The Publishing Contrarian

Finding the Perfect Executive Christmas Gift

Sure, you could pick up the phone and order an executive gift basket of Ruby Red Grapefruit to be delivered in time for the holidays. Or you could order the  perfect corporate gift online and send unique executive gifts that will be as important to your colleagues, investors, preferred clients and prospective clients as their ticket and passports — The Cure for Jet Lag by Lynne W. Scanlon & world renowned authority on PREVENTING JET LAG, Charles F. Ehret, Ph.D.

No one who unwraps your corporate holiday gifts will toss them aside. Everyone who receives The Cure for Jet Lag will be amazed by your clever choice. You can’t beat The Cure for Jet Lag when it comes to unique executive gifts. And best of all, it’s not twenty grapefruits in an executive gift basket!

A GREAT BUSINESS GIFT IDEA
Order quickly and Back2Press Books can customize the jacket cover to include your company logo or a starburst that reads “Compliments of Donald Trump” or “Compliments of The Donald” or “Compliments of the Trump Organization.” Well, you get the idea! Act really quickly and we can deliver 500 - 2000 copies to your company in plenty of time for wrapping and shipping from your company mail room.
CLICK HERE TO GO TO THE CURE FOR JET LAG WEBSITE TO PLACE YOUR ORDER TODAY! THE CURE FOR JET LAG IS NOT AVAILABLE IN BOOKSTORES or ONLINE AT AMAZON.COM or BARNES & NOBLE.COM.
View the PRESS RELEASE FOR THE CURE FOR JET LAG!

They poured down RT 27 East in cars, tumbled off the Hampton Jitney and Hampton Luxury Liner buses and disgorged from MTA Long Island Rail Road double-decker trains that ripped past crawling commuter traffic exiting New York City on the Long Island Expressway. Directors, actors, screenwriters, film critics, film lovers, all gaining momentum and numbers as the weekend approached. By Saturday they were everywhere, overrunning the luxury-store-studded sidewalks, cramming into the local Starbuck’s, and queuing up for the lip smackin’ good, international smorgasbord of films.

Luckily, I was able to be in East Hampton for opening night, Wednesday, October 15th, when the Hamptons International Film Festival actually began. My ticket in hand and press pass dangling from around my neck, I stood gamely in the suddenly bone chilling cold in the ticket holders’ line at 7 PM waiting to see the festival’s opening “Spotlight” film and grousing with other ticket holders about the low-slung, nearly-impossible-to-get-out-of Porsche sporting a handicapped sign and parked right in front of the movie theater.

Gentlemen, Start Your Movies!

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How important is the book jacket for your book? Critical, I’d say. If you are an unknown writer, your book must practically leap off the page and jump into the Amazon shopping cart all on its own. Of course, if you are a writer with a following and have cajoled all your colleagues into writing glowing testimonials about your book for the cost of a glass of Chardonnay, the jacket-as-sales-tool isn’t quite so critical since readers take endorsements seriously — at least until they’ve read the book.

Book Jackets That Look Pretty and Do Nothing.

I particularly enjoy clicking over to lulu.com, one of the printers for self-publishers and independent publishers, to check out the top 100 books listed (most of which are nonfiction, by the way). Here is an example of a perfectly beautiful book jacket for Understanding Business Statistics by Ned Freed that is lovely to look at, but next to worthless as a sales tool. The Wicked Witch of Publishing has suffered mightily through advanced probability and statistics (and received an A, thank you) and for all the world cannot detect any correlation between this beautiful cover and the book’s 604 pages of content.

Book Jackets that Demand — at the Very Least — a Peek or Sneak Peek!

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Contact: Lynne W. Scanlon
Cell Phone: 917-685-9128
Land Line: 631-907-9001
Email: Publisher@back2press.com
Website: www.back2press.com

BACK2PRESS BOOKS LAUNCHED

FOR

“THE 100,000+ CLUB”

—Authors with Books that Sold 100,000 Copies Can Apply—

—No Bookstore Sales Planned—

Why are authors whose books sold over 100,000 copies often not happy? Because many have asked themselves: “If my book could sell 100,000 copies, why not a million?”

According to Lynne W. Scanlon, founder and publisher of the new imprint, Back2Press Books, the answer is that it could have … and it should have … and it still can.

“The problem is that publishing companies are content, even ecstatic, if a book sells more than 10,000 copies, let alone 100,000. Rarely do they continue to promote a proven bestseller at the expense of the newer books currently in the pipeline. After months or even years of helping to fill the publisher’s coffers, the 100,000+ bestseller eventually dies an unnatural death from negligent homicide,” says Scanlon.

Back2Press Books is inviting authors or their heirs to submit books to be considered for repackaging and republishing. The provisos:

1. The book must have sold over 100,000 copies.
2. The rights must be held by the author or be able to be reversed.

(Back2Press Books can help secure the reversal of rights, if necessary.)

Back2Press Books was launched in 2007 by the author of Overcoming Jet Lag, a nonfiction book previously published by Berkley Books that sold over 200,000 copies and received thousands of testimonials from international travelers, including executives in The White House.

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Oh, no. Not again. Another aging author uses writing a book as an excuse to enter the world of the sex-trade and pornography. Gay Talese did at age 49 in 1981 when he wrote the nonfiction book Honor Thy Neighbor’s Wife, and proceeded to spend nine, count ‘em, years researching massage parlors, strip clubs, and sex shows, sometimes with his clothes on. I remember reading the book and wondering what his wife was thinking at the time.

John Irving did it at age 56 in 1998 when he had to research Amsterdam’s Red Light District, with its tattoo parlors, window parlors, brothels and sex shops, all of course in support of the main character in Widow for a Year, Ruth Cole, who is doing research on prostitutes in Amsterdam’s Red Light District. She finds herself hiding in a closet and witnessing the murder of a prostitute by the prostitute’s client.

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Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming is the kind of play for which you would do well to prepare yourself. This is no fluff ball diversion for the brain-dead like David Mamet’s November, nor a multi-generational tragicomedy with a pill-popping Mama stumbling down the staircase like playwright Tracy Letts’ August: Osage Country. You shouldn’t just ride in from out of town on the Long Island Railroad or Metro North thinking you are going have an evening of light entertainment on Broadway that will make for charming, intelligent, cocktail party-speak in the “burbs.” No, not with this play. Know what you are getting yourself into: The Homecoming is a lethal, haunting drama about familial one-upmanship, seduction, lust and betrayal.

“Let me outta here!”

That’s what Rose, played by long-legged Eve Best, should be screaming at the top of her lungs in this revival of Pinter’s 1965 play at The Cort Theater. Rose is the wife of one of three grown brothers played by James Frain, Raul Esparza, and Gareth Saxe. As the play begins, she’s just being introduced for the first time, after eight years of marriage, to her in-laws—a creepy bunch that would make the hairs on the back of the neck of any woman stand up. The father, played by Ian McShane, should have put at least two of his miserable whelps in a burlap bag, dropped them into the nearest river, and then, if there were any justice in this life at all, fallen in after them.

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I have seen the future and it is the end of “Used & New” purchases on amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com.

I feel it. I sense it. I know it.

All it took was for me to activate my new Kindle and download Jeannette Wall’s The Glass Castle for $7.99 and have it delivered digitally in 60 seconds, count ‘em, from Amazon for me to hear the death knell for all those subterranean, bottom feeder, entrepreneurial booksellers online who have been making money by reselling advanced reader copies, tag sale finds, and entire inventories passed to them out the back door of warehouses. And I say this as a book purchaser who always prefers to pluck books from the “Used & New” option online.

So if you visualize me now, après Christmas and my Capricorn birthday, see me in your mind’s eye as sitting in front of the computer, cute new wool socks on (thank you!); wearing a new red beret and red leather gloves (thank you!); resting a coffee cup on a stack of “wish list” new books that includes Thomas McGuane’s Gallatin Canyon, Marisha Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics, William Trevor’s Cheating at Canasta (thank you, thank you, thank you), about to switch on my birthday Kindle and place another order (THANK YOU!).

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What a comedy! Nathan Lane as the President of the United States cum extortionist. Laugh a minute.

Not.

November, written by David Mamet, author, essayist, screenwriter, film director and, for the past few years, cartoonist, opened last night in previews at the Ethel Barrymoore Theatre in New York City. There I was, hunkered down in a $98.00 aisle seat (for a “f”ing preview, as Mamet might put it) in the second-to-last row, orchestra, next to someone whom I didn’t know and who, thank goodness, displayed exceptional taste by joining me in never laughing. “Maybe all these hyenas are ringers and/or friends of the playwright,” mused I, under my breath.

I think I “get” that the play was very tongue-in-cheek. After all, Playbill, which listed all the major players in November and their credentials, described Mamet as being “better known as a cartoonist.” Frankly, I found it painful and embarrassing as, yes, an American, to watch my president, Charles H.B Smith, being portrayed as such an ignoramus and so…venal.

Yet, people laughed. Hahahahahaha. Guffaw. Guffaw. Guffaw. Slap that knee!

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I’m all for illicit affairs in the office. To my mind, the more, the better. Sub rosa relationships just make going to work so much more fun. Not only do people take more pains with their appearance, but you can count on them to have upgraded their underwear. (Oh, my God, I can’t let him see me in the floral cotton panties up to my armpits! Oh, my God, I can’t let her see me in these sagged out, skid-marked skivvies.)

What gives me pause about the revelation that the notorious Judith Regan and macho-man Bernard Kerik had a smoochfest in an apartment overlooking Ground Zero for three months in the winter of 2001 is NOT that he was her oft- and currently-married lovebird (hey, that’s the third wife’s problem, n’est-ce pas?), but when his autobiography, The Lost Son: A Life in Pursuit of Justice, was published, she had him under contract AND at the same time between the 200-thread-count sheets.

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I know that every book and every screenplay exists because of an heroic and obsessive act of creativity. However, after spending four days last week turnstiling into and out of and back into the United Artists 6-Plex in East Hampton for the 15^th Hamptons International Film Festival, I was scratching my head, wondering if a few of the filmmakers hadn’t wasted their time and everyone else’s.

Who in the world pulled Starting Out in the Evening from the bookshelf and deemed it worthy of a film? Did anyone take the time to get past the hype in Customer Reviews on Amazon and read some of the less than laudatory comments about Starting Out? “Not much happens.” “Brian Morton does not really tie up anything with his endings.” “…some of the individuals in the book seem put together in a piecemeal way.” “This book sat on my bookshelf for nearly five years….” (And perhaps, I might add, should have stayed there!)

And what depths of originality did the screenwriters plumb to come up with Rails & Ties, Four Minutes and AmericanEast?

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