Showing posts with label Book plugging. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Book plugging. Show all posts

BBC plug-a-book show slot for aging new left author

Readers of my previous comments on BBC plug-a-book shows won’t be surprised to hear that I didn’t last longer than about three minutes before turning one off last night.

This week’s lucky book-plugger on Laurie Taylor’s Thinking Allowed programme (BBC Radio 4) was Tariq Ali, veteran Trotskyist campaigner of the 1960s and 70s – or, in the slightly more sanitised description of himself that the BBC website reproduced verbatim from Mr Ali’s own website: ‘novelist, historian, political campaigner and one of the New Left Review’s editors.’

For those too young to remember, there were a lot of Trotsky fans around in the 60s and 70s organised around rival acronyms like IS, WRP, and IMG. Tariq Ali rose to the dizzy heights of becoming leader of IMG (International Marxist Group) which, roughly speaking, was run by and catered for middle class intellectuals.

One of my colleagues in the sociology department at Lancaster University, where I then worked, was also a member of the politburo (or whatever they called their committee) of IMG and, in between ortgainising strikes at local factories, arranged for his leader to convey their particular version of Trotskyist truth to a packed lecture theatre of potential disciples.

My mistake wasn’t just to attend, but to ask a really stupid question along the lines of ‘If Marxism is as accurate an analysis of how societies work as you say, how come things have worked out so badly in all the communist countries of the world.’

Mr Ali's answer was, of course obvious, namely that they hadn’t followed IMG’s version of Trotsky’s version of Marx’s version, and all would have been well if only the Russians, etc. had been as smart and clever as members of IMG were.

Needless to say, Mr Ali, like so many social theorists then and now, has never let facts stand in the way of whatever theory he happened to be espousing on any particular day (or in any particular book). But why should he when he was and is a very articulate and plausible speaker, as you’d expect from someone who’d been president of the Oxford Union debating society?

Three minutes of hearing him pontificate about his latest book last night was quite enough to hear that was as articulate and plausible as ever and just as unconstrained in his theorising as he ever was.

As for how he came to get one of these prime plug-a-book slots, it’s anyone’s guess. It’s just possible that the producers of this particular BBC show are also New Lefties grown old, but I don’t have any evidence of that. All I do know is that there were rumours going around in the 1970s that Laurie Taylor was either a member of or sympathised with one of the aforementioned acronyms.

But I don’t have any hard evidence of that either.

Book plugging news

It's 10 days since I posted some comments about the impact of BBC 'plug-a-book' shows on sales, following a mention of Speech-making and Presentation Made Easy (see above) on the BBC website.

As expected, it soon slipped back from its all-time high of 1,841st in the Amazon bestsellers chart, but it's still been averaging about 220,000 places higher than it was before the plug on the BBC website.

What this means in terms of actual sales, I'll have to wait for news from the publishers.

But, with the ever-growing domination of booksellers like Waterstones, Amazon and word-of-mouth are becoming even more important to frustrated authors, and the book's current placing prompts a degree of cautious optimism that it might have just about reached lift-off.

Why doesn't Amazon have a Spanish site?

Wondering how the Spanish translation of Lend Me Your Ears was doing, I thought I'd have a look at Amazon Spain.

To my astonishment, I discovered that it doesn't exist, even though Spanish is the 3rd most widely spoken language in the world.

But, there are Amazon sites in Japanese (10th most widely spoken) and German (11th most widely spoken), not to mention three in English (UK, USA, Canada) and Amazon China.

I'm not as worried about Amazon missing such a major market opportunity as I am about the fact that Spanish speakers don't have access to books translated from English into Spanish.

I know from emails and comments on the blog that there are some regular Spanish speaking visitors.

They might like to know that the Spanish edition of Lend Me Your Ears is published as Claves para hablar en público: Todo lo que necesita saber sobre cómo pronunciar discursos y hacer presentaciones, further details of which are available HERE (from where copies can also be ordered).