The Finch and Pea

Beatles-inspired author photos

In 1994, Bruce Alberts and his co-authors released the third edition of their popular textbook Molecular Biology of the Cell. On the back cover, all the authors are photographed crossing Abbey Road, because they worked on the book just around the corner from the famous crossing.

When they published another text book, Essential Cell Biology, they stuck with the joke and took a photo in the style of With The Beatles.

Now committed to a running gag, almost all subsequent editions of both textbooks have included author photos in the style of a Beatles album. I’ve listed them all on easternblot.net, with sliders to compare them to the corresponding album. I couldn’t get the sliders to work on this blog, unfortunately, but I will leave you with my favourite author photo, of the fourth edition of MBOC. Who do you recognize in the collage?

Images: Abbey Road parody: I photographed the back of my copy of Molecular Biology of the Cell, 3rd edition (1994). With The Beatles parody: This image comes from the blog of Svenn, who misidentifies it as the second edition of Essential Cell Biology – it’s the first (1997). Sgt Pepper parody: I found this posted on Reddit by a user called hookp. Don;t know if they took the photo, but it’s the back of the 4th edition of Molecular Biology of the Cell. All books published by Garland Science, and obviously all images are inspired by the Beatles.

Introducing Banks’ Second Theorem

A neighbor recently opened an etsy shop to sell her paintings. She asked me a bunch of questions about the process, which I was happy to answer. Then she asked me the essential question: “How do you get people to find you on the internet?”

Getting people to find me on the internet (ohai!) is the central struggle of my career. It’s a constant battle that I’ve been fighting every single day, with some success, for the past five years. But of course I didn’t tell my neighbor this, because I didn’t want to scare her off. So I suggested she start by posting her new shop on her Facebook page. “Well, that’s the thing, I don’t do Facebook.” Twitter? Nope. Instagram? What? We didn’t even get to the idea of submitting work to blogs.

I had a sudden flashback to a conversation with another artist a few years earlier, who complained that twitter wasn’t working well for promoting her work. “I tweet a lot,” she explained, “But I don’t actually READ tweets.” Dear fellow artist,

This is not to say that twitter is the only way to go, or that artists have to spend as many hours a day on the internet as I do. They probably shouldn’t!

But really, selling online has a lot in common with selling offline. You need to put in some time. You have to get out there and forge relationships. You need to know who the players are. I’m going to call this Banks’ second theorem:*

If you want to sell on the internet, you have to be on the internet.

If you had a brick-and-mortar shop, you would know the other shopkeepers in your neighborhood, wouldn’t you? Well, if you have an online shop, the internet is your neighborhood. Get out there, take a walk every day, and say hello. Read some blogs. Read some tweets. Make some intelligent comments. Show other people the cool things you find on your walks. Then say, “here, have a look at what I’m working on.” Repeat.

*I’ll get to the first theorem later. My blog, my rules.

(originally posted on Artoblogica)