One of the problems with our new LabourStart calendar for 2014 is that people are unable to see the amazing photos we’ve collected to show there.
When we point people directly to the Lulu.com website, they get very little sense of what’s available.
When people see the actual calendar, as Derek has discovered in Canada this week, they’re blown away.
So, here’s the new link to help us sell more of them:
Order your copies today from CreateSpace — and in a week or so, from Amazon and elsewhere.
Spread the word!
Book 3: Now completed, published, and waiting for the first paper copy to arrive before we officially announce it. A draft web page is already live — http://www.labourstart.org/firefoxos — and will be improved before launch, probably tomorrow.
Intern: We have a shortlist of five intern candidates and will interview them this Friday.
Berlin 2014: I’ll be visiting Berlin next week, meeting with our organizing committee there plus others. We should be able to launch the conference website by then, and begin online registrations.
This is how you promote LabourStart: See below for the table Derek set up at the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) convention where he’s been selling our calendars and books and making great connections for LabourStart.
Colombia campaign: After just 8 days, this is our second largest campaign ever, with just over 10,100 messages sent — over 100 of them from Colombia.
Calendar sales: Continue to be disappointing, but growing slowly. In October, we sold just 30 copies of the calendar; in September, we sold more than four times that number — 134 copies. I continue with weekly reminders via social media, and we mentioned it in a recent mass mailing. We’ll continue with this in the hope that as 2014 approaches, people will begin to buy their calendars …
Blog action day: I used this to help promote some of our campaigns — but there’s no evidence it helped at all.
Donations: We received once again a large donation from LO Norway.
Newswires: I checked to see if there was a problem with one of our French newswires — there wasn’t, and with one of our Finnish newswire — there was, and I’ve not yet been able to solve the problem.
Campaigns: We launched two new campaigns – in support of striking workers at Crown Holdings in Toronto, and in support of the Korean teachers’ and public service unions, threatened with deregistration by their government. The former is up to over 7,300 messages sent, and the latter, after just a couple of days, is already up to just under 6,800. Following the release of jailed Canadian trade unionist John Greyson in Egypt, we were able to close down the campaign. We also used one of our mass mailings to promote the IUF’s campaign in support of jailed independent trade unionists in China. The UN workers campaign, with nearly 14,000 messages sent, is our largest current campaign, and one of the largest we’ve ever done.
Calendar and Book Sales: In its first month, our LabourStart wall calendar for 2014 has sold 144 copies, an average of about five per day. I did another push this week which generated only two new sales in two days. Book sales totalled 1,664 as of earlier this week — with 959 of those being the campaigning book in English.
Book 3: Jeremy Green and I have completed a first draft of our book on Firefox OS for Activists. We’re making some final tweaks today and tomorrow and hope to have it ready on Monday.
Public events: I spoke at the European Trade Union Institute seminar in Brussels on lobbying the institutions of the EU last week; the ETUI purchased 30 copies of our campaigning book. Last Saturday, I spoke to nearly 100 activists from UNISON Wales in Cardiff, and sold all 10 campaigning books I brought with me.
Berlin 2014: While in Brussels, I had a chance to meet up with ITUC staff to discuss coordinating our efforts. In Berlin, meanwhile, we’ve set up a meeting at the Friedrich Ebert foundation for the day I arrive, later this month.
Fundraising: I did the quarterly appeal to our power users, and the mailing this time reached 20,164. Ten days into the previous appeal, in July, we’d raised only £1,843.72. This time, we’ve raised £3,191.93 in the same period — a gain of 73%.
Intern: We received about 40 applications for our internship; we’re completing the shortlist today and tomorrow and will do interviews within two weeks.
We hope to have our third LabourStart book completed next week, so this is a good time to look back at sales of our first two titles.
Since the first book (on online campaigns) was published, we managed to distribute 959 copies, 40 of those this week alone. Of those, 696 were sold directly by CreateSpace and Amazon, 138 were office copies we sold, 65 were Kindle sales, and 60 were copies we gave away (mostly to large donors, our volunteer translators, and some journalists).
The French edition of that book has seen 91 copies distributed, 81 of them through CreateSpace and Amazon, and 10 direct sales.
The second book (on the global labour movement) has had 614 copies distributed, 463 of which were CreateSpace and Amazon sales, 103 direct sales from our office, 27 sales of the Kindle edition and 21 copies given away.
The total distribution of all 3 books so far is therefore 1,664 copies.
August is traditionally a quiet time and I was away for most of the month. Nevertheless, we’ve made progress on a number of fronts.
Campaigns: We’ve won a great victory at the Toronto Plaza hotel and were praised by the United Steelworkers for the work we did. Another of our previously Canada-only campaigns has gone live — we’re supporting the union demand to released jailed Canadian film-maker and union activist John Greyson, who is being held in Egypt.
Berlin 2014: We’ve announced the date and are slowly informing people about it. We’re not rushing this out just yet as some people will be wanting to get invitation letters to apply for visas to Germany and we’re not yet ready for (we’ll want a partner union there first). The committee in Berlin has already met a couple of times. I’m planning a first visit to Berlin in late October. I with spoke with ITUC staffers who are in charge of their congress and ours will follow immediately after theirs. It looks like we already have a venue for our event, which is great as still have about 8 months to go. One of the members of our Berlin committee is visiting London and we’ll meet on Saturday.
Twitter: We reached a milestone of 10,000 followers on 26 August. Twitter cards now working (see the explanation below).
Books: We have a new publications page advertising all our books and sales are probably just over 1,500 in the first 8 months. We’re working to finish the third book in the next few days, and are discussing one more for later this year and some options for next year. CreateSpace is still not being great about payments, but we hope to have this sorted out very soon.
Calendar: The LabourStart Calendar for 2014 is now done — we’ve ordered one copy to have a look at it before we go public with it. It’s a beautiful design and kudos to Edd for all the work he put into it.
Photo of the day: There’s a brand-new feature — we’ll now be able to pre-load photos for future dates, and to archive the ones we’ve run. Derek is currently testing.
Internationalization: The Italian and Portuguese editions have been revived. We expect to spend quite a bit of time on building up the Portuguese edition and have secured some pledges of funding for this. The translators’ mailing list is now considerably larger with all languages covered and our campaigns are now routinely appearing in a large number of languages, with mailing lists growing as well.
News database: When correspondents login now, they can see their default country and language and the next step is to allow them to change these whenever they want. So if you regularly post news about, say, Canada, but suddenly have a lot of news stories from the USA, you will be able to change your default country on a temporary basis.
Travel: The next two months will see me travelling to speak at a number of trade union events. These includes separate trips to Geneva, Brussels, Cardiff, Berlin, and Kiev.
It’s been about nearly 8 months since we began selling LabourStart books and I’m pleased to report that our sales total is just under 1,500 books so far.
The breakdown is as follows:
Total: 1,498
The breakdown by type is as follows:
377 of those books — all of them the paperback edition of Campaigning online and winning (English) were sold in the first 15 days (31 December 2012 – 15 January 2013).
Our next title will be appearing in September.
As I was travelling, there were few updates to this blog during this period. So here are some highlights:
Campaigns: In my absence, we launched a new campaign in support of public sector workers in Peru. Edd has followed up with translators for missing languages in our earlier campaigns. We have a new Canadian campaign as well, and have closed down the funeral home campaign there. We helped Amnesty promote their new campaign protesting death threats against Colombian trade unionists. We’ve received permission from DISK to close down the Turkey campaign — our largest ever — but are aware that there will almost certainly be the need for followup campaigns.
Books: CreateSpace is still dithering, not paying us the royalties owed. I’ve shipped 60 copies of our global labour movement book to the International Domestic Workers Network who will be distributing them to delegates to their international congress in Montevideo in October. Jeremy Green and I are working intensively on our third LabourStart book and hope to have a draft ready in the next week or two. All our books now appear on our new publications page on LabourStart.
Calendar: Edd and I are in the final stages of preparation for the 2014 LabourStart Calendar which we hope to sell lots of copies of.
Internationalization: Our Italian news page has come to life again thanks to new correspondents. We’ve sent out a special appeal to our Hindi language list to get more people involved.
Upcoming events: I’ve been asked to speak at a Unison Wales event on campaigning in October — this will be my third visit to Unison Wales in the last year or so. That same week, I’ll be speaking at a European Trade Union Institute event in Brussels. In November, we have the Kiev event, mentioned earlier.
Global Solidarity Conference 2014 – Berlin: The committee will be meeting there this week. We’re awaiting a phone call from the ITUC regarding the final dates and then we’ll send these out in a ‘save the date’ message. I’ll go to Berlin probably in September for a first meeting with the committee and to see venues.
Donations: We’ve received a substantial donation from the IUF, as well as donations from unions in the UK, India, Canada and elsewhere.
These are two unrelated things, but wanted to tell you about both.
First, we have a new publications page on LabourStart. This is where we’ll list all our books as they’re published. I’ve done some publicity for them today and hope that you’ll do what you can to promote this page. Thanks.
Second, I’ve integrated Twitter cards into our campaigns. What this means is that once Twitter has approved us — and this could take several weeks — when people tweet our campaigns, it will look something like this.
This will be my last update for a while — I will be back at my desk on 12 August for a week and a half, and then back to work after the summer break on 28 August.
Mailing lists: I fixed the link on the English and new French home pages to ensure that anyone signing up to mailing lists there is added to our old MailChimp lists. I migrated some who had subscribed (prematurely) to the new Sendy lists. We’re not yet using Sendy for English or French, but we will.
Campaigns: I’ve sent out monthly reminders to our partners in general, and specific ones to our friends at the 3 Cosas campaign in London and GE workers in Erie, Pennsylvania campaign at the two-month mark. We’ve promoted the Maruti Suzuki campaign in Hindi to more than 300 Indians who are on our English language mailing list. We’re beginning to grow a small mailing list in Hindi as a result.
Books: I’ve followed up with CreateSpace and our bank about missing royalty payments totalling over £500. We’ve been asked to ship 60 copies of our Global Labour Movement book to the founding congress of the International Domestic Workers Network in Montevideo in October.
Asia: I’ve followed up with the 15 trade union communicators I met at the recent ILO course in Turin, asking them to support, publicize, and translate our campaigns, and to signup as volunteer correspondents.
Publicity: I was interviewed this morning for an article to appear in Labour Research.
Kiev conference in November: Edd and I have been invited to participate in an event linking together trade unionists and democratic socialists from across the former Soviet Union. One of the days will be devoted to a meeting of LabourStart correspondents from across the region.
Brussels course in October: I’ll be teaching trade unions from across Europe about campaigning in a course organized by the European Trade Union Institute. I did this last year by Skype; this year, they’re bringing me over to Brussels.
LabourStart home page in French: Edd has done a lot more work on this and we are nearly ready for launch. We’ll be meeting Andy in London in August and can finalize then.
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