New Book from the Media Guy Coming soon!

The Media Guy — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 17:34:00 +0000

New Book Cover Art

Many of you emailed me regarding my SHEESH! blog where I talked about the frustrations of dealing with book editors and the delays in book publishing. Last week, I received some wonderful news: as part of a two book deal, my “LANDSCAPES OF LIFE: Behind the Lens” (ISBN: 9781622091324) will be out in sixty to ninety days and on sale at Amazon.com and a few other spots — although NOT at Borders, what a shame. There’s even an eBook and audio book in the works that will be available at the iTunes store!

My publisher came up with this for the back cover …

Take a visual journey through the eyes of the makeshift anthropologist. The extraordinary photographs showcased in Landscapes of Life are from of the eyes Michael Lloyd, who snaps at will to capture the moments often missed,

This remarkable book showcases hundreds of emotions adding up to a panoramic view of life from Los Angeles to Lebanon. You’ll discover heartwarming photographs that perfectly capture the spirit of the mind.

His subjects, entangled in their emotions, all seem to feel unobserved and safe. We remain unaware about the causes of the passionate feelings of his characters, their experiences before being captured in their apparently agitated and alternating loving moods.

With images of princesses, camel jockeys, immigrants, and mountain men, husband hunters, interns, people finding inner peace in the Great Pyramid of Egypt and life inside pre-revolution Syria and the constantly perilous Beirut, and more! Landscapes of Life captures the world’s cosmopolitan lifestyles and common living with intimate portraits and the human intimacy inside, where the heart lives.

Your imagination couples with the writing to create expanded stories behind these photos to embark on an exciting journey. They remind us of film scenes we have never seen. Lloyd’s photos are very expressive, matching the subjects that are filled with exciting details. The observer can’t escape the unique mood highlighted in these photos.

(Wow! I sound like Ansel Adams…)

Thanks for the support everyone!

Dust Jacket Art with Book Flaps

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Internet Killed The Book Store

The Media Guy — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 05:16:00 +0000

Kathleen Kelly just shed another tear.

1998’s You’ve Got Mail saw Meg Ryan’s ~~surprising~~ convincing turn as the second generation owner of The Shop Around The Corner whose spirits sank as she secretly fell in love while her dreams were getting bulldozed by Tom Hanks’ Darth Vader-ish Fox Books.

…now it seems the same thing is happening to book stores in general across the nation.

Yesterday, I passed by my once-favorite Borders in Northern California. The massive parking lot was desolate and the 12,000-square-foot building was comatose.

I remembered the last time I was here—it was just like Black Friday at 8:00 A.M.. The parking lot bulged with cars, shoppers scrambling over the rows of 50% off racks, stripping them clean like rodents around day old chicken in the alley way. Each shopper with armfuls of books. What a festive day it would have been. That is, if it wasn’t so sorrowful. It was October 2011 and the store was in its final days.

How ironic that I picked up a hardcover “Death of a Salesman” for $1.99. Willy Loman would have quipped that it should be renamed, “Death of a Bookstore.”

Just as the British band The Buggles summarized the death of the record store with the 1979 hit “Video Killed the Radio Star”, here it could be said that the Internet Killed the Book store.

With Amazon destroying Borders in the pricing wars and Kindle, iBook, Opus, Nook, Cybook, PocketBook, etc., taking over the reading market, the visit to the book store is part of our ever growing bygone era.

Just after the release of You’ve Got Mail, I read countless articles about when Borders hits your town, it would kill the smaller stores. Look what happened instead. This is the ultimate twist of irony.

Read somewhere online [whoops!] that in the final round of Borders store closings—over 400+ stores and $450+ million in inventory—that the commercial real estate being opened up totaled 6.8 million square feet of space. That’s 120 football fields to you and me.

You wonder if a little bit of distinguished branding might have helped Borders. I mean instead of threatening employee’s people’s jobs if they didn’t sell particular books that Borders promised to make bestsellers (as former CEO Ron Marshall did for years), they could have solicited their help to make them stand out in a crowded marketplace.

Kathleen Kelly might have saved Borders…

Simply, they should have taken a page from Kathleen Kelly.

Really all of the chains sell the same inventory. What made Borders special were the nuggets of gold each employee would deliver when asked for recommendations. I can’t tell you how many great reads I had based on two-minutes of conversations at the customer service desk. Ad campaigns and out-of-home campaigns should have been built around this intangible. An intangible you simply cannot find at Amazon. They could have brought this interconnectivity to the Internet with live chats that would have welcomed the consumer instead of driving them away with a confusing, unfriendly rewards program that never got its legs (and for good reason).

Yet, I digress…

Don’t misunderstand me. There’s nothing wrong with Kindle. I bought my mom one for Christmas two years ago and she loves it. Many friends swear by it. But when technology kills off something as sacred as the book store, something’s not right in the world.

I’m a purist in many respects. I enjoy holding a book. Strolling down the aisles gives you a greater perspective of knowledge. You appreciate the words more. How do you replace the sounds of a freshly cracked spine or the oddly alluring scent of flipping unsullied pages? You cannot. It’s a shame.

Borders. Dead.

Blockbuster. Dead.

What’s next? Starbucks? Now that would be a sad day.

Kindle helped kill the book store.

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New Book from the Media Guy Coming soon!

Internet Killed The Book Store