Saul Bass: A Life in Film & Design from Laurence King Publishing on Vimeo.

Short film about the new Saul Bass book from Laurence King Press. You don’t get to see much of the book, but what you do see looks amazing, as do the spreads from it at the bottom of the info page.

Not as entertaining as the viral video for James Frey’s The Final Testament Of The Holy Bible, but I’d say more compelling. The viral made me chuckle. This actually makes me want to read it.

I am a fan of James Frey’s writing. I am a fan of viral marketing. So it makes sense that I would like and blog about this viral video for James Frey’s new novel, The Final Testament Of The Holy Bible. But before we all get too excited about the fact that my posting of this viral video is proof positive of the effectiveness of viral marketing, I should point out that despite the ad’s genius, I only actually know the book is out – and hence why I googled it and found this superb piece of viral marketing gold – because my girlfriend read a piece about it in last week’s issue of Grazia Magazine.

Just re-read Len Deighton’s The Ipcress File. Almost as good as this picture of him teaching Sir Michael Caine to cook on the set of the film version. What’s surprising is that I read the book a couple of years ago and hated it. Thought it was dull, confused and nowhere near as good as the film. Admittedly the film is one of my all-time favourites, so it was always going to struggle. Re-reading it, the plot isn’t quite as refined and smart as the movie, which is substantially different, but the writing is stunning. Sharp, clever and very fun, I can’t recommend it enough. Don’t know what I was on the first time.

I have ghosted celebrity memoirs. I have worked on biographies. I am currently two thirds of the way through writing a novel, plotting another and working on a film idea.

I used to do all of the above in Word. It used to to make me very unhappy.

I used to have folders all over my laptop with notes, research, transcripts, chapters, outlines, drafts, manuscripts. It was all very confusing. When the draft was finished I used to have to cut’n'paste each chapter into yet another Word document. Making sure there was a page break before each chapter was a nightmare. Keeping the formatting consistent made me want to kill. And if I wanted to change or move anything… I used to weep…a lot.

Not anymore. Oh no. Now I use Scivener. Now I have all my notes, research, transcripts, chapters, outlines and drafts in one place and when all the chapters are done I can compile them into a manuscript and output it to Word, page breaks and formatting included, at the touch of a button.

Am I happier? Of course. Would I recommend other writers try Scrivener for themselves? Absolutely. Am I more productive? Not a bit, but I at least get to procrastinate and be unproductive free from the fear of page breaks and formatting and not being able to find my notes the one time I do decide to write something. Which in its own way is worth every cent of the $39.95 it costs.

Don’t believe me? Why would you. Maybe the video below will do a better job of convincing you.

There is a better life. And it looks a little something like this. A thought to conjure with on a cold, snowy/icy/slushy night in London in January. For more of the same, see my new favourite oversized coffee table book Poolside With Slim Aarons. Genius.

I love magazines. I should do. I’ve spent most of my adult life writing for them. Increasingly though, magazines are becoming hard to like, let alone love. Grown bloated on d-list celebrities, fad diets, watches, cars, tits, cellulite, empty sound bites and hot air, they’re just another noisy distraction designed to entertain the shortest of attention spans. Of course, you could say that for something more substantial there are always books, and as someone who writes those too I certainly wouldn’t argue with their value. But it’s not the same. Books are about words sparking the imagination; a writer and a reader, alone in a space sharing a thought. Magazines are about words and pictures and how the two interact. They’re about a designer’s interpretation of an attitude, a photographer’s understanding of a subject, a writer’s assessment of the situation and an art director’s idea of how all three can best come alive on the page. Or at least that’s the way I think of them – exciting explosions of ideas, unexpected stories that grab the attention and suck you in.

The truth is that mainstream consumer magazines aren’t like that anymore. And it’s a recent change. In the last 10 years word counts have plummeted, the pictures are bigger (although, sadly, not better) and the imagination, the vocabulary and the subject choice have become so constrained that it’s hard to tell one men’s magazine from the next and all the celeb gossip weeklies from each other. I could blame Loaded or Heat or everyone else who’s helped cheapen the format, but the real point is not to blame others but to do something about it – which is why I’m currently trying to get a cool, quality, pop culture quarterly off the ground. More of that in another post.

Away from the mainstream though, the magazine is very much alive and well and lovable. Independent publishers are doing all the things which used to make me buy magazines by the armful. They’re spilling imagination all over the page, exciting with indescribably sexy images and delivering rock’n'roll in print, and making all of it so exciting you could just reach in and touch it.

I know this because I recently bought two amazing books. We Love Magazines is a celebration of the magazine as an art form, focusing on 10 stunning publications from around the world, as well as reliving the greatest moments in magazine history and providing an extensive directory of the coolest magazines in the world – or most of them, there were a couple missing. My other purchase was the equally incredible follow-up, We Make Magazines : Inside the Independents, a celebration of the people and the passion behind the most influential independent magaiznes in production – as well as a tribute to those great titles long since departed.

Both books are beautifully executed with the same imagination and attitude as the titles they’re examining, so while bloody expensive, they’re worth every penny. It’s enough to make you want to put pen to paper and start dreaming up your very own super cool title… oh, wait a minute…

I’ve been reading Sun Tzu’s The Art of War – the legendary War For Dummies guide, written in 500 B.C., now worshipped by aspiring business types of the kind who go on The Apprentice and say things like, ‘No guts, no glory’ and ‘I’m a natural closer’.

Not that I’m after a job in middle management. Just curious.

Sun Tzu was clearly a very wise man who’d given much thought to the nature of conflict/competition and how best to succeed. Sun Tzu says… well he says a lot and most of it in slighty Yoda-esque backwards speak, but in a nutshell…

• Plan like buggery. Come up with a watertight strategy… and a couple of other watertight strategies in case the first develops holes.
• Research. Know your market, know your enemy, know yourself.
• Make the most of your resources, by focusing your strengths against opponents weaknesses.
• The best way to win a war is without fighting. Outsmarting your opponent is painless.
• Only fight battles you can win. When you’re dead, you’re dead.

Makes sense. So there you go, 2500 years worth of tried and testest strategic wisdom reduced to five bullet points. Now you too are ready to be a business samurai. Show me the money. Lunch is for whimps. Etc, etc.