I recently shared lunch with my good friend and business associate, Ray Bard. Ray is the monumentally successful mastermind behind the Bard Press publishing house where I worked from 1999-2002. We established a great dialog during my stint there and try to get together as often as possible to trade war stories about current projects and the state of affairs in the Big Bad Book Industry.

We spent most of this particular lunch discussing the challenges faced by today’s publishers. (This…

...continue to read "I’ll Pay for Lunch"

There was a good article in Sunday’s New York Times by Steve Lohr, called “Slow Down, Multitaskers, and Don’t Read in Traffic”

“Confident multitaskers of the world, could I have your attention?

Think you can juggle phone calls, e-mail, instant messages and computer work to get more done in a time-starved world? Read on, preferably shutting out the cacophony of digital devices for a while.

Several research reports, both recently published and not yet published, provide evidence of the limits of multitasking. The…

...continue to read "Tell the Truth: Have You Ever Read Email in Traffic?"

A Day in the Life of a Persuasion Architect brought back an interesting blog post by “Mike” on Techdirt.

In it, ‘Mike’ argues that:

“Book publishers have been pretty vocal in their dislike for Google’s plan to scan books and make them searchable via a great big electronic card catalog — claiming that this somehow is a misuse of their content.”

“The question, really, is why bother? All these publishers are creating limited, expensive, fragmented searches for books, when Google (and others such as…

...continue to read "Book Publishers Need a Reality Check"

It’s apropos that my first blog post would be another first for me. For those of you who don’t know me, My name is Michael Drew I am the Eisenberg’s book agent and resident book expert.  I apply Persuasion Architecture in all of my book marketing ventures, and will be posting about my adventures in Persuasion Architecture from time to time.

Today Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? hit # 2 on the Wall Street Journal Business list, but, even more remarkably, three…

...continue to read "Introduction/WSJ Best-sellers list"