Russell Davies

Account Planning School Of The Web - library

Funny things books. I love buying them, reading them and keeping them. Even though I'm clearly never going to read most of them again. They just sit there unused and unloved. So I've decided to take a leaf from Howies book and start the Account Planning Lending Library Of The Web - so the books get used and loved.

I've got a copy of everything pictured above, or listed on the clickable links in the sidebar (scroll down, look right) - if you want to borrow one then email me your address and I'll pay to ship it to you. You have to send it back within a month with a 50 word review which I'll post on here - otherwise no more books. Seem fair? Let me know if you'd like to borrow anything. I'll add more books as I come across them.

unhalfbricking

I've been rediscovering Fairport Convention recently. And I was reminded of how this is the best album cover ever. And it only gets better with age.

what agencies are for

first assignment - now closed

The first Account Planning School Of The Web homework thingy is now closed. 16 of you sent thoughts which I think is both splendid and daunting. It's going to take me a while to work through them all and I won't post anything until they're all ready so patience please.

And huge, huge thanks to everyone who joined in, I think this kind of co-operative effort is going to be really interesting.

the boys of autumn

Leafy fun in Markeaton Park. With accompanying video. (1.5MB)

I left it on the bus

If anyone wants to play along with the Account Planning School Of The Web, you need to get your homework in by 11.59pm on the 15th (GMT). The first assignment is here.

I've got about half a dozen so far, I've not looked at any of them yet, but I'm expecting great things.

account planning school in the country

Here's some more podcasting video. 5 minutes of thoughts about how to influence creatives and get your ideas injected into their thought processes. This is a response to a question someone emailled me ages ago but I was too rude to reply to right away. Hope this compensates.

Here it is. (About 28MB.)

the love of numbers

Since I became 'an author' I've really started to understand people's really personal obsession with things like tracking.

You get very little feedback on what's actually happening to your book (is anyone buying it? I've still not seen it in a bookshop) so you quickly fall back on the Amazon Sales Rank. Which is an indication of how well you're doing, but like most tracking, is at best a distant surrogate for actual achievement and is poorly understood. No-one really seems to know how Sales Rank is calculated, though various people have attempted to correlate sales with ranking and work out how many books you need to sell to get to a certain postion - but all that data is for Amazon US.

All I know is my sales rank was in the 16,000s for ages, then on the 8th it went to 2555, then on the 9th it was 1351 for a bit and then went up to 653, then on the 10th it was 1559 and now it's 7226. Not that I'm checking it every 5 minutes or anything.

I'll never disregard the importance of tracking again - you can get very invested in surrogate numbers.

Comic of the Month - November 2005

I know it's not new but I do love Ministry Of Space. It's like an incredibly cynical, bitter version of Dan Dare. Warren Ellis sat down and imagined how the world would be if Britain had seized Wehrner Von Braun et al and had led the march into space. Marvelous stuff.

Board Of The Month - November 2005

I really like this Landscape deck. Very fond of the anachronism of having a typewriter on there. Don't know exactly why it seems anachronistic, but it does.