepage and be reminded when new content is up. Alternatively, follow FifthEstate on Twitter.
The final of today’s Christmas Wishlists and the penultimate in the series is from Ariane Sherine, editor of The Friday Project’s There’s Probably No God: The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas: 42 atheist celebrities, comedians, scientists and writers give their funny and serious tips for enjoying the Christmas season.
Showing absolutely no nepotism whatsoever, three of the books on Ariane’s list are written by co-contributors to the Atheist’s Guide. (I wouldn’t let that put you off though – they are on my wishlist too.)
Charlie Brooker – The Hell of it All
The second of our Friday Project authors to offer up their Christmas wishlist today is the excellent Caroline Smailes. Caroline is the author of Black Boxes, which was published by The Friday Project earlier this year. Affecting and engrossing, this is a gripping novel of family breakdown – Julie Myerson meets Ian McEwan. Get yourself a copy here, or click here to read about a brilliant little widget created to publicize it.
You can also read Caroline’s great blog here .
Top of my Christmas wish list: Jeanette Winterson’s new book The Battle of the Sun. I’ve read everything she’s written, so I guess this is an obvious choice.
We asked our authors for books they’d like to give – or get – this Christmas. Continuing the series, today we are featuring the gifting choices/ wishes of not one, not two, but three of our very special authors.
Paula Byrne
Paula Byrne was born in Birkenhead and has a PhD from the University of Liverpool. Her second book, Perdita, was a Richard and Judy bookclub pick. Her most recent book, Mad World, was published last year to critical acclaim.
On my Christmas list are the following books:
- The new biography of the Queen Mother by William Shawcross (especially after hearing all the hullaballoo on Woman’s Hour)
- Selina Hasting’s The Secret Life of Somerset Maugham
- Behind Closed Doors: at Home in Georgian England by Amanda Vickery
- The Twilight saga because my niece has told me to read it (and so did India Knight in last week’s Sunday Times and I always do what India recommends)
