On Monday afternoon, during my Amtrak trip north from Baltimore after NAIBA's Fall Conference, I found myself making--as I tend to do--a mildly absurd connection. Maybe it was the endless parade of telephone poles flicking past my window, but something caused me to equate the NAIBA Internet marketing panel I was part of last Sunday with a scene from the HBO-TV Western series Deadwood.
Al
Swearengen, the irresistibly sleazy owner of the Gem Saloon, stands on
the second-story porch of his establishment. Whiskey bottle in hand, he
watches a group of men raise a telegraph pole on the outskirts of town.
"Messages from invisible sources," Al says scornfully, "or what some people think of as progress."
One
of his henchmen, the dim but lethal Dan Dority, suggests that the
telegraph is just another form of communication, like smoke signals or
letters. Al asks him when the last time was that he received a letter
and Dan replies, "Bad news about Pa."
Al's case is made. Bad
news, indeed. "So by all means, let's plant poles all across the
country," he sneers. "Festoon the (expletive) with wires to hurry the
sorry word and blinker our judgments of motive. Ain't the state of
things cloudy enough? Don't we face enough (expletive) imponderables?"
Dan thinks about this for a moment, then replies, "Well, by god, Al, you give the word and them poles'll be kindling."
Kindling
they did not become. In fact, almost 140 years later, telephone poles
are still with us, flashing by my train window, carrying "messages from
invisible sources."
Time was on my mind during the train ride
Monday: the time that has passed since telegraph poles stretched out to
the western frontier; the time that seems, in every age, to be
shrinking even as we discover technological breakthroughs meant to make
more efficent use of time.
Our Internet marketing panel
in Baltimore was led by Jessica Stockton Bagnulo, events coordinator at
McNally Robinson NYC bookshop and author of the bookseller blog, The Written Nerd. It also included Felicia Sullivan, editor and publisher of the literary journal Small Spiral Notebook, senior online marketing manager at Collins and author of The Sky Isn't Visible from Here, which will be published by Algonquin in February 2008.
Jessica and I had been on a similar panel at NEIBA in Providence, R.I., which I wrote about in an earlier column. For our part, we again showcased several favorite bookstore websites, as well as bookstore blogs like Atomic Books, Kash's Book Corner and Brookline Blogsmith.
Felicia offered a guided tour of popular social networking sites that should be of interest to booksellers, like Gather, FaceBook and MySpace. She also provided a list of book-related sites (LitMinds and Gather Essentials, for example), as well as age- and subject-specific sites such as blogher.org (women), gaiaonline.com (teens) and eons.com (boomers).
During our conversation with the audience, the subject of time came up more than
once, especially time management as the key impediment to engaging more
creatively with Web 2.0 opportunities.
If everyone is already
working at full tilt, how can they incorporate online marketing into
the mix? Where in the course of their busy days will they find time to
blog, to update website staff picks, to send out email newsletters, to
check and fulfill online orders?
After the panel, one bookseller
said that she already works a brutal schedule and cannot find good help
to delegate any of these tasks to. She had no interest in establishing
an online presence. Like Al Swearengen, she might have, but didn't,
ask, "Ain't the state of things cloudy enough? Don't we face enough
(expletive) imponderables?"
A hundred trade show panels won't
answer these questions because there will never be enough time--nor a
sufficient number of qualified, motivated staff members--to do
everything that needs to be done.
But there never has been
enough time. When booksellers were slipping index cards between the
pages of books for inventory control, there wasn't enough time. What
were you doing with all your extra time before you had to answer emails
and cell phone calls all day?
We find time where we've always found time, in its mysterious expandability.
Booksellers
will not gain by resisting the Internet, any more than turning a
handful of telegraph poles into kindling would have stopped the future
from reaching Deadwood.
In 1866, Ralph Waldo Emerson
suggested, "I think the habit of writing by telegraph will have a happy
effect on all writing by teaching condensation."
Perspective is everything in this discussion.--Robert Gray (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)