–Reed and the Javits staff have found a way to obscure the fact that it no longer fills an entire floor with exhibitors, but there was plenty of space around the edges for curtained enclosures and meeting rooms of various types.
–Despite the small number of exhibitors (or perhaps because of it), the aisles were full, and the mood seemed upbeat, enthusiastic and intent. I heard far less of the “this will be the last show” chatter.
–The “concurrent events” brought new blood into the mix. This bodes well for the future. Unfortunately, the total attendance didn’t go up with the inclusion of this new blood. That doesn’t bode as well.
–Oddly enough, I saw far fewer of the independent publishers’ booths and the denizens of Writers’ Row. It could be that the word has finally gotten out that those locations aren’t really offering the full benefit of being at the show, and that this isn’t a place where you go to sell a bunch of books on the spot.
–This was the “All Ebook, All the Time” BEA. I know that e- is the coming trend, and I certainly advocate being aware of how it can be used in your own publishing, and what the pros and cons are for your operation, but surely we could have found more topics to discuss? Maybe next year?

I attended one very interesting lecture, and yes, it was ebook-related. The presenter was from Attributor. If you publish in niches that suffer from large amounts of organized piracy, I would invest in their services. They search all of the darknet and legitimate file sharing sites (after all, there are legitimate reasons why you might need to upload things, for example team projects where people are telecommuting). When they locate files that might be caches of pirated material, use AI and expert systems to rank the most probably-pirated of the millions of files found, and then have humans examine them to prevent false positives.

Then they do a tiered enforcement action, resulting in a 99% success rate in getting the illegitimate material yanked, or converted to a revenue producing legitimate sales site.

The auction supports The Lang School, which is a very special place indeed. They work with children who are simultaneously brilliant and learning disabled. You can probably imagine how frustrating and difficult it would be to walk in their shoes, especially in either normal or special education environments.

One of these kids could be the next Einstein, but without the support of an environment tailored to them, most will spiral into a cycle of failure, let alone realizing their potential and becoming the forces for good that they could be.

If you want to support the school, you can bid on the item above, or one of the others in the auction, at Bidding for Good. If you visit the school’s site, you can find out more, including this link for donations.

And finally, if you live in NYC, you can always come to the party, this Thursday, February 10. It’s called Cocktails at the Cabanas, and you can get a ticket here. I’ll be there, and it looks like it will be a lot of fun, as well as supporting a wonderful cause.

I’ve found that this is about the length at which the eyes roll back in the head and the brain shuts down, so why go longer??

I hope that any of you who grab a copy will like it. I’d love to hear what you think. (And if you email me with an error or confusion, I’ll send you a free copy of the next work in the series!)

I get around 10,000 non-spam emails per month. I think the tactics I use will pay off for anyone handling more than 25 or 30 “real” emails per day. If you’re getting much more than 30,000 per month, you may need more sophisticated techniques.

Start with: spam filters.
I use a Bayesian one, and recommend this class of filters highly. They learn as you go from the emails that you mark as spam, and from the ones that you fish out of your email box as non-spam. After a few weeks of using one, you should be catching the vast majority of your spam, and have a false positive rate in around one or two tenths of one percent.

Follow with: threading.
Having your conversations collected by thread is critical. Not everyone “snips” well. (Snipping is cutting out the parts of the prior email that aren’t necessary for context, so that the whole thing isn’t miles long, and you can find the new entry whether it’s top posted or bottom. Doing it well means keeping enough but not too much to supply context.)

Next: subject filters and specialized boxes.
Most of my non-spam email comes from the listservs to which I belong. I filter all of that into special in-boxes, with one for each active list, and one for all of the inactive ones. These are all in a separate folder that I can look at when I have time.

Everything that doesn’t fit a bulk category goes into the general email box, and this tends to be either junk or urgent stuff. It also tends to be pretty small amounts.

Saving emails:
I have dozens of subject boxes, in nested folders (each layer gets more specific), and my email client program automatically indexes them for searching by subject, addressee and sender, or by keywords within the email. I take emails from my current in boxes and file them in these subject boxes when I have made whatever responses or actions are required.

To Do boxes:
If there are long-term projects or issues, I tend to create a to-do box for them, and file emails inside it, even if the action hasn’t been completed. Some of these take such a long time that my other active boxes get overwhelmed. It’s hard to keep track of more than 20 active emails in a box — or at most, 50.

Just so you don’t miss me too much, I’m sharing my favorite procrastination:
LOLcats!

Many of you know that I’m a mom and a knitter in my "real life." If you share those characteristics, or simply share my slightly screwball sensibiity, you’ll also like the blog,So The Thing Is . . .

And now, back to our regularly scheduled (or rather IRregularly scheduled) posts. Enjoy.

I’ll blog more about it, and possible improvements, later.

Do please send me questions about any aspect of publishing, except submissions to publishers. I’ll be happy to try to answer.