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Put the Needle on the Record

Vinyl Collecting Passion Becomes Award-Winning Book

by Matthew Chojnacki

Editor's Note: As author and publisher of the only double medal-winning book in the 2012 IPPY Awards (for Performing Arts and Best Book Marketing) we asked Matthew to tell us the story about how his book came about.

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I've been a longtime collector of vinyl records, both 7" singles and 12" albums, and about eight years ago was at a bit of a breaking point in terms of the volume of my collection. At the same time I was converting a lot of the music to digital form, so there wasn't as much of a need to have them all at my fingertips. However, I still found myself pulling the sleeves to check out the artwork. I thought that there had to be a book out there that could essentially replace my collection, basically for the coffee table, so that I could put my collection into storage.

While there are a ton of album cover art books on the market, there were none that dealt with singles, and certainly none that covered the 1980s (which was my favorite decade from a visual standpoint). This is where the idea was originally born.

I chose to only focus on single covers from the 1980s, a niche for sure, but one that I thought was worth diving into. For me, the 1980s represented both the birth and death of vinyl single cover artwork. With MTV, imagery became a marketing tool like never before, and artists were investing as much time with their 7" singles as they previously did with their full album covers. Also, legendary artists like Andy Warhol and Keith Haring were pairing up with musicians like Grace Jones, Debbie Harry, and Madonna, generating really stunning pieces of art.

By the end of the decade, however, with the rise of the CD and cassette formats, the cover size started to shrink, and therefore the interest in creative cover artwork. Nowadays with iTunes the art canvas is even smaller - about 1" x 1", and mainstream record labels are for the most part ignoring quality artwork. It's now up to the musicians to push for great pieces (and they're still out there, mind you, but not in mass quantities).

So, my idea at the beginning was simply to provide a great representation of single sleeves from the 1980s: the good, the bad, and the ugly. It was all out there, and all very influential. The first task was to find one or two great sleeves per artist.

The second task, which took about a year, was to visually match single sleeves in pairs of two. I wanted to make the book an art piece in itself, where every page turned provided a comparison between two sleeves that visually related. One of my goals was to have Put the Needle on the Record really stand out from other cover art books on store shelves....and certainly there are plenty available.

Another key element was grabbing the stories behind the images, from the original musicians and cover artists. This was another first for cover art books, since it's quite a daunting task to nail these artists down for interviews. Originally, I only wanted a handful, in hopes that their names would help sell the book to a publisher. However, the first five musicians to jump on board were all big names: Annie Lennox, Gary Numan, The B-52's, Devo, and Yoko Ono. I couldn't believe it. Then the interview offers exploded. "Yoko is involved? Sure, I'd love to contribute." I heard that from at least twenty female musicians. In the end I interviewed about 125 artists, over a period of three years. Then Jake Shears (Scissor Sisters) wrote the foreword, and Nick Rhodes (Duran Duran) the afterword. Both are huge idols of mine. I'm still pinching myself.

Despite all of this momentum, I still had a rough time finding the right publisher. The first was quite a mainstream company, but they folded when the economy crashed a few years back. The second (in the UK), sat on the book for a year and really wanted to change the layout approach and edit the controversial material (there are banned sleeves included). There were about five more publishers that said "we love it -- but don't know how to sell it."

I finally decided to go the indie route, knowing that it would be a little bit of a gamble. Schiffer Publishing stepped up, saying that they would print the book in the way I intended, without image editing, and in a hardbound/full-color format. I was sold. I knew that I had to pick up a bit more work from the marketing standpoint, but certainly I was game.

So, a book about music is a tough sell, no doubt, and for this one in particular you really need to see it to understand it. With that in mind, two key elements of marketing for me were A) spreading the word on social media sites and blogs (they're free -- and very effective -- and are very visual), and B) creating a trailer that would show the contents of the book creatively.

About five months prior to the book's launch I started a Facebook "fan page" for the group, where I provided not only '80s music news but leaked information about the book. Not unlike a band that's releasing a new album. It's http://www.facebook.com/RecordNeedle. I'm up to about 9,000 fans, which caught me a bit off guard.

Then I thought it would be fun to create a book trailer that showed pages from the book, set to music. One of my favorite music groups, OMD, permitted me to use their song "History of Modern Part I" for the clip, and also used their video directors to create the piece! At first I thought that the Swedish video team of Bo Nordin, Björn Skallström and Danilo Giannini would be creating a simple clip, but in the end absolutely floored me with a brilliant stop-motion animated piece. They were really into the book and wanted to lend a hand. I'm still slack-jawed:

Here’s a link to the book trailer: http://www.tinyurl.com/needlevideo

Now, a few months later, I'm still pushing the book in fresh ways. I recently came up with a new promo item: a miniature "LP" jacket housing a CD-ROM (designed like a 45) that includes the promo film, press release, press photos, and sample pages. It's been very effective thus far, and is a great alternative to actually sending out copies of the book.

I definitely recommend that authors  think a bit “outside the box” in terms of promotion. First, it's tough to compete with major publishing houses, so we need to think of ways to really knock socks off and grab attention. When a magazine, newspaper, etc. gets 10 books a day -- how do we get them to pay attention to our boxes? One personal touch that I've always included, for example, is a short handwritten note written on the back of vinyl artwork. It seems to really resonate well.

Second, it's not just about the bookstores any more. We need to think of other places to sell books, not unlike the music industry (see all the CDs selling at Starbucks, in clothing stores, etc.). I recently sold 250 copies of Put the Needle on the Record for "Record Store Day 2012." Record Store Day encourages people to shop at their local record stores, and on this particular day musicians will offer limited edition vinyl releases. They normally don't carry books, but I offered a signed, limited edition of the book, and it was a big success.

We shouldn't let the publisher completely control the PR process, because there's nobody that knows the topic better than the authors themselves. Dig in.

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Matthew Chojnacki is a freelance writer and music/pop culture historian living in the Rock ‘n Roll Capital of the world, Cleveland, Ohio. In addition to an extensive music collection, he also invests in the music itself, owning a stake in five hits from the ‘80s. Put the Needle on the Record is Chojnacki’s first book.

Matthew Chojnacki
http://www.matthewchojnacki.com

(author photo by Jeff Downie)

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