Sometimes things happen which are so ridiculously amazing you don’t really know where to put them.

This is one of those things.

And here’s the kicker for me: in general, I’m not persuaded by book trailers as a concept. I haven’t seen many which make me want to buy the book. They tend to feel like old TV ads, a bit starkly representative, without a sense of build or excitement. They are often clunky transliterations of text to a video format. Publishing, after all, is a verbal and even an oral business, a person to person business. It’s a text industry. There’s no particular need – or there wasn’t – to construct a literacy in film grammar or in the art of implication and tease by moving images. In many cases, that has meant that teaser trailers are like burlesque dancers who show up naked, tell a rude joke about a frog in a tiara and march off the stage expecting a round of applause.

But this is not that. This is one of the few trailers I’ve ever seen in the book world which feels filmic, feels comfortable with its purpose, and which genuinely teases. It reveals very little, implies a great deal, and positively drips sexy and fun. This is a trailer which can take off one finger of one glove and get a response like the wolf in Swing-Shift Cindarella.

Sure, I have a vested interest. But I LOVE it.

It makes me believe in trailers as something we can use in the booktrade. And it actually makes me want to go out and buy a copy of my own book.

See what you think :)

A while ago, I wrote a Twitter Quickstart Guide.

It’s a little out of date now and it’s a sort of Aston Martin quickstart. It’s a bit elegant and roomy. I realise that many people would prefer a Caterham-style guide, with no fluff and plenty of vroom.

So the first section of this post will get you up and running in a few seconds.

Just do it. Right here, right now.

If you decide you don’t want to use Twitter, you’ve lost less time than you spend deciding whether to have a Bourbon or a digestive.

So, right click (or command-click) >>>>here<<<< and open the link in a new pane so you can keep reading my helpful advice while you begin your Twitter journey. I’m going to assume you’ll do that every time I ask you to click on something, because otherwise you’re going to spend a lot of time re-opening this page…

Okay, if you’re dithering about your screen name, stop. You can change it later if you want to. In the meantime, if you’re in doubt, may I suggest you prefix your own first name with something. Be MassmarketBob or LiteraryLinda, or go with something goofier like KnittingJenny.

You’ve signed up? Great. Good work. Now click here or type twitter.com/harkaway into your browser. Click the button to follow me, then go to the lists (right hand side of the page) and click ‘view all’, then select the Book Trade list. Or you can be lazy and click here. Follow the list. There are at present just over 300 people on it, and you probably know some of them. Click on their names and follow a few of them. Now click here and follow some of the nice people on the Bookseller lists. You know you want to. And then you may as well let the Bookseller know you’re now on Twitter, too. [N.B. Recently I have noticed that people who do no, in fact, work in the book trade have been using this guide. Since I follow a wide and ridiculous cross-section of the world, you can skip the Booktrade list and the Booktrade II list and look at some of the others for inspiration. Or follow a bunch of writers and publishers and agents if you want, it's a free country...]

See? You’re done. What’s going to happen now is this: your own Twitter feed is going to show a bunch of people you know talking about things you know about. If you look on the right of your own page, you’ll find my Book Trade list. You can read that, too. Don’t hang around. You can break your duck by sending me a message, if you want: go to the input box and type:

@Harkaway Hi! I signed up. My technophobia is melting even as we speak. I am swimming the cloud! Yay, me!

In case you’re wondering, you can say quite a lot in the allotted space. For example:

This message is long & unwieldy – a little contrived, even – but it serves a purpose. It is precisely one hundred and forty characters long.

Now, here’s the second bit of the guide, which I have culled from two previous posts on this topic I wrote on this site. If you’re curious, try searching in the box in the top right for “quickstart” – you should get the original post and another called “you have to be there” which is the presentation I did for the London Book Fair a while ago.

1. Twitter is NOT a broadcast medium.

The word ‘microblog’ suggests that it’s about minuting your day. “I’m brushing my teeth.” “I’ve dropped the soap.”

Please. Don’t go there. Twitter is a conversation, a rolling babble of ideas, alarm, comment. At the risk of sounding like a lunatic: Twitter is the zeitgeist in 140 character fragments. Some of it is trivial, some of it is not, but it’s unlikely that anyone will want to know about the soap situation.

More than that, though, tweets which are basically plugs for product, or references to another site, will probably fall flat. Twitter is above all about relationships and communication. It is a multidirectional flow of information and opinion. Respect that, enjoy it, and you’ll be fine. Ignore it, and Twitter will probably return the favour. You need to get to know people, respond to them. Don’t worry, they’ll respond to you, too. But this is a level playing field. It’s not like putting stuff on a billboard or advertising on TV. It’s like going to lunch with a lot of people you’ve never met before in a very nice, chatty pub.

2. Hashtags

You’ll see tweets like this:

Cameron & Clegg: marvellous. Now I can hate all three parties in #UKpolitics.

That # is a signal for Twitter; it lets the system know there’s a tag there. Click the word with the tag, you’ll get taken through to a search for all uses of it. You can see what else people are saying on that topic. The search will also find uses which are not tagged. NB you can’t use punctuation or spaces in a tag. So #michelle’s wedding will find all instances of “michelle”. The rest of the term is inert. On the other hand, you can tag something with #michelleswedding and that will work so long as everyone else uses the same tag. Anyone can make up a tag.

3. Apps & Phones

In the end, to get the most out of Twitter, you need to be using it from a smartphone as well as from your desk. The immediacy of it, and the sense of participation, is part of the thing itself. And also, you want to be able to use the backchannel which is Twitter to find out and share stuff on the go. The London Book Fair is a different animal with Twitter. So is an evening on the town. If you’ve got this far, you won’t find it hard to get hold of an app for iPhone, Blackberry, or Android to make that happen. I use Twittelator, for no better reason than that this really cool guy told me to and I’ve never found a reason to change.

Similarly, Twitter apps for your desktop can make the whole experience a bit more powerful. I use TweetDeck, but there are plenty. And of course, the best place to get advice on either of these is… Twitter. You’ve probably got used to Googling things. It’s entirely possible that many of those things you can now ask your group on Twitter instead. Google certainly thinks so; they’ve been chasing live search for months, lest they lose out…

And that’s about it for getting started. The key thing is to follow people who are interesting, pass on interesting information and links, and remember that Twitter is democratic and populist. It doesn’t respond to instructions, but it will walk across coals for something intriguing.

Not that you have to be intriguing all the time. Just be you – not your job or your sales targets. It’s a long, slow party.

Come mingle.

[Edited 25th May 2011 for sense and so on. Not that I got all the errors and anachronisms. I'm sure I didn't. Life's rich and splendid that way.]

Oxfam is making few friends with its bookshop chain…

This has been on my mind a bit recently, but I haven’t had time to say anything about it. This morning, there’s a piece in The Bookseller, and as I wander around the internet poking things and muttering, I find that Susan Hill has written in The Spectator, as well.

So… what to say?

Well, first thing: Oxfam is not good just because it’s Oxfam.

Oxfam is good because it does good stuff. It has a positive effect on the world, so we applaud it. If it’s also having a negative effect, that’s something to consider. Any number of big entities, of course, have a crappy effect on the world a long way away from the UK. Mentioning no names. If Oxfam is messing with the UK’s local economies in order to feed the 3rd world, that wouldn’t make it unique, just weirdly upside down. That does not make it okay, it just makes it bleakly amusing.

So, first thought: being Oxfam does not make you irreproachable.

In fact, being a powerful charity means you have to be, if anything, more careful about where you step when you work in a commercial arena in your own back yard, especially in a recession. Why? Because you get tax breaks and low business rates and donations (more than 80% of income from Oxfam’s shops is from donations). Oxfam, like other charities, is awarded significant advantages under the law so that it can do good. The tacit presumption, it seems to me, is that it will not deploy those advantages in a fully-fledged, corporate-style commercial enterprise in which it competes directly with local shops. I think those advantages are supposed to make it possible for a charity to function on a shoestring and send as much money as possible to the battlefront. I don’t think that when they were created anyone envisaged a charity which would iterate as an aggressive chain. That transformation is genius in fundraising terms, but it also potentially indicates a shift in identity from something which is about transforming donation into cash to something which seeks to maximise profit from donation.

I think it’s incumbent upon Oxfam to consider very carefully whether what they’re doing here is really a good thing. There is sometimes a narrowness of focus in the charitable sector. It’s a necessity – or at least a huge pluse – when you’re trying to argue for your cause above a lot of others looking for the same funding. It’s a vital component of reminding people that beyond their own problems there’s a world which needs their support. It’s also a potential disadvantage in some situations, where the notion of the good which one’s own organisation can do is allowed to eclipse the other goods in the world, and even the possibility that one may do damage along the way.

Second thought: when a charity operates in a corporate style, what does that mean?

Is there a middle ground?

I can’t see how any bookshop can readily compete with an entity which enters the arena with such significant advantages. I’m a big fan of indies and I think there are some opportunities which will become available to them over the next few years which are really interesting. However, those opportunities will equally be available to Oxfam and the chains. So, would Oxfam be prepared to work with the indies? Would they wholesale to local second hand shops? After all, they’d still make money on the transactions, because their operating costs are low and they’re getting a lot of books free. They just wouldn’t make as much. And that’s where this becomes a razor issue to me. If Oxfam really is operating in the way which Susan Hill describes – if they’re moving in and driving out the indies – that is unconscionable. It’s one thing to open a charity bookshop in a thriving area. It’s another to identify a town as a target because you can undercut a local bookseller and walk away with the catchment area. The former is perfectly good practice, the latter is corporate brigandage in the interest of the financial bottom line, and a charity doing it is not better than a corporation, but worse. Corporations, after all, are profit-making machines. Charities get their status because they are good-making machines.

Third thought: it is not clear to me – yet – exactly how bad the situation is. However, if the Oxfam Books chain is endangering local shops, that is not something they can in good conscience ignore. It is not enough to say, as David Mccullough did the other day, that supermarkets are more of a problem for booksellers than Oxfam is. That may well be true, but it’s like saying that rain isn’t something to worry about when the river’s flooded.  Rain may make the difference between life and death.

So here’s a hypothetical question for Oxfam: if the cost of raising the maximum amount of money for your work abroad is the demise of the small bookseller in the rural UK – and possibly more widely – is that a price you’re prepared to pay?

It’s a genuine question, not a rhetorical one. I know people, I suspect, who would say “yes” without hesitation. If Oxfam’s plan allows for this possibility and has factored it in and approved it, that’s something we should be told, because it has bearing on whether we want to shop at Oxfam Books. After all, there’s nothing to say we can’t give them money in other ways.

@SamAtRedmag asked me this morning whether I thought people should withhold donations of books from Oxfam. The answer is that I don’t know. I’m a fan of charity work and I believe that – despite tales of 4WD excesses and banquets in famine zones – Oxfam is a massive force for good. That said, I’m incredibly uncomfortable with this operation. It seems a mismatch of cultures – when Oxfam shops were little scruffy places on the corner with wonky candlesticks for a fiver, then of course they needed all the breaks they could get. When (if) those breaks have been deployed as part of a nationwide strategy to create a smooth selling machine whose side-effect is to jeopardise one of the few remaining hubs of local life and throw more fuel on the fire which is consuming small booksellers, then I have no intention of supporting that process.

There are a hundred other charities which do great work around the world. I can sell my old books by weight to a local indie who will then make enough to stay afloat on them, and send the money to Water Missions International or MSF – some of the alternatives spend a far lower percentage of income on administration, so the bookseller’s cut will not affect the amount aid I’ve given. In the end, as with any use of money, the thing you have to remember is that in our world, buying is voting.

A few more links:

Guardian 4.viii.09

Debatewise

Independent 7.viii.09

[Edit: @oxfamgb have been in touch to say that Oxfam spends 11p in the £1 on administration, which is pretty good. However, I've also seen an estimate of 30p from the Unofficial Oxfam FAQ. I have to say my instinct is to trust Oxfam's own estimate. Set against that, the situation with the indies is more dire than I had realised: in 2009, 40 indies opened their doors, and 102 closed for good (link). In other words, Oxfam may be leaner than I thought, but that doesn't make what they're doing better if it really is causing problems for local booksellers. So it may come down to what you think is more important. If so, it's a lousy choice to have to make, full of incommensurables and unpredictable variables.

Oh, one last thing: when @oxfamgb picked me up on my numbers, I took the opportunity to ask about this issue. So far: answer came there none.]

[Updated edit: Very exciting. I'm apparently about to be emailed by Oxfam's trading director on this topic. One thing I can say without hesitation: Oxfam is a hell of a lot easier to talk to than Google... And isn't that completely bizarre?]