Hello,

Coralie Bickford-Smith is a Senior Designer at Penguin, and until recently I worked there as a copywriter (now I am still working in book marketing, but I am freelance). Coralie and I are going to grab a space on the day to talk about things that interest us. She has designed really cool books like:

We both love books. We are also intelligent, forward-thinking individuals so we know that e-books are coming. So we would like to discuss why we love books so much (teaser: they are awesome), and also what would we would like to see e-books become so we can love them as much as we love books. Because Coralie is a designer and I am very shallow, this will likely involve how they could be more beautiful, but will touch on other things as well.

UPDATE: We were talking and thought it might be a good idea to talk about why people buy the books they buy, starting with why us Bookcamp attendees buy the books we do. And from there talk about book marketing – what works and what doesn't, what we'd like to see more of (more beautiful books pls, they are our weakness) and what less of (do adverts for books work?). And how the changing times we live in are going to affect these things – are cover designers like Coralie going to become disposable irrelevances instead of the industry-striding colossi (she says) they are now, is Tao Lin a prescient genius or a gimmicky con artist, how publishers can use blogs intelligently ... Does that sound interesting to people? We definitely still want to talk about beautiful and interesting books, but this seemed like a decent way to start a fairly open discussion if it did seem interesting.

We will quickly add ourselves to the grid of activities on the day. Please come along. This is our first —camp, but we expect to be very good at ... whatever we end up doing. Already I am the first person to use the wiki to beg for other people not to ignore us, and you can expect more of that kind of marketing nous (and lack of dignity) on the day.

Here are some of the things Coralie and I have done: 

A slideshow I made for the Penguin blog about interesting type:

And, hey, I hadn't quite realised how much of my time at Penguin I spent interviewing Coralie, but here is a video:

Design to get you hiding under the covers from Penguin Books on Vimeo.

And here is an interview we did through jpegs:

And, for a refreshing change of pace, here's another interview with Coralie by someone else.

Oh, also, I am one of the owners of a 10% stake in this (unpublished) novel by Tao Lin, and would be interested to talk about that.