Disqus - Latest Comments for maxalexander

Re: The Best Men’s Button-Up Shirts

Max Alexander — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 16:44:50 -0000

No-iron shirts (as opposed to "wrinkle-resistant" which still need some ironing) are treated with formaldehyde which bonds the fibers at the molecular level. Even if you don't care about wearing formaldehyde-laced fabric against your skin, the shirts are less breathable and, thus, hotter.

I've been ironing my own shirts for half a century. For me it's like bed-making or toothbrushing--something I'd rather not have to do but which is just a part of life. I realize others feel differently.

Re: The Best Men’s Button-Up Shirts

Max Alexander — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 12:31:32 -0000

Cold water will not get a man's shirt clean, I don't care what the detergent or machine manufacturers say. It might "look" clean, but the bacteria (which causes odors) will still be there, building up over time. How can you tell? Take a whiff of the pit right after ironing; you'll know it when you smell it. Meanwhile, white shirts will eventually show yellow stains in the pits and collars. Here's how to do it right.

First, scrub pits and collars (and cuffs, if French) with a strong laundry bar soap like Marseille or Fels-Naptha. Scrub hard with a brush, against a hard surface like a sink as you probably don't have Grandma's washboard. Soak shirts in that soapy water overnight. Then spray the problem areas with liquid Oxy. Soak a few more hours. Wash white shirts in HOT water, dark shirts in WARM. Never use a dryer. Iron on the hottest setting using steam, unless you buy no-iron shirts which you shoudn't because they're plastic and horrible. Use spray starch only on linen shirts. Then you will have clean shirts which will last a long time--the dryer, not water temperature, is what wears out shirts.

Re: Purging Old Clothes? Here’s How to Responsibly Donate and Repurpose Your Castoffs.

Max Alexander — Sun, 24 Jul 2022 13:32:31 -0000

The article fails to mention that donating clothes to the developing world (especially Ghana where I lived and wrote a book) puts local tailors, who make traditional dresses and robes on foot-powered sewing machines, out of business. Their prices are cheap but not as cheap as used Yankees t-shirts. Cost of good intentions--most Westerners are clueless about life on the ground in Africa.

Speaking of clueless--do you really mean to imply that people throw away perfectly good clothes when a button comes off? Come on...even if someone is so helpless (or without Google) as to be flummoxed by sewing on a button, their local dry cleaner can do it for a couple bucks.

Re: Words-to-be-read are losing ground to words-to-be-heard, a new stage of digital content evolution

Max Alexander — Fri, 15 Jun 2018 09:54:37 -0000

Mike, should you decide to give audiobooks a try, I recommend the new version of Murder on the Orient Express read by Kenneth Branagh. He has a field day with the characters' accents.

Re: Words-to-be-read are losing ground to words-to-be-heard, a new stage of digital content evolution

Max Alexander — Fri, 15 Jun 2018 09:41:54 -0000

Great post Mike. As an author it's a strange experience to hear your words read by an actor. (It's different from plays and screenplays which are of course all dialog.) And sometimes the actors seem to find new and significant meaning in your words, which is doubly disconcerting. Another interesting dynamic in this is the huge amount of work being created for non-star actors.

Re: Newspaper publishers face very different and much more immediate threats than book publishers

Max Alexander — Wed, 16 Nov 2016 13:36:53 -0000

Not to worry Mike, Trump will tweet all the news we need.

Re: The publishing world is changing, but there is one big dog that has not yet barked

Max Alexander — Fri, 07 Aug 2015 06:30:52 -0000

I'm certainly not in the bestselling author category, but I do get six-figure advances and my books tend to get reviewed in many of the major U.S. and overseas English newspapers. I have retrieved rights on two of my backlist titles and now sell so many more copies of both than either of my trad publishers managed to sell--and of course I keep most of the money. I don't begrudge the publishers--Max Alexander is not worth their time and effort to promote old titles. But it IS worth my time and effort, and so I grab those rights whenever I can. I'm amazed how many authors I know don't do that with their out-of-print titles. They're just leaving money on the table, not to mention failing to connect with readers who want their older books.

Re: The publishing world is changing, but there is one big dog that has not yet barked

Max Alexander — Fri, 07 Aug 2015 06:04:43 -0000

That's probably right, although I do wonder how many authors and agents routinely go on Amazon, Apple and BN to see if their ebooks are properly listed. If there was a systemwide glitch at Hachette, even for just a few months, it could have gone unnoticed by lots of parties but could still have contributed to the drop in their e-biz.

Re: The publishing world is changing, but there is one big dog that has not yet barked

Max Alexander — Thu, 06 Aug 2015 21:36:24 -0000

Yes, I think no doubt it was a glitch and not deliberate. I just don't know if it also affected (infected?) other titles. Or maybe still is?

Re: The publishing world is changing, but there is one big dog that has not yet barked

Max Alexander — Thu, 06 Aug 2015 15:02:05 -0000

So this is purely anecdotal and I have no idea if it was happening on multiple Hachette titles, but last year my Hachette-owned title suddenly became unavailable as an ebook in any format. I do not believe this had anything to do with the Amazon war as it was also suddenly unavailable from Apple or BN.

This particular book is very popular in Africa (with both foreign aid workers and African citizens), so e-sales are essential--indeed about the only way readers there can buy the book, as I stressed to Hachette. Despite several promises to "look into it," they proved either unable or simply uninterested in fixing the glitch. Fortunately I was able to get the rights back and am now selling my own e-copies--lots of them. And I have a new trade paper version through Amazon POD with orders from universities for hundreds of copies this fall.

Did Hachette somehow torpedo other ebook sales as well as mine through some dysfunctional computer glitch? I'll never know. Will I continue to publish my books through legacy publishers? Sure. Do I think I have a future in self-publishing? Absolutely.

Re: End of a year, and perhaps the end of a stage of the ebook transition

Max Alexander — Fri, 02 Jan 2015 07:14:26 -0000

You're absolutely right that the movie business is different in substantial ways from the book business, and I wouldn't want to suggest there is some obvious parallel. And you brought up a number of salient points related to the 80s video boom--notably how it disrupted Hollywood (which might not have happened if the studios had understood video from the get-go) and presaged the rise of arthouse indie films--by which I think you are suggesting that indie publishing could augur a similar renaissance of great writing (and new authors).

I sincerely hope you are right! As an author who has published all of his books with legacy houses but also re-issued some of them independently when the rights reverted to me, I work in both realms.

However I take issue with your suggestion that legacy publishers, unlike major studios, don't bring much to the table besides larger advances.

First, like the studios, they bring distribution power to the table. With very few exceptions, indie authors simply are not going to get their books into bookstores, at least not on a national level, and not even in indie bookstores (irony alert). I get that there are fewer and fewer bookstores and I have personally switched entirely to e-books (to quote Penn Jillette: "God I hate paper!"), but I take my friend Mike Shatzkin's word that bookstores still do matter for sales and marketing--and no one is a larger and earlier fan of e-books than Mike.

Second, for better or worse legacy publishers still wield tremendous influence with book critics, as most newspapers and magazines simply will not review books that have not been "curated" by a "real" publisher. In America these include the NYT, the WSJ (which may actually publish more book reviews than the Times), the LAT, the WaPo, People magazine and O magazine. Overseas the same could be said for the UK papers and even Asian English-lingo outlets like the South China Morning Post. And book critics matter, since reading a book is a major investment of time and money.

Third, although this may change, legacy publishing still carries a cachet with the vast majority of literary-minded midlist authors, who once dismissed self-publishing as the realm of vanity projects but increasingly associate it with "hack" authors who churn out potboilers which they self-promote relentlessly. (How much of their contempt is sour grapes I will leave for others to decide.)

For all of these reasons I actually think the big publishers are quite a bit more like the big studios than first meets the eye. Like the studios, they are largely in the blockbuster business. Ask any agent: These days if your book isn't "pre-sold"with a "high concept" or a star name, well good luck to you and the Red Sox as we say up here. And it doesn't work to observe that today the best "adult" film writing is on TV because those hit TV shows are produced and distributed by the same media conglomerates. Likewise, the biggest-selling literary book titles (Donna Tartt, etc) are legacy published.

Meanwhile, indie publishers are hurting--don't take my word for it, ask Dave Eggers, who recently dropped the other shoe and converted McSweeney's to nonprofit.

So while I'd like to believe that self-publishing can really disrupt the legacy book business, I'm holding out for more evidence. In the mean time, it's fascinating to watch this all play out. At age 57 I'm still young enough to wonder how the outcome will affect my own career, but old enough to enjoy the game as a spectator!

Re: End of a year, and perhaps the end of a stage of the ebook transition

Max Alexander — Thu, 01 Jan 2015 13:37:45 -0000

Mike, your post prompts a comparison to the video movie business of the early 1980s, which I witnessed firsthand at Variety. When VCRs first came out around 1982, the major studios balked at releasing movies on video, fearing (as legacy businesses always do) that it would devalue the conventional (i.e. theatrical) movie viewing experience. To fill the gap, countless indie film producers leaped into the market, cranking out thousands of cheap action "direct-to-video" movies. (The films actually made stars of people like Rutger Hauer and Jan-Michael Vincent.)

VCR owners, desperate for content to watch on their new devices, scooped up the titles at neighborhood video rental shops. The business mushroomed, to the point where international film marketplaces like Mifed in Milan and the Cannes Film Market (the trade show under the Palais, not the glitzy competition upstairs) turned into cash-crazed bazaars as distributors jockeyed to secure rights to the films--many of which were shot in unlikely places like Israel and apartheid South Africa. Video companies like Vestron were generating revenues on the level of Hollywood studios.

But it couldn't last. Once the major studios jumped on the video bandwagon and customers realized they could rent "The Deerhunter" for the same price as some no-name B-movie, the business withered. Vestron and others went down in flames.

An interesting sidelight: Cahners Publishing bought Variety in (as I recall) 1987 after salivating over phone-book-sized issues leading up to the Cannes Film Festival, packed with full-page ads for all those crappy direct-to-video movies. They saw it as a turnkey operation: Just sit back and watch the ads flow in. But they got in too late; by that time the studios were getting on board the video revolution, and the indies (and all their ads) were already fading.

Re: Don’t blame Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter for the fact that technology changes behavior

Max Alexander — Mon, 23 Sep 2013 15:04:07 -0000

Thanks Jeanne--my mistake. I thought the two were linked but Question 7 answers that in the negative.

Re: Don’t blame Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter for the fact that technology changes behavior

Max Alexander — Mon, 23 Sep 2013 14:33:00 -0000

Mike, an interesting aspect of Amazon's new Matchbook bundling program is in the fine print (I'm one of the 100,000 authors they've approached), which I have not seen discussed anywhere, including in David Wilk's DBW post to which you linked. Namely: in order to qualify for the program, the e-book must be exclusive to Kindle--no iBook or Nook or Smashword or any other version. I declined.

Re: Two thoughts: what was one book business may divide by format and backlist may be the neglected marketing opportunity

Max Alexander — Wed, 29 May 2013 22:18:12 -0000

Sam Walton could not have said it better!

Re: Two thoughts: what was one book business may divide by format and backlist may be the neglected marketing opportunity

Max Alexander — Wed, 29 May 2013 19:11:44 -0000

Thanks for your reply Mike, and good luck with BookExpo. Yeah I assumed it would be the retailers, not the publishers, who would adjust pricing based on demand. So when the new movie about Hannah Arendt opens, the ebook price for Eichmann in Jerusalem goes up. As for sloppy e-transfers, to me it's just the tip of the iceberg in ways that publishers are missing the boat on ebook backlist sales. They could be so much more imaginative, with value-added features that would cost very little to nothing.

Re: Two thoughts: what was one book business may divide by format and backlist may be the neglected marketing opportunity

Max Alexander — Wed, 29 May 2013 14:06:43 -0000

Mike, I've been thinking about the backlist business a lot lately (having published my own backlist on e-book), and in a similar vein. An article in the NYT a few days ago about Orwell's house in a remote outpost in Burma led me to hop onto Amazon and buy his first novel, Burmese Days, which I had never read and which was only a couple dollars. I can't be the only person who reacted to that article by buying the book. My first thought was, why don't e-retailers develop dynamic pricing using some sort of algorithm like Google Alerts? So when a backlist title is suddenly in the news, the price goes up a few bucks. Yes, maybe buyers would shop around for the better price, but I doubt people are really sensitive to a price difference of a buck or two, especially if it means switching from Kindle to iBooks or whatever.

Then I read the book and was very disappointed to see that the e-conversion sucked--not only riddled with typos and bad breaks, but they must have used the original U.S. edition with all its censored words (e.g. "b_____d" for "bastard," etc.)--surely not what Orwell or his estate would have wanted.

I started reading through Amazon reviews of other backlist stuff and realized that Orwell is not alone; based on the scathing comments of readers across the spectrum, the whole classic market is being saturated with shit that publishers are just dumping out there with apparently no proofing whatsoever. It's one thing for a free public domain book to have issues, but I'm talking about copyrighted works being sold for cash. As an author I find that inexcusable from an artistic standpoint but also really shortsighted from a business standpoint. Hardcore e-book readers are losing faith in these publishers, who supposedly are on the front line of curatorial diligence. Contrast this to the CD revolution, which found record companies releasing carefully re-mastered versions of jazz and classical recordings. The assumption was that if it was put out on a CD, it was the best quality.

I fear publishers and retailers are endangering this potentially lucrative revenue stream with short-term thinking--and missing golden opportunities to rapidly adjust backlist pricing.

Re: Gubernatorial candidate Steve Woods says 108 Maine towns ‘basically insolvent’

Max Alexander — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 15:08:01 -0000

There is no king. It's currently known as Queen's English.

Re: Rockland high schools will start classes half an hour later, says superintendent

Max Alexander — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 09:28:20 -0000

I wonder if Camden schools are considering any similar measures.

Re: More thoughts on libraries and ebook lending

Max Alexander — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 17:21:06 -0000

Yes, and it's interesting that two years ago there was no waiting list for any ebook in Maine. Now it's the norm, although the lists are always longer for fiction and I mostly read non-fiction.

Re: More thoughts on libraries and ebook lending

Max Alexander — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 14:34:13 -0000

I didn't say the authors I take a chance on from the library are ones I've never heard of; they might be bestsellers but I'm just not interested enough to pay money. A perfect example is Cheryl Strayed: I have no intention of buying "Wild," but when it turned up at the library, I got on the (long) waiting list. Who knows? Maybe I'll love it and want to read more of her work; if so I'll have to buy them because the Maine library doesn't have any of her earlier books.

Re: More thoughts on libraries and ebook lending

Max Alexander — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 14:14:00 -0000

Here in Maine, library ebooks are bought at the state level. If you have a library card for any town, you have access to the statewide ebook selection (and the privilege of waiting weeks, maybe months, on a waiting list!). I've pointed this out before, but I often discover new authors through library ebooks (which I would not have bought on my own), then gone on to buy other books by the same author. So for what it's worth, my anecdotal experience is that ebook lending does drive book sales.

Re: Things to think about as the digital book revolution gains global steam

Max Alexander — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 10:44:19 -0000

If true then it's happening a lot. I just picked one random example.

Re: Things to think about as the digital book revolution gains global steam

Max Alexander — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 10:36:07 -0000

Interesting string here. Personally I think publishers could easily "enhance" nonfiction e-books with much more devotion to web links. Those links, which could be photos, maps, charts, reference guides, whatever, could open in the window of the book (like the Wikipedia links you summon from within Google Earth), which would help keep readers "in the book" and not wandering off to the web. I don't know why more of this isn't being done. How hard could it be?

Re: Things to think about as the digital book revolution gains global steam

Max Alexander — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 10:26:30 -0000

Mike I'll leave it to you and others to analyze, but I've been noticing lately that e-books are now often costing more than the trade paper edition. Just one example: on Amazon the Hitchens anthology "Arguably" carries a $12.99 cover price in the trade paper edition out Sept. 4, but the Kindle edition (already available) costs a whopping $14.99. Anyone with Amazon Prime gets free shipping on the print book, so the e-book really is more expensive. Is the thinking that people will pay more for instant access, rather than waiting until Sept. 4? Or that more people are becoming like me and actually prefer e-books to print books and will reluctantly pay more for the convenience? Or is there no thinking going on at all?