This Week

It’s been a big week for Scott Pilgrim fans. First the official film poster artwork is revealed, and now, (arguably even bigger news) the cover and the title of the final Scott Pilgrim book have been posted up on ONI press‘ site.

I cannot tell you how excited I am about this. According to ONI’s site:

On Tuesday, July 20th, 2010 comic shops and bookstores across North America will celebrate the release of SCOTT PILGRIM VOL. 6: SCOTT PILGRIM’S FINEST HOUR.

The UK edition will of course be published by Fourth Estate. If you haven’t discovered this ‘epic of epic epicness‘ yet, check out Volumes One to Five (UK editions) or go to ONI’s site, for the US editions.

There’s also some awesome iPhone/ iPod wallpaper, as well as some computer wallpaper, available for download, from the website of Bryan Lee O’Malley, the incredibly talented, and lovely, creator of Scott Pilgrim.

If you’re on Twitter and you don’t follow Bryan  yet, what are you waiting for? He’s  @radiomaru and he’s very funny; and whilst you’re there why not add @onipress to be ahead of the curve for future ONI announcements, and @FifthEstate too, for more of the usual!

Or, The Most Epic and Awesome Social Media Fail in the History of the World, Ever.

If you haven’t heard about Rentokil’s fantastically sensationalist PR story about cockroaches on public transport, then you can read my overview here or Ben Goldacre’s overview here. This article is about how badly they dealt with the negative PR storm in its wake.

So you write a press release about a new bug killing technology you’ve developed, send it out to a few journos and then follow it up with some specific figures about the number of cockroaches on train carriages. You present the figures as being real, actual figures about the number of actual cockroaches you found on an actual train (they were not) and this is printed as fact. Then a relatively well known debunker of bad science tweets you asking to see the figures from your study. Knowing full well that your figures are a massive over-estimation reached by the most absurd model and not actually ‘real’ figures at all, you ignore him.

Unfortunately, the relatively well known debunker is Dr. Ben Goldacre who has 30,000 followers on twitter. So Rentokil, I thought I’d give you a few pointers.

Lesson 1 – What do you do when you have created an outrageously sensationalist PR story, presented over-inflated pretend figures, produced from the most unlikely model known to man, told everyone they are real figures collected from a real field study and then someone famous for attacking such behaviour with religious zeal who has 30,000 dedicated followers, a Guardian column and No.1 Sunday Times Bestselling book called Bad Science challenges them?

A: Don’t ignore them. They will not go away. They will re-tweet and re-tweet and re-tweet, making sure as many people as possible know what you have done and that you are ignoring him. Those people will then re-tweet it to others who have never heard of Ben, but are damned sure to be following him now. Don’t believe me? Look here.

Lesson 2: What do yo dou when a famous investigative journalist, broadcaster and author criticises you in front of an audience of 30,000 people (likely more – by this point, Dave Gorman and Neil Gaiman are re-tweeting, who collectively have over 1.5 million followers. EPIC FAIL) and you eventually get around to responding to him a day later and but haven’t actually given him the specific information he asked for?

A: Well, first of all don’t tweet this

Good Morning @bengoldacre, I hear that @Rentokil UK’s PR Agency got back to you. Sorry it took so long; corp wheels can turn slowly!

Are you kidding? You blame ‘corp wheels’ for taking an age to get back to him, when you haven’t even told him anything at all?! Fail.

Don’t pretend the issue is happily resolved when you know full well you haven’t answered his question but in fact have fobbed him off. This = more bad PR. Perhaps it would even have been prudent to make note of the fact that said journalist had in fact been tweeting for the last 12 hours about the fact you still hadn’t answered his questions and had fobbed him off.

Rentokil posted this apology on their website at 7.43pm on Friday 12^th March, 29 hours and hundreds of posts after Ben’s first tweet. That’s 29 hours of real time, continuous bad PR to a very large audience. Google ‘Rentokil’ now and a lot of that bad PR is on the first page.

Social Media can be a really useful tool in brand management; it’s a great way to engage with your market and manage your brand image in real time. If a negative message about your company is spreading like wildfire across twitter do not take 29 hours to respond to it. Do it immediately and less tweets will be made, the story hopefully goes away quicker and you limit the damage. Instead potentially millions of people across the world saw the whole exchange and it was so sensational Ben used it as his Guardian column on Saturday 13^th Match (Saturday Guardian readership is over 350,000 people. Oops).

Part of brand management is owning up when you’ve done something hideous and mitigating the inevitable damage, not putting your fingers in your ears, closing your eyes, saying “LALALALA – I CAN’T HEAR YOU” and hoping it goes away (besides, when you did eventually own up you still withheld an awful lot of information – read the comments on the press release. Very funny.) News stories don’t end up as chip shop paper anymore; they are filed by Google forever to appear in searches for you. Chances are we’ll all do it at some point and after writing this the fates will probably move to make me fall far from my high horse in punishment, so lets hope I at least have the sense to take my own advice!

I think we can all agree that this was an epic social media fail, but what makes it a Super Massive Epic Fail? Well, it’s this. Cockroach-gate unfortunately brought immediate attention to Rentokil’s appalling social media strategy, which they decided to post online (FAIL so hard I fell off my chair); in which they not only outline their ‘strategy’ of employing worst-practice methods of social media PR (like Twitter spamming), they also acknowledge that some people find this rude and intrusive and are (rightly) angry about it. They go on to state that those people are wrong to feel that way and that their course of action is a good one (even though people have left comments explaining that this goes against twitter’s code of practice and is BAD PR!). It’s not so good if you’re annoying the market genius. This combination is why I am awarding you the prize for The Most Epic and Awesome Social Media Fail in the History of the World, Ever.

So guys, with the fates duly tempted watch this space for an embarrassing social media fail of my own to (hopefully) honestly own up to.

I admit my heart sank when asked to write a blog.

I’ve never written one—and don’t read them. I’m a closet blog-o-phobe. The faddish term sums it up for me: “blob” combined with the word for dead wood, rhyming with “hog”. It promises to bore, buttonhole, and take up copious space on my crowded mental sofa.

I can’t help it. The massed global community of avid, dedicated, garrulous bloggers makes me want to be silent.

If this reaction seems alien and ungenerous; so be it. It’s probably related to my being a painfully slow writer with a tendency to get hypnotised by words, and hair-splitting distinctions of tone, colour, weight and meaning. I wish it were otherwise, but I’m a chronic re-writer of sentences and manuscripts. Not surprisingly, I don’t get much done. When writing a book, I eat, sleep, drink, and manage basic bodily functions. Email allows me to stay in touch with people who might otherwise assume I’ve died. Blogging is a non-starter.

When working on a novel, I’ll glance at news headlines, read the odd poem, watch a DVD, or listen to music. But I don’t read books, avoiding parallel fictional worlds–much as I’d not attempt to eat a rich meal and cook one simultaneously. Reading and writing are, for me, forms of digestion and assimilation.

Writers are—or should be—hyper-porous, so it’s essential to watch one’s influences and use of energy. It’s a bit like putting a red sock in a hot white wash, or listening to someone with a heavy Southern accent: the influence can be subtle, but before long, I’m pink, and come from Alabama.

My novel “One Thousand Chestnut Trees” involved an intensive distillation of facts and experience; adolescent memories, feelings about race and culture, and interpretation of the complex wars that shaped Korea. This filtering demanded patience, time and space incompatible with zingy web pursuits and their instant charms.

I’m glad that people have a powerful desire to connect and disseminate their views, and it’s wonderful that they have a platform. (What did they do before?—ed.) But sometimes it feels as if the tsunami of casual internet content threatens to engulf considered writing. I sound like a party-pooper, but perhaps there’s a saturation point past which blogging becomes a riptide of babble.

Despite hypocritically writing this now, I’m not much interested in my own views—a prerequisite for the born blogger. It must be fun, and vital in some way I can’t relate to. It’s old-fashioned, but I feel it’s a privilege to “be read”. With so much competition from other media it seems a miracle that people find their way to reading books; I only hope readers sense in my work that their attention matters.

The latest edition of Mira Stout’s One Thousand Chestnut Trees is out today.

Read more about blogging:

• Fuel Injected Dreams
• Blogging like its 1665

Still more cause to celebrate today, as Wolf Hall enters another prize longlist.

The Orange Prize for Fiction 2010 longlist

Rosie Alison - The Very Thought of You – Alma Books
Eleanor Catton – The Rehearsal – Granta
Clare Clark -  Savage Lands – Harvill Secker
Amanda Craig – Hearts and Minds - Little, Brown
Roopa Farooki – The Way Things Look to Me -Pan Books
Rebecca Gowers – The Twisted Heart - Canongate
M.J. Hyland - This is How - Canongate
Sadie Jones – Small Wars – Chatto & Windus
Barbara Kingsolver – The Lacuna – Faber and Faber
Laila Lalami - Secret Son - Viking
Andrea Levy – The Long Song – Headline Review
Attica Locke – Black Water Rising – Serpent’s Tail
Maria McCann – The Wilding – Faber and Faber
Hilary Mantel – Wolf Hall - Fourth Estate
Nadifa Mohamed – Black Mamba Boy – HarperCollins
Lorrie Moore  – A Gate at the Stairs - Faber and Faber
Monique Roffey – The White Woman on the Green Bicycle – Simon and Schuster
Amy Sackville – The Still Point - Portobello Books
Kathryn Stockett-  The Help – Fig Tree
Sarah Waters – The Little Stranger - Virago

Now in its 15th year, the Orange Prize celebrates ‘excellence, originality and accessibility in women’s writing (BBC).’

Click here to read about the history of the prize, including how and why it was established.

This is the second time Hilary has been on the longlist, the first being for Beyond Black, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2006.

Another HarperCollins title, Black Mamba Boy, also made the longlist. Although I haven’t read this book myself, it comes highly recommended from people around the building who have, and who’ve loved it. It’s also got these brilliant quotes from Amazon Vine reviewers:

‘A great read, colourful and powerful’

‘One of the most wonderful things I have ever read!I was held spellbound by this book’

‘Rich description and a fascinating story’

The Orange Longlist nod might be the kick I needed to bump it up my must-read list.

Besides Wolf Hall, I also enjoyed MJ Hyland’s This is How – chilling in its realism and by value of its understatement. I felt an implacable sense of dread, of inevitability as I read it. Thankfully, this was shortlived; the book was so good I finished it in a day.

Read more about prize winners:

Dancing with the Queen of Sweden

We may not have won the Booker, but…

Prizes Galore at the National Books’ Critics’ Circle Awards!

An interesting discussion broke out on The Millions site last fortnight about the differences between UK and US covers. In a piece entitled Judging Books by their Covers. Millions editor C. Max Magee compared various jacket looks published here with those from across the pond, including those for our own Wolf Hall.

Magee (a person of excellent taste in my ‘unbiased’ opinion) decided:

‘The American version doesn’t do much for me – a little too coy. I love the U.K. version here. I like the idea that you might paint your book cover on the side of a barn.’

Magee also compares the cover looks for last year’s Orange prize short-listed Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows, commenting

‘This is really a case study in the “exotic,” no? I’m not sure I like either of these much at all’

and this year’s Orange long-listed Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna:

‘These are both very nice for totally different reasons. The American design is bold, intriguing and eye-catching. The U.K. cover is intricate and I like how the “K” in Kingsolver bleeds off the left edge.’

To see the full article including the covers mentioned, go to the Millions.

Which do you prefer? Send your thoughts into our blog fifthestate@harpercollins.co.uk.

Read more about design:

• Awesome Video – How to Design a Book Cover
• 4th Estate’s 25th Anniversary Exhibition
• One Life, Six Words Exhibition
• Biff, Bang, Pow Suprises!

The Problem with Bad Statistics

You have to feel a little bit sorry for Rentokil. The tenacity with which Ben Goldacre (quite rightly) went after them was really something to behold (and I urge you read the whole #tagged exchange here).

If you’ve never heard of Ben Goldacre, then allow me to explain. He is the author of the blog and Guardian column ‘Bad Science’ and the book of the same name published by us, here at 4^th Estate. He is a medical doctor who specialises in unpicking dodgy scientific claims made by scaremongering journalists, dodgy government reports, evil pharmaceutical corporations, PR companies and quacks.

Vitamin pill magnate Matthias Rath sued both Ben and the Guardian after Ben raised serious concerns over Mr. Rath’s practice of taking out adverts denouncing Aids drugs in South Africa, while at the same time promoting his own pills. Mr. Rath eventually dropped his case.

Ben was also part of the campaign to stop Gillian McKeith from using the title ‘Dr’ and constantly questioned her methods, results and ‘scientific’ claims about her products.

The short version is that if you’re peddling bad science, then on Dr. Ben Goldacre’s radar is the last place you want to be.

So enter Rentokil, the multi-million pound pest control company who press released a rather alarming (or should that be alarmist?) story about the number of cockroaches and other nasties inhabiting London’s buses and train carriages.

1000 cockroaches on the average train carriage? 1000? No wonder this raised Ben’s quizzical brow  – I mean, I know I keep my head in my book and music on loud when I get on the train but I’m fairly sure even in my early morning, bleary eyed state that I would notice 1000 cockroaches sharing my morning tube ride.

Now, any critical reader of a daily newspaper who notices a story about pest levels on public transport that has been commissioned by a pest control company may well raise an eyebrow, look around their tube carriage and correctly assume that the article is sensationalist nonsense, but that is not the point. Here is a quote from Rentokil as published in The Evening Standard:

People eat on the move, and there is a lot of food left on seats. Pests are thriving. Although we looked at a train not running in London, we believe that London trains, both underground and overground, will have a similar number of infestations.

The bus we studied was within the M25, and we are already in talks with bus and Tube operators about a new cleaning system we’ve developed, which heats the vehicles to kill the insects, and their eggs.

The problem is that this article also quotes specific figures and, as shown above, states that these figures were reached through actual study and sample collection from real life trains and buses. We know it’s nonsense. We have our own empirical evidence of this by virtue of taking public transport and having, you know, eyes. So what exactly is the problem? Well, as Ben rightly outlines in all his work, if you use scientific language and hint at real scientific methods being used – like a field study on, say, a tube carriage, to collect actual data –  and use that information to reach a conclusion in this way, when we know you’re lying, how can we ever trust scientists? How can we believe them when we know that ‘scientific evidence’ is really just a fancy way of saying ‘something I made up because it suited my cause’ (which in this case was what? I could say what I think, but I fear it would be libellous).

This behaviour allows people to pick and choose the evidence they want to believe, or that helps them achieve their aim – be that a scaremongering story in an evening tabloid, or a boost to your vitamin pill sales. If the public have no faith in the scientific community, then it is easier for you to turn the tides against that community and sell Joe Public your ‘alternative’.

After a long, drawn out campaign on twitter and some tenacious questioning from Ben, Rentokil relented and issued this statement.