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Chris McCrudden Profile picture
Chris McCrudden
@cmccrudden
Author of Battlestar Suburbia series 👇, planner & the self-styled Wendy Williams of graphs. Honey, no one else wants these opinions. He/him.
Oct 8, 2019 • 25 tweets • 9 min read
So inspired by rumours that Pizza Express might fold (arf arf), I've done some digging into Pizza Express's corporate history.

And it's a FASCINATING story of how solid businesses get crippled by debt to make a few people rich. Pizza Express was a mainly London-focused restaurant business until 1992.

When a pair of entrepreneurs called Luke Johnson and Hugh Osmond bought it for £15m.

(N.B. it's been in & out of so many hands it's v hard to find hard number sources.)

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/…
Feb 11, 2019 • 10 tweets • 4 min read
Because the news is horrible I am having one of *those* days.

Here is a list of the books I wish Agatha Christie had written.

And Then There Were Nun (1939)

10 strangers are invited to a house by a mystery host and, one by one, are forced to take the veil. Mudder on the Nile (1944)
Hercule Poirot is horrified when Captain Hastings takes him on an assault course in Egypt. But that was before a runner broke their neck in mysterious circumstances scaling an obelisk
Feb 8, 2019 • 13 tweets • 6 min read
Book Twitter! @thebookseller published this today about falling YA sales. (They are down SHARPLY.)

I have thoughts about this, because I've seen the receipts.

Hold me, I'm going in...

The following observations are based on analysing the Top Ten best-selling YA titles from 2016, 2017 & 2018 in Nielsen.

N.B. This is print book data. It doesn't include ebook or audiobook sales. So bear that in mind.
Jan 4, 2019 • 14 tweets • 5 min read
🚨🚨🚨Ok, Book Twitter! Receipts incoming!🚨🚨🚨

I've spent some time analysing bestseller sales figures from this article and there's some fascinating stuff in here.

Get ready for some graphs.

theguardian.com/books/2018/dec… 1. Children's
The Top 100 books in the UK sold nearly 16 million copies in 2018.

31% of those books were children's books.

(Can we have more children's book coverage plzkthks?)
Nov 29, 2018 • 11 tweets • 4 min read
I have strong feelings about this

Some arts courses might give false promises to students about career prospects.

But instead of pointing the finger at FE colleges we should be talking about....

STRUCTURAL INEQUALITY IN THE ARTS.

Hold me, I'm going in. Graduates from FE college courses may struggle to find a job in the arts.

Because WHO works in the arts now? The rich, white middle-classes.

Aug 24, 2018 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
Whenever some technology scold says:

"Smartphones & social media are a scourge on society"

I like to remember how people in power used to view novels. As a scourge on society.

This is what 'The Youth's Religious Instructor' said about children's books in 1820. Headline 2018: SOCIAL MEDIA IS AS ADDICTIVE AS CRACK

Headline 1930: BOOKWORMS ARE LIKE ALCOHOLICS
Aug 9, 2018 • 19 tweets • 3 min read
Book Twitter!

It’s Thursday! It’s raining! It’s #bookloversday

So let’s play a game of…

Choose your own HOT DEAD GIRL thriller

First, choose your corpse. How young and hot will yours be? But before we know anything about your HOT DEAD GIRL we need to know her hair colour.

Why?

Maybe she’s born with it. Maybe you’re going to use it as lazy character determinism.

So her hair will be…
Jul 24, 2018 • 12 tweets • 4 min read
Okaaaaaaaaaay, since this controversy is raging again.

A short thread about 'readers', and why we should be careful about applying a zero-sum logic to book-buying. There are 20.1 million people in the UK who self-identify as 'readers'.

Just over half of them bought a book in the last month.
Jul 23, 2018 • 10 tweets • 4 min read
So @NPR has just published some research on smart speakers in the US, and it's a fascinating snapshot of how they're shaping a deeper relationship with audio.

(Audio publishers & marketers take note. Some great stuff in here.)

nationalpublicmedia.com/smart-audio-re… 1. Who owns smart speakers?

The over 45s, and women.

With my marketer's hat on, I find this super-interesting. It can be terribly hard to reach the 45+ audience via digital channels.
Jul 20, 2018 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
This happened today.

I have a lot of time for The Works. They sell books to under-catered for consumers in unpretentious, accessible settings.

It's not *just* this that makes it an interesting deal though...

thebookseller.com/news/works-flo… The Works used to be owned by a private equity house.

Earlier this year, Waterstones was bought by a... private equity house.

Jul 19, 2018 • 20 tweets • 8 min read
Publishing people! The latest @PublishersAssoc yearbook is out!

Underneath these bland headlines there is some

☕️STEAMING
🔥HOT
🍵TEA

On the state of the UK book business. Hold me, I'm going in...

publishers.org.uk/news/press-rel… 1. Export-driven growth

5% is okay growth for a mature market sector like publishing, but that 60% of revenues are exports alarms me BECAUSE BREXIT.

If we crash out without a deal, what happens to more than HALF of the book trade?
Jul 16, 2018 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Showgirls. Keep Elizabeth Berkeley. Starring...

MISS PIGGY AS CRISTAL CONNORS
Jun 28, 2018 • 16 tweets • 7 min read
Okay! I'm an author (1st novel out in September), I used to work in publishing, I'm a @Soc_of_Authors member.

I've thought long and hard about this problem and I disagree with both the SoA and publishers' positions on it.

Here's why...

societyofauthors.org/News/News/2018… Author earnings fall every year (they've never been high), and large publishers' profitabilities are stable or growing (slowly).

But it isn't because publishers are swindling authors. It's because the book industry is in long-term structural decline.
Jun 27, 2018 • 15 tweets • 6 min read
So since the world is a tyre fire AGAIN today, who wants a thread of adorable animals from the Danum Valley National Park in Borneo?

Oh you do.... so here we go.

The red ❤️ leaf 🍃 monkey 🐒 Red leaf monkeys move in small troupes through the forest. They live mainly on leaves and they are totally adorable.
Apr 16, 2018 • 37 tweets • 15 min read
🚨🚨TRUTH BOMB INCOMING🚨🚨

So the always amazing @DrDaveOBrien @markrt & @OrianBrook have dropped 44 pages worth of receipts on the Creative Industries attitudes to:

🔹Social class
🔹Cultural taste
🔹Inequality

Hold me, I'm going in.

createlondon.org/wp-content/upl… Inequality in the arts can feel like a trivial issue. I mean, the arts are the fluffy stuff of life, right?

No.

The arts are how we see ourselves reflected in culture, so...

🔹The unrepresented go unseen.
🔹The over-represented. assume their experience is 'universal;
Dec 27, 2017 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Ok Nadine, here we go...

The pantos you remember from your idealised childhood were local productions.

Many of them were produced by locally owned and managed theatres or by municipal theatres funded by local authorities. Many of these municipal theatres experienced big funding cuts in the 80s, because the Conservative government was a group of heartless Philistines hell-bent on stripping civic pride and identity from working class communities.
Aug 21, 2017 • 14 tweets • 4 min read
I'll say this again.

BUSINESSES DON'T HAVE A RIGHT TO EXIST. THEY MUST MAKE A CLEAR, COHERENT CASE FOR YOUR MONEY.

uk.businessinsider.com/millennials-ar… 1. Napkins - Well, what did you think would happen when you premiumised paper towels? You made another category of product obsolete.