Recently I watched Mark Penn, author of Microtrends, talking about the subject of his book. And he flagged some interesting stuff.

. The number of "lefties" is on the rise. No longer do parents try to keep their kids from being different. Whereas we used to try to keep up with the Joneses, today we're content to be different from the Joneses. In fact, if the Jones family has a white fence, we'd probably opt to paint ours purple. This attitude has also led to a huge number of kids being vegan. When kiddos say, "Yuck, I don't want to eat meat," today's parent says, "Fine, then don't eat meat."
. More than 30 million people now have tattoos.
. More people drive long commutes to own property. And that means a spike in audiobook sales.
. Couples are opting to have pets instead of kids or at least delay childbearing, trying out "pets" as surrogates first. So a great amount of disposable income is being spent on dogs and cats.
. A huge number of households are now headed by women.
. Dads are spending more time than ever with their kids. (Yet most marketers of parenting products still gear their messages to moms.)
. More people meet via internet, where race, class, and gender are not the barriers they once were. About ten percent of couples marrying these days met on the internet.
. A huge number of students are dropping out of college. We have books on how to get into college, but not much on how to transition out of college.
. The person who uses technology today is the most sociable person (whereas techies of the past were geeks). Today's tech connects people and brings them together.
. More dads than ever are becoming parents at age 40-45.
. The primary internet customer is the "long attention span" person who can go fifty pages deep into a site and stay up all night online.
. About half of folks who reach retirement age don't retire. Of those, half keep working because they prefer their jobs to leisure.

So I wonder...how would the public receive a book on left-handed over-40 college-dropout parents who get tattoos?