Jeremy Blachman's Weblog: 2012

Blogging from the University of Minnesota Law Library

At the University of Minnesota right now, sitting in the law library before I head to dinner with some students.  Signing went really well, I think.  Huge turnout at the lunchtime event -- I think it was the food.  Potbelly Sandwich Works, which I've eaten once or twice in DC and wasn't bad.  Looked like they got about 120-130 people there.  Standing room only.  I talked for about ten or twelve minutes, and then took questions.  Gave away some pencils and stress balls.  Signed some books just now in the library's new Legal Fiction wing.  Everyone was really nice.  This was the first time I had to do something where I had to talk about this stuff in a non Q&A setting for any length of time, so it was interesting to see what got a laugh and what felt boring as I was saying it and at which points I was more or less articulate and more or less comfortable and more or less interesting, and it'll help me be better if I have to do this again somewhere else.  Plus hearing the questions people asked was useful as far as figuring out what I should have talked about in the first place.  This is maybe just a precursor post to a post I'll write once I'm back home -- I may write out the stuff I talked about and the questions I remember, because maybe that's interesting.

Observations about the law school here... building looks like Northwestern's, on the inside.  Very similar.  It's cold outside.  But it will be in NY soon enough I guess.  Pretty big library.  OK, these are pretty ordinary observations.  Did you know the Cincinnati airport is actually in Kentucky?  That was where my stopover was.  One of the students here told me a story about how he ate a street vendor hot dog in NY before an interview and ended up having an accident in his pants, while wearing his suit, on his way to the firm.  Good story.

More when I get home.

Update: A nice post from a University of Minnesota blogger about my visit here.

University of Minnesota

On Wednesday I'll be at the University of Minnesota Law School, talking about my book and hopefully signing some copies.  I just checked the weather forecast.  37 degrees tomorrow, 40 on Wednesday.  I'll be packing a sweater.  So if you're in Minnesota, come check it out.  The event's at lunchtime -- Room 55 at the law school, 12:15 PM.

In other book-related news, I met for the first time last week with my paperback publisher.  I'm excited to get to start all over again with promotional stuff.  Yeah, I keep telling myself that.  :)  Also, I heard the Anonymous Lawyer audiobook last night for the first time.  It's $55 on Amazon, over here.  I've never bought an audiobook, so I don't know if that's the normal price of these things.  The guy reading it is named Ray Porter.  He's got a nice voice.  My grandma is pretty thrilled by the audiobook.  I think hearing someone read my book on CD makes it seem even more real to her than it being in the bookstore.  Interesting.

I'll be in Cambridge signing books...

HL Central, an organization at HLS, is hosting a "meet and greet" where I'll be signing books, or not signing books, this Thursday night at the Hark Pub, in the law school student center, from 8-10.  I had lunch with the guy who started HL Central over the summer, and he thought it could be a cool event, and I thought it could be a decent way to potentially sell a book or two, so he made it happen.  So if you're in the Boston/Cambridge area, with or without a book, and want to stop by, cool.  Of course I'm rooting for the Mets to dispose of the Cardinals by Wednesday, so I don't have to miss Game 7 while I'm doing this... not to mention the fact that I don't think me sitting in the Hark Pub can compete with a playoff game.  If I'm not mistaken, we did a Parody show recruiting event the night of a Red Sox playoff game one year, and six people showed up.  For the pizza.  And then left.

Another Interview About My Book

Over here, at Internet Law and Strategy.  Nothing revolutionary, but figured I'd flag it.

TJ's Double Play

There's a new UVA Law Student blog that I was going to link to anyway, but they just posted a review of my book, so that's an even better reason.

Here's an amusing post about how to be a gunner, from their archives.

AOL Book Maven

I did an audio interview with AOL Books about a month ago, and they just posted it up on the site.  Check it out.  I'm talking too fast, but I think this actually went really, really well.  The backstory: my publisher's marketing people told me I was doing an interview with AOL, but I thought it was going to be a phone interview for a print piece.  When they called me, they asked, "Are you ready to start?" and I asked what we were starting, and they told me it was a real-time audio interview and they'd be recording me to post on the site, and I totally wasn't expecting that... and inside I was freaking out but I did my best... and I'm actually really pleased now, listening to it.  SO MUCH BETTER than my radio interview!  And maybe that means I ought to be blindsided for this kind of stuff, instead of having time to get nervous about it.  Or something like that.  I'm seriously excited that this came out really well, even though probably no one ever visits AOL Books and listens to these things.

Radio Interview, Pt 2

That was kind of a disaster.  I mean, it won't hurt the book, and the segment was fine, but I think I was pretty terrible.  I just tried to listen back and can't listen for more than 30 seconds without wanting to punch the wall, so I shut it off.  I know I was much, much better toward the end of it, once I was a little more comfortable and wasn't totally freaked out by the whole thing.  I was surprised how they do it -- I assumed you get to meet the interviewer, talk for a few minutes, get a sense of what kinds of things they want you to talk about, maybe some practice in the microphone to check levels.  But it's much simpler than that -- they had me sit outside the studio until the break right before my segment, then they ushered me in, told me to put the headset on, where the volume control was, and I was on the air.  I guess that works if you've done this before.  The interviewer was really good, and they went to callers pretty quickly, which took the load off of me to talk, so I appreciated that.  The callers were good.  I thought that after all of the phone interview stuff I've done, and because the AOL podcast they haven't posted yet actually went really well, I would be less nervous and better at this, but I wasn't.  The one thing I wanted to try and do was take my time, take a deep breath and think about an answer before starting to talk, but in the moment I couldn't do it.  I kept jumping the gun and talking before I knew what I wanted to say, and then realizing mid-sentence that I had nowhere to go, and then I ended up getting flustered and that only feeds into itself and makes it worse.  I can't really beat myself up over it though.  The segment overall was fine, I'm sure it doesn't matter, and if it meant that the publicist didn't run back to her office eager to book me on some more of these, I'm not sure that's such a terrible thing.  With practice, I'm sure I'd be better at this, but, I don't know, before the next one I should have them do some mock ones and let me get a little comfortable with it.  Or at least I should try and find a way to have them let me meet the host first and chat for 5 or 10 minutes, just to get some sort of connection and make me a little more at ease in the chair.  No one's fault, except mine, but, shit, that wasn't very much fun.  Eh, I had a good lunch, I'm going to watch some TV and take a nap and do some writing.  I'm sure it's been fairly obvious here that the muse hasn't been terribly active in the past couple of months, but I kind of feel like I'm getting able to get past this Anonymous Lawyer stuff in my head and really start playing around with a bunch of things that are percolating.  More later.  Feeling something is good, even if it's frustration.  Good for writing.

2 quick links to stuff written by me

New Wall Street Journal Online article that just went online.  You can see it here.   And I've been blogging all week over at Powells, over here.  I know posts over here have been dismally lacking lately.  I'll rectify that soon, by the weekend for sure.  Blogging overload, without a ton to say.

Oh, and it looks like I'm going to be on the Brian Lehrer show on public radio this Friday at 10:40AM.  That's WNYC in New York.  More details if I find out any.  I've never done any sort of live radio thing, so it may be a complete disaster.  I promise I will admit it if it is, and write about it in excruciating detail.

UPDATE: I fixed the link to the piece

Quick link

I did a (long) interview with the New York Inquirer. It's posted here. Check it out.

From Blog to Book

I've been getting a fair number of e-mails asking about the blog to book transition, so I've written a fairly long piece about it and posted it over at the anonymous law firm site, here.

I feel like part of this whole process has been about trying to learn a bit about the publishing industry and how to promote a book online, and how to get people interested.  In a way, that's as interesting as writing the book was.  This is possibly a bad question to ask, or the wrong audience to be asking, but: if you haven't bought the book, I'm sort of curious to be able to know the reason why.  Not in a bad way, but just the honest reason.  Like, you only buy paperback, you figure it'll be enough like the blog that why should you pay for it, you'll probably buy it but haven't yet, you borrowed someone else's copy, you think you won't like it, you just don't want to buy it, I don't know.  I'm curious if one of these, or something I'm not even thinking of, dominates over the others. 

Feel free to also add what would need to happen for you to be galvanized to buy it.  :)

Just wanted to share a blog review I found...

If you're on the fence about whether to buy the book... can't do much better than this review.  I don't know the person who wrote it, but it's awfully flattering.

Unrelated links...  There's a blog post on Seth Godin's blog about why we need bosses, which resonated with me.  I may post more about this later.  And a cool article about the Tigers over at Baseball Prospectus (most of the stuff one there is subscriber-only but this one isn't).

A Bit of Book News

The Rocky Mountain News reviews the book today, and gives it an A-.

And there was an article in Variety yesterday about some other book-related stuff.  The shorter but free-er version is at ComingSoon.net.

Pencil Giveaway

My publisher gave away Anonymous Lawyer pencils outside the New York bar exam on Tuesday.  They just sent me some pictures and said I could post them on the blog.  So I thought I'd share them.  Note how pretty the bar exam testing site is.

Help Me Bring Down The Sonoma Diet!

I just wrote a new blog post on my Amazon Connect page, riffing on some of the books in Amazon's top 100, the holy grail for books, apparently, according to my publisher.  I'm currently at 131, and have been hovering between 114 and 184 for most of the past 30 hours or so.  The Sonoma Diet is currently at number 94.  I understand why Malcolm Gladwell and Harry Potter and Seth Mnookin ("Feeding The Monster," the book about the Red Sox I bought last week but haven't read yet) are ahead of me.  But I don't understand why The Sonoma Diet is, especially since if you do a google search for the Sonoma Diet, you find out more than you'd ever need to know.  For free. 

So here's my challenge: I want to rank ahead of The Sonoma Diet, even if it just means The Sonoma Diet sells fewer books and doesn't actually mean that I sell any more.  That's my goal.  How you can help?  Don't buy The Sonoma Diet.  Tell your friends not to buy The Sonoma Diet.  If I pass The Sonoma Diet, even for a moment, I will pledge to eat more blueberries.  That's one of the diet's ten power foods.  Almonds, bell peppers, blueberries, broccoli, grapes, olive oil, spinach, strawberries, tomatoes, and whole grains.  I learned that for free on Google.  Here's why I don't trust anything, including The Sonoma Diet.  If there really were a set of power foods, why would there be exactly ten of them?  Isn't it a little too convenient that nature has given us exactly ten power foods, and not seven, or THREE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY?  Is there really a difference between strawberries and raspberries that should mean one makes the Sonoma list and the other is stuck in your grocer's produce aisle, alone and moldy? 

I want my book to change the world for the better.  And the best way I can think to make that happen is by passing The Sonoma Diet in Amazon sales rank and stop people from being so silly as to think "ten power foods" are any better than "lots of fruits and vegetables, some exercise, and just a bit of invasive surgery."  The all-natural way.  Just look at Star Jones.

Publication Day

It's finally here.  Hopefully on the shelves of a bookstore near you.  My big plans include a nice dinner in Manhattan with my family, and some book-related errands during the day, and, you know, if I happen to pass some bookstores while I'm out, well, what would be the harm in going in for a second and checking to see if it's there?  Right?  Right????  Plus, I've drafted a mass e-mail I'll be sending to everyone whose e-mail address I have, sometime in the morning.  Apologies for that, really.  But I have to.  If there's one mass e-mail I'm allowed to send, this has to be it, right?

You've been reading my blog for a while, or maybe you haven't.  Either way, I appreciate it, and you're obviously a huge part of this chain of events that's gotten me to this point.  It's pretty exciting, and even if no one buys the book, it's still pretty exciting.  If all you want to do is keep reading the free stuff, and you don't want to spend 15 bucks on the book, I understand, and I still like you.  Obviously I'd love everyone who reads this to buy the book, and buy one for everyone they know.  And post a positive review on Amazon.  And tell all of your friends.  But even if you don't buy it, I'd still love for you to tell your friends.  Or even post a positive review on Amazon.  :)  No one will know you didn't read it.  No, I'm kidding.  I don't want to encourage Amazon review fraud.  That would be almost as bad as going to class without doing the reading.  Or taking the final exam even if you never bought the casebook.  So don't do that.

First week sales help.  If you buy my book, I will buy yours.  Shoot me an e-mail and hold me to that promise, whether today or thirty years from now.