The Publishing Contrarian

The Wicked Witch of Publishing has had a brilliant idea. Yes, a Christmas bulb exploded over her head while she was planning her December visit to the James A. Farley Post Office in midtown Manhattan in New York City to comb through letters to Santa Claus. This holiday season, why can’t book reviewers, authors, literary agents, libraries, publishing companies, bookstores, community service organizations, local associations and individuals—along with a new doll, video game, or warm coat—send great books to needy kids and families? 
 
More than 100,000 letters from around the world are sitting at the James A. Farley branch right now, and millions of Dear Santa letters are being read by caring people at local Human Services Departments, Rotary Clubs, churches and synagogues around the globe.  
 
Dear Santa,
I am the mother of three (3) beautiful childs of the 5, 13 years old and one of eight month (8)… The most important thing I want is to give my childrens happiness sadly enough I can’t buy the basic thing in life. I would be so grateful if Santa Claus would send things. Luis is 13, pants size 16-18 sneakers 9 coat sweaters = 16-18. Magdalena is 5 years old Pants = 6, sneakers = 13, coat and sweathers = 6 Emiliano is (8) month old pants 18-24 m sneakers = 4-5 Coat and Sweathers = 18-24 m. Thank you, Santa Claus for making dream be come true.

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For three years my friend Gilbert (a retired physician and, he would be the first to agree, an intellectual) has been emailing me article after article about “the terrorists.” His belief is that the only good terrorist is a dead terrorist and that there is no such thing as a Muslim who isn’t a terrorist. I used to resist the implied syllogism, suggesting he was overreacting. (Should I mention here that he is Jewish?)
 
Now, I’m a true believer, halleluiah, and it ain’t in Islam.

Where’s my gun?
 
I’m wondering whatever happened to that 410 shotgun with which I used to shoot skeet on Lone Tree Hill in New Canaan, Connecticut with my father and his friends and my brothers when I was a little girl. I can shoot. Oh, yes, I can. Thank goodness.
 
Documentary “Obsession” on Fox News Network Causes Wicked Witch to Click Over to National Rifle Association (NRA) Website.
 
Yes, I saw “Obsession.” I was one of the 2.5 million comfy, cozy Americans sitting in front of his or her big-screen TV, whiling away the evening when I got my peek into the inside world of Muslim extremists. My God. (And I mean MY God, not the prophet, Mohammed.) Little kids in Muslim countries were not reciting their ABC’s in this documentary. Those weren’t Nazis goose stepping around, but they sure looked and sounded like the ones you see in vintage news clips. If you missed seeing the documentary in its entirety, at least go to the online Fox News site and watch excerpts. (You have to get past the 18-second commercial, but the snippet from Obsession is worth the wait.)

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,226482,00.html

Those videos of the jets hitting the Twin Towers remind me of the footage of the  Japanese kamikaze pilots on “World at War,” the documentary series that my father, a ship’s doctor on the USS Alabama during WWII, watched religiously. He knew all about kamikaze pilots.

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If the first thing a bookstore browser sees when picking up your book is the book title and the jacket design, shouldn’t that title and jacket just blow him away? And once he plucks your book from among the thousands in the store, shouldn’t the jacket promotional copy just sizzle and scorch his hands on the way to the cash register?

Of course it should, but more often than not (given the number of books that fail to ignite in the bookstore), the promotional copy on the book jacket is so lackluster that the potential buyer doesn’t even bother to take that critical next step—a peek at the first paragraph of the first chapter—before tossing the book back into the pile and moving on in search of a book whose jacket copy leaves him breathless!

The Story Can’t Sell Itself

Well before a book hits barnesandnoble.com, borders.com and bookstores, a huge mix of promotional elements must be in place to set the stage for robust sales. The most obvious pushes come from the author’s reputation for writing blockbuster stories. Charles Frazier’s Thirteen Moons soared onto the top-10 fiction list in the New York Times four weeks ago because of the success of Cold Mountain. The extraordinary publicity The Audacity of Hope received when Barack Obama appeared on “60 Minutes,” “Today,” “The Ophrah Winfrey Show” and the front cover of major magazines has catapulted this nonfiction book to the No. 1 spot on the New York Times nonfiction list next Sunday. Winning the Nobel Prize for Literature or The Booker Prize doesn’t hurt either (though they don’t always help.) A publishing company can also back a book with advertising, fire off extra author review copies (ARCs) to book reviewers, and even spend money for preferential shelving. All of these strategies, individually or in combination, work to move a book to the cash register or online checkout in the days or weeks immediately after publication, but the question is: how do you generate sales once the initial publicity push is over? (more…)

I hadn’t even intended to go to any of the movies being shown at the 14^th Hamptons International Film Festival. Like a lot of the people who own homes out here, when the Friday night cars stream into town and the Jitney and Luxury Liner buses disgorge the weekenders from the city, we head for deep water. (Oh, wait, I forgot, I had just gotten out here myself on Thursday from the city. That’s right, I was disgorged too, just a bit earlier than the others!) Eleven thousand additional people were expected in East Hampton for the festival! Dive, Dive!

My neighbor, Katy, had miraculously cadged two free tickets to the film 1:1 from a friend who had been doing volunteer work at the festival. Katy invited me, and after last week’s posting with its subsequent vitriolic, finger pointing, name calling (You’re a racist! No, you’re a racist!), email slug-fest around the blogosphere, I needed to sit in a dark theater and regain my sanity. So Katy and I fought for a parking space in town, and joined cinephiles who had trekked in from all over the United States and maybe even the world. The very honest Katy bought a gigantic, butter-soaked bag of popcorn while the opportunistic Wicked Witch dropped down on all fours and sneaked past the overpriced concession with her large diet-coke and stash of oatmeal cookies purchased down the street.   
 
1:1 started and within minutes I had caught the film festival bug—and caught it bad. I knew I would try to snag a press pass in the morning. And, yes, I hoped that some of these films originated as literary fiction or nonfiction books or memoirs so that I could tie the movies I saw to my publishing blog and keep one step ahead of the “tend to your knitting” crowd. (You know who you are!)
 
How to Grift a Press Pass to an international  film festival: Up at dawn I knew the challenge would be to convince someone (it would turn out to be the very handsome D’Arcy Drollinger from Springer Associates in New York City) that I was, indeed, worthy of a press pass. How was I going to pull this off, simple blogger that I am?  Here’s how I did it:   (more…)

“Greetings, my name is [–] and I’m the director of [–], you are slated to do a book signing with us…. I want to know if you are a black/African American person.”

The above is an email message posted by author Millenia Black on her blog Millenia Black—Taking Care of Business. Click on the link above and scroll down to March 13th to see the entire posting.

This blunt email message sent Black into paroxisms of indignation. She felt her race was nobody’s business when it came to book promotion and she was incensed that the director of the bookstore would even dare ask such a question. So insulted was Black that she canceled her appearance and left the director in the lurch, forced to locate an alternative author to make an appearance. And 25 out of 26 commentors joined the rage-in:

“The frickin’ nerve of some people! I’d make sure this idiot looks like the dumb shit he is.” – Lynn Ray Harris

“I think I would call the store and ask to speak to the manager. I would try to get the person who did that FIRED!!!” —Anonymous

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I loved making money while I slept. Every time someone bought one of my nonfiction books, I was probably sleeping or reading on the beach on Block Island, Rhode Island or in East Hampton, New York, or lounging somewhere with a margarita in my hand, humming “Girl from Ipanema.” (”Tall and tan and young and lovely….”

I once went to Yankee Stadium (seating capacity 56,937), looked at all those people, and thought: “Whoa, look at that sea of faces. If each one of them would just buy a single copy of my book I’d make some good money.” And, in fact, several hundred thousand people over the years would indeed buy my books, but I never made great money, certainly not the kind of money I had envisioned when my books started to sell well. But that was then and this is now and I’m not writing books to make money anymore because I have learned that book royalties are just too hard to earn in quantity—even when I’m sleeping, tanning or carousing—and there are too many tricks in book publishing contracts designed to make certain that my share of the profits ends up the smallest share.

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Raise your hands!

Is your anger and resentment so all-consuming that you can talk about nothing to friend and family other than how awful your ex is being toward you, how mistreated and marginalized you were at work, or how loathsome and certifiable your neighbor is? Are you cornering virtual strangers in the supermarket and subjecting them to your indignant tirade, when all they wanted was help getting a can of peas off the top shelf? When you saw Charlie Shanian, Tori Spelling’s ex-husband last week on “The Dr. Keith Ablow Show,” did you scream: BOOK ME!

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It took me just a jacket-read at Book Hampton to understand why Kim Edward’s book, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, became a creeping, then raging bestseller through word of mouth. In fact, even had it been the most poorly written book in the history of publishing, I know it still would have ignited a brushfire in sales.
 
Given the usual routine whereby publishers blast 300 author review copies (ARCs) into outer space, hoping against hope that they’ll somehow land on an interested reviewer’s desk, writers need to write with clever marketing ploys in mind and editors need to capitalize on the ancillary (meaning other than a good plot) elements that authors can weave into a book to make readers eager to buy. Sure, everybody hopes the book is good, but sales don’t have to be completely plot-driven for a book to be successful in monetary, if not literary, terms.  
 
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You and I owe Frederick G. Kilgour a big THANK YOU. Because of this recently deceased librarian’s pioneering work, just a few days ago we became able to go directly to www.worldcat.org and locate the library closest to home or office that has any given book, CD or video we would like to checkout, download or view directly, even if the closest copy is 1000 miles away––or even a continent away. It’s that simple! All we have to do is type in the name of the book, CD or video AND our ZIP code. The library network we tap into links 55,000 institutions in 110 countries!

It works. I tried it! I typed in the title of one of my old, out-of-print books. Worldcat reported one copy in a library about 20 miles from where I am right now. There were no copies in my local branch of the library. Interestingly, there were copies in other languages in other countries. Yes, it’s the magic of computers once again! The intra-state library database has gone global. 

Let’s Go Worldcatting!

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What a great idea to have Novel Night at the library in East Hampton, New York. An estimated 250 author groupies showed up at the cocktail party held on a lush grassy patch of lawn behind the library and approximately 375 deeper-pocketed benefactors/patrons/sponsors headed over to “one of 22 lovely East Hampton private homes” for dinner later that night where authors would hold court.

Of course, it is very busy in The Hamptons this time of year and I was torn about which of five big events to attend. Former President Bill Clinton and Junior Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton were in town for two very pricey fundraisers. I thought about going, but I just couldn’t see how I could force down $1000 worth of scrambled eggs at breakfast and knock back $2000 worth of margaritas at the cocktail hour, and still be able make it to my event of choice, Novel Night, at 6:30 pm—where all those local authors were corralled and captive under the big tent.

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