Looking back at 2011: the music

Like a lot of publishing sales reps, I spend a lot of time listening to music, both at home and on the road. This year, with the arrival in the US of Spotify, I was able to indulge in a more expansive sort of experimental listening. And that, combined with a renewed account at last.fm which meant I scrobbled nearly every Spotify track I listened to, gave me a fairly easy base for looking back at 2011's music.

My most-played & favorite artists/tracks from 2011

(A Spotify playlist of these Top 10 tracks and the honorable mentions.)

1. Wilco - I Might (spotify)
2. Feist - How Come You Never Go There (spotify)
3. Arctic Monkeys - The Hellcat Spangled Shalala (spotify)
4. Mike Doughty - Into The Un (spotify)
5. Dave Stewart - Can't Get You Out of My Head (spotify)
6. The Belle Brigade - Lonely Lonely (spotify)
7. The Watson Twins - You Showed Me (spotify)
8. Laura Marling - The Muse (spotify)
9. The Decemberists - This Is Why We Fight (spotify)
10. Jason Isbell & The 400 Unit - Codeine (spotify)

Honorable Mentions

Bon Iver - Holocene (spotify)

Nick Cave & Neko Case - She's Not There (from True Blood) (spotify)

Real Estate - It's Real (spotify)

Florence + The Machine - What The Water Gave Me (spotify)

Elbow - lippy kids (spotify)

Fool's Gold - Wild Window (spotify)

Beastie Boys - Don't Play No Game That I Can't Win (feat. Santigold) (spotify)

Beirut - East Harlem (spotify)

The Jayhawks - She Walks in So Many Ways (spotify)

The Civil Wars - 20 Years (spotify)

Kathleen Edwards - Change The Sheets (spotify)

Ryan Adams - Chains of Love (spotify)

Lissie - In Sleep (spotify)

Josh Rouse & The Long Vacations - Diggin' In The Sand (spotify)

Wild Flag - Romance (spotify)

I Break Horses - Winter Beats (spotify)

Destroyer - Savage Night At the Opera (spotify)

Drive-By Truckers - Used To Be A Cop (spotify)

Foo Fighters - These Days (spotify)

The Mountain Goats - Damn These Vampires (spotify)

The Dodos - Don't Try and Hide It (spotify)

Fleet Foxes - Battery Kinzie (spotify)

Peter Bjorn and John - Second Chance (spotify)

My most-played & favorite albums released in 2011

1. Wilco - The Whole Love (spotify)
2. The Decemberists - The King is Dead (spotify)
3. Arctic Monkeys - Suck It and See (spotify)
4. The Smiths - Complete (spotify)
5. Mike Doughty - Yes and Also Yes (spotify)
6. Feist - Metals (spotify)
7. The Belle Brigade - The Belle Brigade (spotify)
8. Dave Stewart - The Blackbird Diaries (spotify)
9. Ryan Adams - Ashes & Fire (spotify)
10. Bon Iver - Bon Iver (spotify)
11. Death Cab for Cutie - Codes and Keys (spotify)
12. Fleet Foxes - Helplessness Blues (spotify)
13. Jason Isbell & The 400 Unit - Here We Rest (spotify)
14. Destroyer - Kaputt (spotify)
15. Drive-By Truckers - Go-Go Boots (spotify)

Honorable Mentions

Paul Simon - So Beautiful Or So What (spotify)

The Civil Wars - Barton Hollow (spotify)

Josh Rouse & The Long Vacations - Josh Rouse & The Long Vacations (spotify)

Thurston Moore - Demolished Thoughts (spotify)

The Jayhawks - Mockingbird Time (spotify)

Wild Flag - Wild Flag (spotify)

Elbow - build a rocket boys! (spotify)

Laura Marling - A Creature I Don't Know (spotify)

Gillian Welsh - The Harrow & The Harvest (spotify)

Foo Fighters - Wasting Light (spotify)

Thanks, Steve.

Steve Jobs narrates the first Think Different commercial, "Here's to the Crazy Ones".
It never aired with his voiceover.

my3books' First Impressions for Spring 2010: An Introduction

By way of introduction:

I spent a lot of time in November and December in a series of sales conference meetings with the publishers I represent and with the other sales reps who also represent them around the country.  These sales conferences took place via web conference, by phone conference call, and in person on both coasts and in the middle. The sales rep group I'm a member of added some new publishers to our list for this coming season, and it all added up to the longest, and most intensive, series of sales conferences I can remember.

I've been making notes all along about my favorite new books coming out in Spring 2010.  Some of them I've read all the way through, some I've seen just an excerpt of or sample chapters, and for some I'm going entirely on catalog copy and maybe a few page spreads.  Nevertheless, the books that you'll see featured in this coming series of short posts are the books that I was most excited about at the end of the sales conference process.

As the season progresses, I'll also be putting up more typical long-form posts about some Spring 2010 releases that I'm really excited about.  But it was this process of reading sales kits and reviewing my notes about the Fall 2009 season that caused me to start blogging at my3books in the first place, so I wanted to begin to put up these posts for this coming season.



The End of Summer wrap-up post

I finished my summer of sales calls this past week.  I've been visiting bookstores and other customers more or less non-stop since the week after BookExpo America.  This week is also something of a milestone for the my3books blog, as I posted my first entries on June 6, just before I started this summer of travel & bookselling.

As I said in that first post...

I’ve been looking for a way to pull out just a few of those books at a time - to restore a more human-readable scale to the process - and focus on some of the really great ones.

Having spent the summer both selling books to my bookstore customers and blogging about those same books, I have to say that the blogging has enriched my selling experience and has really been a lot of fun.  I've found that I have more to say in my sales calls about the books that I've also blogged about.  And I've thought more about the books, and the ways they connect and interrelate to one another.

***

It's also been a summer of expanding my connections to booksellers and other publishing folks.  I want to say thanks to everyone who contributed a guest post this summer:

Geoffrey Jennings (twitter: @RainyDayBooks)
Jake Hallman (twitter: @jakethegirl)
Melinda Blau (twitter: @melindablau)
Micheal Fraser
Paul Ingram
Taylor Rick
Teresa Rolfe Kravtin (twitter: @trkravtin)

and especially, the stellar Angela Sherrill

Their additional voices in the chorus made this a much more interesting place to visit, if you ask me.

***

At some point this summer, I began to wonder what I would post about when I was done visiting bookstores and selling the Fall books in a one-on-one sort of way.  It was a momentary madness, of course.  The sales kits and manuscripts for next spring's books have already started to trickle in and I'll be able to start a whole new list of potential post ideas.

Then I started to unpack some of the boxes of samples of the very same books I was posting about all summer, and I found some more books to write about.

I'll be taking part in some Rep Nights at some of the bookstores I sell to, sharing some of my picks from the lists with a roomful of frontline booksellers.  I'm hoping to be inspired by what I hear from my fellow rep colleagues, and in conversation those booksellers.

And finally, I'll be attending two of the regional trade shows for booksellers this fall: the Midwest Booksellers Association show in St. Paul, MN and the Great Lakes Independent Booksellers Association show in Cleveland, OH.  There will be endless book chat at both, no doubt.

I'm looking forward to a glorious autumn of new posts, more guest voices, and a lot of great reading.  I hope you'll keep coming around to see what we have to offer.

A preamble to the my3books concept

I represent a lot of publishers to the bookstores in my territory (hey, if you were wondering, that’s Illinois, Wisconsin and Missouri, with just a smidge of Indiana and Michigan), and every season, they all publish a lot of books. For instance, this coming fall, all my publishers put together have about 4000 new books in their catalogs.

I’ve been looking for a way to pull out just a few of those books at a time - to restore a more human-readable scale to the process - and focus on some of the really great ones. So here begins a series of posts that will each zoom in on three books - three from the same publisher, or three on a theme, or three by the same author, whatever.

This space is open to other friends in publishing & bookselling & litblogging, too. I’ll be glad to help spread the word about your 3 fave books on some topic or other. Send me a note about your ideas.

And do let me know what you think - I’ll be happy to include a letters column to clear the air and share news from readers on occasion.

John Mesjak
twitter: @mesjak

UPDATED: email address removed (6/7/09)