For A Good Time On The InterTubes (Self Aggrandizement Alert)

Most of you probably know that I published a book (my fourth!) a couple of years ago:  Newton and the Counterfeiter. (Kindle, Nook, Indiebound, Powell’s multiplatform ebook and Powell’s, Barnes and Noble, Amazon, Amazon UK, audio version, Your Local Book Store)

As you all also know, two or three years is a lifetime in book  years, so I’ve been doing almost no talking or promotion on that project for a while.

That changes in a few hours, when I’ll spend an hour on Skeptically Speaking with Marie-Claire Shanahan talking Newton, crime, the birth of the modern idea of money, and wherever else the conversation wanders.  The show starts at 8 p.m. EDT, 6 p.m. MDT, and will go up as a podcast next Friday.  Listen here, and or subscribe via iTunes.

It probably isn’t too much of a spoiler to say that it wasn’t the brightest move of even a genuinely clever criminal to try to match wits with my man Izzy. Just sayin….

Image:  William Blake,Isaac Newton,  1775.

 

Self Aggrandizement Alert: Newton and the Counterfeiter’s UK Paperback is out, Critics Don’t Quail in Horror

Just got my box of paperbacks from Faber, and I have to say, I love the cover — best of the four versions to date:

The book has been well received, especially in the British press — the Sunday Times was pleased enough with it to name it on its best-books-of-the-year list, as did the Library Journal and New York magazine over here.

And now it can be bought in Britain again (Faber had a bit of an inventory control problem with the hardcover, which has been unavailable for some months.  Heck, at least I can say I sold out the British Isles…;)

And a few folks have been kind enough to re-notice the work. Via Faber’s eternally vigilant publicity folks, I learn of these props:

‘Entertaining … Levenson has a good eye for the colourful details that bring 17th-century London to life in all its grimy glory: Newton and the Counterfeiter weaves together the history of the money and a biography of one of our greatest scientists in a readable romp.’ Observer

‘Wonderful book.’ Sunday Times

Should any of this move  you to more curiosity, you can check out the work at your local bookstore, (I hope), or online at the usual suspects:  Amazon, Powells, Barnes and Noble, Indiebound and  across the pond at Amazon.co.uk, Waterstones, Blackwells, Books Etc., and John Smith & Son — not to mention electronically Amazon’s Kindle store, the Barnes and Noble store (Not sure if it’s available yet at Apple’s ibook store, but I’ll check and update.)

Self promotion (at least thus nakedly) now at an end.  As you were.

Self Agrandizement Alert, Newton and the Counterfeiter, unexpected praise, (Karl Rove…yes, that Karl Rove edition)

I have to admit, I did  not see this coming.  Or rather, I did, but only because Karl Rove…that Karl R., the former senior advisor and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush, showed me the notable courtesy of sending me a personal note to tell me how much he liked Newton and the Counterfeiter. (Amazon, Powells, Barnes and Noble, Indiebound and  across the pond at Amazon.co.uk, Waterstones, Blackwells, Borders, and John Smith & Son — not to mention electronically at Amazon’s Kindle store, and in audiobook form at Audible.com).

I’m not going to repeat the nice things Mr. Rove said in his brief note — when in this age so profligate of bytes someone takes the trouble to send a physical object, on which a human hand has inscribes some private words, it seems right to keep those sentiments private.  But obviously, it’s wonderful to get kind thoughts from readers under any circumstances. Writing is such a solitary act, and the connection between writer and reader so abstract, so distant, most of the time, that when someone does take the trouble to let you know that you’ve connected with another mind, it’s just great. (Keep those cards and letters coming, folks!)

And it’s even better when a reader with unquestioned broader influence chooses to do the unexpected kindness of announcing his or her pleasure in a public way.  So of course, my thanks to Mr. Rove for his positive mention of my story of Newton and his pursuit of criminals amidst economic chaos and opportunity on his website.

But we all know that I’m just dodging around the point here.

Karl Rove?  Karl Rove!

Readers of this blog know that there is not much, probably not anything of consequence on which the two of us would agree.

Until now.

You see:, it turns out, we do come together on at least one issue:  we share his expressed hope for good book sales.  See:  bipartisanship is possible!

Image:  Edouard Manet, “The Reader” 1861.

Diary of a Trade Book (Newton and the Counterfeiter) no number quick update on blogs and books…

…which is the topic of tomorrows session at Science Online 2010, led by Rebecca Skloot, Brian Switek and your humble (sure about that?–ed.) blogger.

In the haste of getting to the hotel and then getting together with Rebecca and Brian to figure out what we really are going to talk about tomorrow, I haven’t found the time to write in detail what I had wanted to talk about today:  some thoughts on what the blogs can do — or even whether they should — to step into the void left by the collapse of the American book journalism at the mass media level.

So here’s a truncated version, which I will try to develop later with whatever insights come out of our conversatons tomorrow.

First:  there are tons of books being published — I’ve seen numbers in excess of 200,000 per year in the US.  I expect that number to both rise and fall in coming years:  rise through the opportunities to self publish that exist now in ways that no vanity publisher of an era gone by could have ever imagined; and fall in the category of books published by institutions attempting to reach large audiences through some kind of worked out distribution and publicity channels — “real” publishing as we’ve known it for a couple of centuries, at least.

Second:  whatever the precise balance between non-traditional and old fashioned publishing will turn out to be, the idea of national or broad conversations centered on books is mostly gone.  There are basically three remaining MSM outlets that can drive a book that does not already have its own media platform (Sarah Palin’s memoir, which was an industrial operation, not a literary one, for an obvious recent example).

Those three, in my guess as to order of importance, are The New York Times Sunday Book Review; NPR (which is not a unitary operation, of course) and, a rather distant third, The New Yorker. Some might through the NY Review of Books in there — and it is true that though its circulation is small, it is influential. Other radio and certain TV outlets are important as well, but these are the outlets that still make a claim to provide real literary journalism — to treat books as cultural events to be covered as news.*

(It’s different in the UK, where there is still a considerable literary news hole; but the mother country (literally, in my case is  have a different problem — an exceptionally rapid decline in their high street retail book trade.  But that’s for another post.)

This is not how it used to be.  Earlier in my career, even though I’ve never gotten much of a rise out of the Times, major newspapers around the country actually had reviewers, and devoted some real space to them, and I found I could hope for significant public discussion of my work in the LA Times, in the Chicago Papers, in the Washington Post…a bunch of places.

Now many of those places have stopped reviewing, picking up the AP review if there is one, or simply not bothering.  Meanwhile the Times has cut its reviewing hole, and now maybe checks out, in brief notices included, something between 1,000 and 2,000 books a year.  And there’s a vicious circle there too: book reviewing space in the NYT and in any other newspaper tracks advertising dollars spent to support such space.  As publishers consolidate and find their profit margins shrinking, they spend less on such ads.  As they do so, the book review hole declines…and the opportunity to sell more product goes with it…

and you know that tune.

So here’s the problem:  blogs and web attempts to create communities of writers, readers, and critics are popping up all the time.  They are important. They work — my post of a piece on Scalzi’s Whatever blog, as part of his Big Idea series drove Amazon sales and other blog interest.

But it’s a really big blog that gets 10,000 hits a day.  Only a small handful can hope to get 100,000.  A decent newspaper in a moderate metro area used to do that every day — in quite recent memory.

And of course, mere numbers only tell a part of the story.  Consider, for example the audience partitioning that goes on in the web is another impediment to permitting a book to find that part of its audience that doesn’t know yet that they might be interested in, say, a story about a scientist-cop whose detective career illuminates the birth of the modern idea of money. (If that describes you, here is the inevitable plug: you can find it at  Amazon, Powells, Barnes and Noble, Indiebound and  across the pond at Amazon.co.uk, Waterstones, Blackwells, Borders, and John Smith & Son — not to mention electronically Amazon’s Kindle store.)

So the thought to consider, in all this doom and gloom, is what, if anything, can be done to make up for the gap left by the MSM abandonment of serious books as an essential beat in cultural journalism.

I have some ideas — as do my co-presenters…all to be discussed, I hope, in tomorrow’s session. From thence, to more bloggy meanderings.

*There is one type of venue that is new and that can do enormous good for a book: the non-book oriented avidly followed TV show.  The gold standard now for book publicity is a gig on The Daily Show, or Colbert, or — and happy indeed are the happy few who achieve this for non-fiction trade book — Oprah.  But we are talking a few dozen books at most in any given year, single digits of which would be science or history-of-science works.  So for purposes of this discussion, hope for the best, and prepare for an acceptable alternative.

Image:  Norman Rockwell, “Fact and Fiction,” 1917

Diary of a Trade Book (Newton and the Counterfeiter) 13.0: Prelude to Science Online 2010’s Book/Blog session.

I’ve been a little slow to update my series of posts about the practice and emotional reality of publishing a (would-be) popular book on science.  (Ya think? — Ed.)

But its time to get back into it for several reasons.

The first is that I’ve got more to say — about what to do in the face of the collapse of serious book journalism within the US mass media; about reviewers and the question of whether and how to respond (no and carefully, if you can go a little Red Queen on me just now); on the kindness of strangers; on the second book crisis, which is a subset of the next book conundrum; and probably some other stuff that will occur to me as I start scribbling all these.

The second is that Science Online 2010 is on hand.  That’s the annual conference that started as a science blogging meeting, championed by the indomitable North Carolina-based duo of Bora Zikovic and Anton Zuiker, and is now, still led by the same pair, with a lot of help, become a vibrant meeting engaging a wide range of questions about the interaction of science and the web.

That’s relevant because Rebecca Skloot (whose book, The Immortal Life of  HEnrietta LAcks, is on the verge of publication, and is fantastic), Brian Switek, (up and running on his first book, born in part of writing to be found here) and I will be leading a session titled “From Blog to Book” at the unFSMly hour  of 9 a.m. this coming Saturday, January 16.

And third, of course, I want to continue to draw attention to the book whose passage to its readers this diary documents.  That would be my true-crime tale, Newton and the Counterfeiter, which as ever, can be found at Amazon, Powells, Barnes and Noble, Indiebound and  across the pond at Amazon.co.uk, Waterstones, Blackwells, Borders, and John Smith & Son — not to mention electronically Amazon’s Kindle store.

As noted above, there’s a lot of stuff I want to cover, and not being sure quite where to start, I guess the context of the Science Online meeting pushes me towards a few scattered thoughts on the enormous problem all of us book-fetishists face in connecting a book to its audience.

As before, any entry on this theme has to be in part a confession of failure.  I began this blog about eighteen months before my book was due to come out, and I did so for several reasons.  Mostly, I felt — and still do, vehemently — that science as a tool for making sense of daily life gets short shrift in the whole range of public and civic debates we have in this country.  My first real post on this blog was on the gap between what neuroscience was telling us about the pathology of mental injuries suffered in combat and the way the US military was dealing with victims of such injuries.

Since then, I’ve written about how important it is to use even the simplest of quantitative tools — grade school arithmetic — to grasp the meaning of reports like casualty levels in Iraq, and the essential nature of a commitment to empirical research to deal with just about any civic issue.

I’ve gotten more purely political at times than I had intended — partly as a result of an almost completely debilitating obsession with the election of 2008. And I have tried to maintain my connection to my core intellectual pleasure, the history of science, but the presenting face of the blog is captured in the tag line:  “Science and the Public Square.”

But there is no doubt that from the start, I knew that I would use this blog to help bring my upcoming book to folks’ notice in any way that I could.

As an aside:  one piece of advice I do have for writers planning to start blogs specifically to aid their upcoming book projects — don’t.  At least don’t imagine that blog created simply to promote a specific book is going to do much for you.  Either your book is already attracting attention, in which case the blog won’t hurt but won’t add much value for the time taken to do it right, or your book is struggling to find traction, and a brand new blog is not usually an immediately effective way to reach much of an audience.  Especially if the blog is explicitly built around the work that already isn’t getting enough play.

Actually, that’s not really a digression:  one of the points of starting my blog long before my book was out, and of using it to stretch my wings over a wider territory than the book itself was to see if I could enter a community of bloggers and readers who would then be sufficiently interested in my take on the world to respond to the book when it became a major focus.

And in that, this effort succeeded, to a great extent, at least as I see it.  I’ve made a bunch of blog friends over the last two years, and a number of carbon based ones as well, a subset of that group.  I’ve interacted with a bunch of different web presences and audiences, and yes, a number of people responded to my book on their websites over the summer and fall.  (I’m very remiss in posting the relevant links with thanks to all who did so.  I will.)

And it succeeded in another way.  One of the odd things about writing a book is that there are long stretches of time in the production process when you are not writing, really. That’s most true after you submit your rewrite to your editors, and the production process really begins.  I find it hard to do more than preparatory work on a next book while one is still in the making — more on that in a post or two — so that leaves me with a lot of days when I don’t have anything I “have” to write.  So from early on I used my blog as a kind of methadone for book writing addiction; not quite the same thing as working out a long form  narrative, but still, every day a venue to fill with words and thoughts.

But I failed to use my blog to best effect.

I mean, I meant well, and I started out on the right track with my “Friday Isaac Newton” blogging.  But I didn’t keep it up, and if there is one thing every blogger knows, (I say, speaking from my one data point, more or less) it is that the blogging marathon requires the stamina and sheer imaginative will to deliver on such promises week in and week out.

And in that I think I lost a significant opportunity to build a community of readers around the core passions that led me to write my book.  I do know that a couple of the posts I did write in that series remain among the most popular of anything I’ve written — especially the one in which I posted my photographs of Newton’s childhood home and the apple tree that may have been implicated in his first thoughts about gravity.  It still pulls in hits every day, and has had almost 27,000 unique views over the last two years.  And while that’s clearly the best performing such single post, I have no doubt that if I had put up some cool bit of Newtoniana most weeks on Friday, it would have both been fun and useful to the project of publicizing the fact that a book illuminating some truly wild facets of the great man’s career was on the horizon.

If you want to see how it works when someone does get this right, or at least more nearly so than I, check out Jen Luc Picard, AKA Jennifer Ouellette, whose book, The Calculus Diaries has just entered the production process.  She will also be presenting at Science Online 2010, as it happens, and in the post announcing that and other bits of excitement in her life, she gives her readers a partial list of links to the posts she used to develop the ideas in her upcoming book.

That’s how to build long-distance buzz.  And what Jennifer did is exemplary in my view because it was real (as I tried to make my Newton posts as well, certainly) —  by which I mean that what she wrote on the blog materially shaped what she came to think about as she wrote her book.

(In my case it was somewhat different — I used the blog to write some of the Newton stuff I loved but did not fit into the sharply defined (I hope) narrative of the book. But the principle is the same:  this was stuff I was thinking about and wanted to express, and not simply puffery for the book to come.)  And at the same time, each of Jennifer’s posts served to whet appetite for the larger work to come.  Good buzz; smart writing.  So I guess my advice to anyone else would be (as always, it’s worth what you pay for it):  do what I say, not what I did.

In my next post I’ll write about why I think this kind of long range preparation is absolutely essential, and yet may never be good enough.  Hint — it’s because the old channels through which book conversations used to pass have mostly gone…and I’m not so sure the brave new world in which we live has figured out how to replace it just yet. There is an alternative hypothesis…but that’s for yet another post.

(Oh — and I do plan soon  to turn to a specific concern I’ve been getting some questions about promotional videos for books — like this one I made about Newton’s London. (Click on the “video” button on the right side of the page if you’re interested.)

In the meantime, see some of you at the Radisson in Research Triangle.  Science Online 2010, here we come.

Image:  Mathieu-Ignace van Brée, “George Cuvier,” before 1832.

Another Commercial Interruption: Newton and the Counterfeiter on Audible.com dept.

Just in case you are one of those who can’t resist having books read to you (my son, e.g.; me too), I just got word that Audible.com has included Newton and the Counterfeiter in a “buy bestsellers for cheap” promotion — my humble offering apparently being one of their better sellers in the physics category.

So, if you like audiobooks, and what to pound the gym to the sound of Isaac Newton chasing bad guys through the mean streets of London...it can happen, for the surprisingly (to me) modest sum of $7.49.

Image:  Gerard ter Borch, “The Letter,” c.1660-1662

We Pause for this Commercial Interruption: Newton and the Counterfeiter/Kindle redux edition

Well, that was an annoying ride.

I mean the seemingly endless saga of achieving the possibilty of Kindle/ebook sales for my poor but honest offering, Newton and the Counterfeiter. (Dead tree versions here:  Amazon, Powells, Barnes and Noble, Indiebound and  across the pond at Amazon.co.uk, Waterstones, Blackwells, Borders, and John Smith & Son.)

Loyal readers may recall that it took more than six or seven weeks between delivering the file to Amazon (a bit late, but not that late, in the context of the hard cover pub. date).  Amazon is, apparently, notoriously slow and creaky around at least some of its interactions with publishers.  (I do know that it took a very long time to get this book-promo video up on the US site…and that the interaction between my British publisher Faber & Faber and Amazon UK went much more smoothly than the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/Amazon.com pairing did.)

But then came an email from old friend and former MIT colleague (not to mention tech/net education guru, Phillip Long, who complained that he could not get a Kindle edition of the book until next April, coinciding with the paperback release.

Apparently Amazon got its algorithm in a twist once HMH uploaded data about the upcoming new edition of an existing title.

Somehow — and I truly don’t understand how this could have happened, because it’s not exactly a new phenomenon in publishing to have a soft cover version follow a hard cover one into the wide world — my poor little book, highly praised though it may be, had to be denied the chance to take part in the day Kindle sales beat dead tree versions on the Amazon site.

Not for lack of effort on the part of HMH’s team, I must say.  I notified my peeps over there as soon as Phil let me know of the glitch, and they’ve been working on it for at least three weeks.  And today, I’m happy to say, HMH electronic stalwart Sanj Kharbanda was able to report success.  Now, at last, you can get your Kindle edition of Newton and the Counterfeiter.

So: all of you gifted (that unlovely neologism) with Kindles (or the Kindle app on your iPhone, and soon, on your Blackberry!) in recent memory may now load up your new gizmo with your own personal copy of that thrilling true crime tale that both tracks Newton as he tracks the dapper don of his day — and that tells a tale of how the scientific revolution got mixed up with the financial one — to our continuing gain and sorrow.  Seriously, it’s a great read, I’ve been told, and if you want to test that claim electronically, by all means, be my guest.  (Not for a a moment to disparage dead tree versions of course, for those (like me) that still love that sense of time measured in turning leaves.)

There.  I think I’ve shilled enough for one day.

Image:  Rembrandt van Rijn, “Two Old Men Disputing,” 1628.

Self-Aggrandizement Alert: Newton and the Counterfeiter/New York Magazine edition

Well, this was a nice way to start the holiday week.  New York Magazine named Newton and the Counterfeiter one of the ten best books of the year — number five in fact.

To allow the Devouring Culture Vulture, AKA Sam Anderson to deliver words that would make me blush to write, this is what he had to say in support of his choice:

Levenson gives us a historical metamorphosis you’d never believe if it weren’t so well-documented: Isaac Newton — the antisocial human calculator who revolutionized Enlightenment science — as badass London supercop. In the 1690s, England faced a financial crisis that almost destroyed the country: Newton aimed his genius at the problem while tracking, Law & Order style, a counterfeiting supervillain. The plot is fast, loaded with rich pockets of history (gravity, alchemy, bubonic plague), and strangely resonant with current affairs. Imagine Stephen Hawking solving the global financial meltdown while also busting Ponzi schemers.

I blush.

As always, should you feel moved to take the next logical step at this point in the post, Newton and the Counterfeiter can be found at all the usual sources:  Amazon, Powells, Barnes and Noble, Indiebound and  across the pond at Amazon.co.uk, Waterstones, Blackwells, Borders, and John Smith & Son.

Image: Adelaide Hanscom and Blanche Cumming, “The Earth Could Not Answer,” 1905, illustration for “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam,” tr. Edward Fitzgerald, 1905.

More Horn Tooting (Newton and the Counterfeiter Edition), and yet another apology

The apology first:  regulars here know that the blog has been moribund for a while now.  Two factors lie behind my (uncharacteristic) dalliance with (bits of) the  Benedictine Rule.  First — just sheer end-of-term/father-of-a-nine-year-old/husband-to-someone-I’d-like-to-see-more-than-in-passing overwhelmed-ness.  That goes with the season and the life…but usually doesn’t so thoroughly quash my fire to get stuff up and out there.

The second is a kind of soul or brain weariness.  Over the last couple of months, the relentlessness of the stupid out there has gotten to me, and this latest mock furor (warning — deep ocean of glib and I’m-so-clever-stupid at that link) over the East Anglia emails has left me speechless.

I’m going to try to blog about it, unnecessarily, no doubt, after the tens of thousands of words (much more, probably) already expended on the topic.  It is futile, I know, to attempt to explain the fact that even if every false claim about the significance of the alledged distortions of the temperature record were true, the breadth and depth of the body of direct measurement, climate proxies, experiment, simulation and the rest would be sufficient to document the deep predicament we find ourselves facing right now.  I will.  I really will.

But I’m going to get going on that tome tomorrow.  For now, I have some happy news to share.  London’s Sunday Times, one of the two or three major players in the world of British literary journalism, has had the kindness and the good taste to name my  Newton and the Counterfeiter in its books of the year round up for 2009, one of nine books in their history category so honored. (Or, as I should write to acknowledge the source, so honoured.)

Here’s what their judge/reviewer had to say in support of his choice:

A delightful piece of narrative history, exploring the surprising second career of Isaac Newton as warden and master of the Royal Mint, his efforts to secure the country’s coinage and his attempts in particular to end the career of master forger William Chaloner. Levenson has a wonderfully light touch, and is able to bring the same enthusiasm and vigour to his discussion of Newton’s work as to his engrossing description of the pursuit of the dastardly Chaloner

I couldn’t agree more. 😉

(And if such seals of approval move you…the book can be found at Amazon,Powells, Barnes and Noble,Indiebound and  across the pond at Amazon.co.uk,Waterstones, Blackwells, Borders,John Smith & Son.)

Image:  Pieter Huys, “A surgeon extracting the stone of folly” before 1577.

I’m Baaaaaack….with some Newton notes…

A return to full blogging this week, I promise, but just to get things going (barring that little amuse bouche re Google voice recognition) with a teaser for a renewed assault on the “Diary of a Trade Book” series, I thought I’d post a reactions to a couple of bits of Newton and the Counterfeiter news.  (As always: Amazon,Powells, Barnes and Noble,Indiebound and  across the pond at Amazon.co.uk,Waterstones, Blackwells, Borders,John Smith & Son.)

First, still very happy with the Library Journal’s placement of the book on their year-end, “Best of” list — but I have to say that I was truly chuffed by the implied institutional critique and explicit compliment coming from Henry Bass, book editor for Essence, who compiled his list of those who should have been finalists for the National Book Awards.  Among them, he said, blushing, mine own Newton….

My thanks to Mr. Bass, and my heartfelt admiration for his exquisite and discriminating taste…;)

Next: I’m so far behind in acknowledging (and disseminating) positive reviews and blog mentions that I can’t even begin to dig myself out just yet … but one post that did stand out for me was this one by Paul Levy at the Running A Hospital blog.  Why such special notice from YT (beyond the obvious desire to point up praise wherever I can get it)?

Because, as astute readers of this blog will note, I’ve been having trouble keeping up with even the minimal task of getting something up a few times a week, just because I’ve got a day job and students and a wife and a kid and all that stuff.  I should complain:  Paul Levy’s day job has him runnimg  the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center here in Boston, which, for all that I find that no spare second survives the crush of the demands on my time, is unquestionably a more demanding job than mine — by a Secretariat-at-Belmont margin, I’d guess.  So if he can find the time to say nice things about my book, I can find the time to wonder how the heck he managed to read it, much less write about it.

More, and more substantive stuff to come…but for now, channelling my inner Ed Murrow:  good night and good luck.

Image:  Hokusai, “Portrait of a man of noble birth with a book,” before 1849