Stephen Baker - The Numerati

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Jay Greene: Design is How it Works posted on July 10, 2010

Marketing the book

Last time I was in Seattle, my friend and former BW colleague Jay Greene and I had this idea. We'd go on a speaking tour together and argue. Naturally, I would defend the metrics and methods of the Numerati. He, meanwhile, would advance the more gut-centric, quant-averse values of design.

So naturally, I was excited to received my copy last week of Jay's new book, Design is How it Works. I wanted to see his side of the argument.

Turns out it's very compelling. In the book, he leads us through eight examples of companies that build their business, one way or another, on design. These aren't the usual suspects, because design, the way Jay describes it, is much more than a sheen, a shape or a box: It's the way things work. So he takes us to a German race track to meet designers at Porsche, to Denmark for LEGO, on a grueling 150-mile bike ride to pedal with the founder of Clif Bar. He crosses the Atlantic First Class on Virgin, first getting his (thinning) hair coiffed at the Virgin Atlantic Clubhouse. That's part of design too.

It's a highly engaging narrative, and it contains lots of wisdom and insights about design. One of my favorite aspects is that the book explores not only their genius and successes, but also their failures. During the craze for Atkins and South Beach diets, for example, Clif Bar designed a low-carb energy bar, Luna Glow. It flopped. "We created a very lousy, inauthentic product that wasn't Clif Bar. And it bombed," the founder Gary Erickson told Jay.

We also see LEGO floundering as it build an entire set of action figures, and moves away from the company's classic bricks. Bang & Olufson, the ultra high-end audio company, designed a stunning $460 portable music player called BeoSound 2, but without a screen, and a $1,275 mobile phone, the Serene, with a beautiful rotary keypad that made it impossible to text.

Summarizing the lessons is a bit of problem, but one that has more to do with design than with this book. Design, unlike the arts I describe, is nearly impossible to measure or predict. It steers clear of formulas. Checklists are near worthless. The only essential, I'd say, is to take it seriously. For that, Design is How it Works serves as a wonderful guide. Here's an interview with him.

(By the way, I'd love to go on tour with Jay. But I think our "arguments" might turn out to be a bit contrived.)

IBM's Steve Hamm on the Jeopardy-playing computer posted on June 18, 2010

Marketing the book

My good friend and old colleague at BusinessWeek, Steve Hamm, produced this short video on Watson, the IBM computer I'm writing about.

(I'm busy writing this morning--and staying off the network for fear of coming across the results of soccer games that are waiting for me on TiVo.)

Free signed copies of translated Numerati posted on April 30, 2010

Marketing the book

I just received two boxes of books from my agent, one full of Numerati in Spanish ("Circulo de Lectores" edition), the other with the Italian version, Il Potere Segreto dei Matematici. My wife looked at the piles and said: We've got to get rid of these things.

We do, because like many people living in and around large cities, we're rich in books and impoverished when it comes to shelf space. So here's the offer. If you would like a free copy of The Numerati in any of the languages I've got, just send me an email staking your claim. If you're among the first, I'll write your name down and give you the go-ahead. Then when you send me a self-addressed envelope with enough postage to send a modest-sized book, I'll mail a signed one to you (or wherever you want it sent). I've got surpluses in the following languages: Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese (simple), Chinese (complex), German, Czech. Japanese should be arriving any day.

Dia de la Madre is coming up. Perhaps a gift for mom?

Barabasi's new book: Promoted in Web word game posted on April 9, 2010

Marketing the book

Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, author of the excellent Linked, has a new book coming out called Bursts. It discusses how predictable we are, despite our claims to the contrary.

As an author, I'm interested in the game Barabasi and his team at Dutton have launched to build buzz around the book. It's a Web site in which all 84,000 words of the book are initially cloaked in green. You can "adopt" a word. When you do it's revealed to you. And then, almost Wheel of Fortune style, you guess other words, winning points as you do. Inviting friends to the site, of course, also wins points. Conceivably, you could put together enough points to read the book on the site. But if you do that, good chance you'll win a daily championship and receive a signed copy in the mail.

Somehow, I don't see this turning into a rage. But I'm open to all marketing ideas. And I plan to read the book.

Targeting readers who hate my book posted on February 11, 2010

Marketing the book

Here's someone named R. Hunt reviewing my book on Amazon.

This book was not only boring, I also didn’t learn anything at all. I really struggled to get through this book, and thought many times about just giving up. I wish I had just given up and stopped reading it after the first few pages.

If I were feeling masochistic, I could find lots of others who not only loathed The Numerati, but took the trouble to warn others about it. As a marketer, it would be worth gold to be able to target those people and discourage them from buying the book. It would save them the anguish associated with reading it, or trying to. More important, from a marketing perspective, it would reduce negative word of mouth.

Is this possible? I've followed some of the negative reviewers, to see what other books they love and hate. (Carl Zetie, for example, who found the book too "annoying" and "devoid of value" to finish, gives five stars to the 25 Coolest Dead Superheroes of All Time.) Others who dislike the book tend to give high ratings to more technical books about data-mining and math. This points to one of the problems facing general-interest books about technical subjects: some experts are likely to find them too elementary. (This is why it drives me crazy to see the book in the math shelves: mathematicians won't find math, and general-interest readers won't find the book.)

Yet some of the positive reviewers also appear to be experts. And this is why I think that any attempt to steer clear of negative reviewers is a long shot. The fact is that the negative reviewers have lots in common with the target audience. That's why they bought the book in the first place. And that's why when it falls short of their expectations, they feel so disappointed, and even angry.

Targeting negative customers is easier in other realms. Cell phone companies have advanced algorithms that detect that patterns of subscribers most likely to drop the service. Perhaps with the arrival of e-readers, booksellers will begin to pile up similar behavioral data on readers. Maybe then we begin to target the potential haters.

Marketing a book, country by country posted on January 16, 2010

Marketing the book

About a year ago, a book showed up at my house. It was Die Numerati, the German translation of The Numerati. The cover featured a dark image of swirling sharks. I stared at it, wondering what those creatures signaled. Then I went to the computer and got a translation of the subtitle, Datenhaie und ihre geheimen Machenschaften: "data sharks and their secret machinations."

Oh, I thought. That kind of shark.

It's a strange thing to propose a book, sell it, and then watch what happens to it in different places. My book, it turns out, has given me access to a highly focused global laboratory for marketing and design. Each publisher has its own angle, and each version is created with a different home market in mind. "Meet the Numerati," warns the Brazilian edition. "They already know you." The publisher of the British paperback, the Mariner division of Random House, gave it a new and slightly menacing title (They've Got Your Number...). Its U.S. counterpart, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, focuses instead on utility. Its cover blurb from Wired editor Chris Anderson trumpets a "must-read for anyone who wants to understand life and business in the Google Age."

The changes began shortly after selling the proposal, nearly four years ago. The original pitch was for a book called The Age of Numbers. It would describe the analysis of the oceans of digital data we all produce, and how this process would reshape history. I wrote:

Abacus and slate. Numbers and words. It was a neat divide for nearly 3,000 years. But the border between the two worlds is fast vanishing. Mathematicians are gaining the tools to turn the entire universe of knowledge--words, sounds, even images--into symbols. As they do, their domain extends into industries far beyond the ancient divide.

Weeks after Houghton Mifflin bought the book, I got a call from my editor, Amanda Cook. She told me that she had read again through the proposal, and she had a suggestion. "I think the whole book is in Chapter Four," she said. Originally, I had planned to explore much of the world of math. My research would even take me to India, where I would compare how students were learning it there to what my sister was teaching in Portland, OR. But Amanda saw the entire book as "the mathematical modeling of humanity." We could have chapters, she suggested, on how we were modeled and predicted as workers, shoppers, patients, potential terrorists, and lovers. It sounded fine to me--though I was sorry to lose the trip to India.

Amanda went on. "Do you think The Age of Numbers is the best title?" she asked. Clearly, she didn't. My title, she said, was fine for selling the proposal to a publisher, but perhaps too static to attract browsers mulling about a Barnes & Noble store or clicking through Amazon. The Age of Numbers, she said, evoked Greek columns and would likely scare off the general-interest readers we had our sights on.

Instead we settled on The Numerati. It brought to mind a global elite (which readers are said to find appealing), with a hint of intrigue. It recalled the Illuminati of the best-selling DaVinci Code. (Practically anything that connects a book in readers' minds to a bestseller is desirable.)

The British publisher, the Jonathan Cape imprint of Random House, wasn't so crazy about the new title. They finally relented, but insisted on addressing the hot-button privacy issue with the subtitle: "They've Got My Number and Yours."

During this period, I gave a lot of thought to subtitles. One friend in publishing suggesting incorporating one or two of the following words: Masterminds, Shadowy, Fraternal, New Order, Enlightened, Mystical, Secret. I tried a couple. "Can the Global Math Elite Predict Your Next Move?" or "How a New Order of Masterminds is Mapping Your Next Moves and Changing How You Work, Shop, Vote, and Play..."

But the editors at Houghton chose to omit the subtitle. They feared it might cheapen or pigeonhole the book. To attract readers attention, they designed a shiny white cover with metallic lettering. Half of a worried face composed of math code looked up toward those shiny letters, as if they were wired with secret cameras. The only written guidance came from Chris Anderson's Google quote. To give the book a little viral boost, we inserted some code into the art, and gave a signed copy to the first readers to uncover it. (It was the geo-location of the Starbucks in New Jersey where I wrote most of the book.)

It was last summer that the British surprised me with the suggestion of changing the title. "We’ve been thinking carefully about where in the market to place the paperback, in relation to the current affairs and business market that the hardback was aimed at, and we plan to target the popular science market more," an editor wrote...."The title needs to be very punchy to catch the eye of the casual browser. The team here really like the title “They’ve Got Your Number…”, derived from the subtitle to the hardback. If we go with this title, we’d need a short subtitle to explain further what the book is about – intriguing and urgent enough to make the reader turn over to read the blurb."

I went along. These people know a lot more about selling in books in Britain than I do. But I asked them to retain "Numerati" in the subtitle. Otherwise people might take it for a different book. They settled on: Data, Digits and Destiny -- How the Numerati are Changing our Lives.

I'm especially curious about the Italian edition, to be published by Mondadori. While "Numerati" is a made-up word in every other language, it actually means something--"the numbered ones"--in Italian. I asked the Italian translator how she was going to handle it. "Since the word Numerati is frequently used in the text," she wrote, "I think they'll keep my translation, which is... no translation at all!"

Whatever works, I say.

Nos Vigilan -- A report in El Pais posted on November 22, 2009

Marketing the book

Sunday morning. You wake up in Spain, pour yourself a cafe con leche, open El Pais, and this might be what you see. It's a story I wrote for the newspaper's Sunday magazine. My lifelong friend, Antonio Sanz, translated it for me and sent along this pic.

By the way, Eric Porras had a Facebook link to this fast-food flow chart. I found it highy amusing.

Martha Anaya's take on the Numerati posted on October 24, 2009

Marketing the book

When I was in Mexico in August, I had a great time talking with Martha Anaya. She had been a political reporter for Excelsior, the big daily, and I remembered reading her stories nearly every day surrounding the controversial (or stolen) presidential election of 1988. Twenty-one years later, as a freelance writer for the magazine Quo, she interviewed me about the Numerati. But we also talked a lot about old Mexican politics...

I just happened upon the digital version of her story. It comes with this terrifying photo of me (below).

Versión Española posted on October 18, 2009

Marketing the book

This version just came out in Spain. The publisher, Seix Barral, is a division of the Planeta group, which published a different edition in Mexico. So now all my friends in Madrid and Colmenar Viejo have no excuse. I have a quite a few Seix Barral books on my shelves, by authors such as Julio Cortazar, Luis Martin Santos and Manuel Puig. Nice to be in their company. (photo by Edans)

Heading to Chicago for Innovators' Summit posted on September 18, 2009

Marketing the book

I'm flying to Chicago today to speak at the Innovators' Summit. It's at the Swissotel. I'll be having dinner this evening with a group of the attendees. If you're going to be there, please sign up and join us. Then I'll be delivering a keynote tomorrow (sans PowerPoint) and doing an afternoon panel. I'm not taking this laptop. I'll make due with my iTouch, and maybe I'll graze a bit on the computers at the conference...

Cog psych yesterdy at Penn St. Try counting things w/out moving finger. You rock, nod, or tap foot,anything to create rhythm.

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