BESTSELLERS & BEST FRIENDS
My book publishing blog, with murder mysteries woven through it.
If this is your first visit, be sure to start with 1. Let’s do it!
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I took the PATH train from Manhattan over to Barbara Mauriello’s in Hoboken. Barbara’s an ingenious, imaginative, artsy bookbinder who works out of the basement of her townhouse on Garden Street.
My favorite innovation exercise is to remove something vital from a product. And then see if you might have another product.
For example, remove a wheel from a bicycle.
And you end up with an exercise bike—a $597 million market.
Remove polymer (what holds stuff together, thus making the stuff permanent) from traditional markers.
And you end up with dry-erase markers, and a $1.6 billion whiteboard business.
Remove calling from the iPhone.
And Apple suddenly sold 60 million iTouch’s.
So I got to thinking. A book is pages bound together. So what if we remove, say, the binding? I grabbed a copy of one those miniature Shakespeare books, cut off the spine (binding), and trimmed the pages. Holy smokes! I ended up with what looked like a bracelet!
Coming soon! To a store near you! Book-on-a-Bracelet! Cool!
I then paid Barbara to do a proper prototype.
Book-on-a-Bracelet could be sold in bookstores, gift shops, and stationery stores.
And worn by book lovers of all sorts—librarians, booksellers, literary professors, etc.
Perfect for most any occasion, from book signings and publication parties to formal charity benefits and political fundraisers.
Charity bash
Stuck at a boring event? Nobody talking with you? Just slip into a quiet corner with a glass of wine and read your wrist. Very handy (get it?).
Those pages could hold lines of poetry. Or—sort of like a jigsaw puzzle—pieces of a painting (or better yet, a book’s cover).
Or a children’s book’s opening sentence. “If you give a mouse a cookie, he’s going to ask for a glass of milk.”
Or the first lines of a detective novel. “Well, they found Amelia Earhart. That’s the good news. Unfortunately, they found her in the trunk of my car.”
Or brain teasers and riddles for when there’s nothing to do and your mobile’s dead. Just turn to your Bracelet-on-a-Book.
See that? Like a traditional book, the possibilities are endless.
And think about it, my Bracelet-on-a-Book is a perfect promotional item. Imagine it as a give-away at book industry conferences like BookExpo, the Bologna Children’s Book Fair, or the Frankfurt Book Fair.
Frankfurt Book Fair
ARC-on-a-Bracelet! Industry’s titans sampling a publisher’s new book as they wander the convention hall, or as they’re in line for a $12 bottle of water, or while they wait that evening in a restaurant for their Schnitzel. (An “ARC” is an “Advanced Reading Copy.” See my Gene Young and Stuart Harris post.)
I test drove the Book-on-a-Bracelet for a day. And quickly learned that a bracelet not made of metal or wood or glass or plastic quickly smooshes while at the desk, steering wheel, or keyboard. By the end of the day, my book-on-a-bracelet looked like hell. The only way to maintain its beauty was to walk about all day like a zombie—hands out, not touching anything. And that’s not a great look.
I honestly couldn’t make the publishing argument for Book-on-a- Bracelet. There would be unhappy consumers. And that’s fatal, as it should be, to a business.
Sometimes you just gotta let go. But I still loved the creative exercise.
Tomorrow: Hoping for news