Film, TV, and publishing companies in India are hoping to cash in on the media-saturated youth culture of the nation, according to NDTVMovies.com.
It seems the books that inspire blockbuster hits in India see an immediate boost in sales, so entertainment giant STAR India has teamed up with Prakash Books to publish almost 300 titles based on TV serials this year.
In the article, Indian poet and filmmaker Gulzar puts it bluntly:
At a time, when youngsters are glued to Internet and television channels, you cannot feed them forcefully. We must provide what youngsters want to read.
Now that the crisis over parity and pricing has eased somewhat – at least for the moment – we can again turn our attention to a more pressing issue in books: how can we get them for free?
The easiest way to get free books is to work in publishing (or at, say, a publishing industry magazine), but there are millions and millions of readers – or, at least, thousands and thousands – out there who are not so lucky, and who are thus still paying money for books. And so, for them, here is the latest in free book news:
According to Entertainment Weekly,Charlie’s Angels director McG has created three teaser spots for a kinda trashy-looking book called Celebutante.
[…] it’s a Hollywood satire […] by Amanda Goldberg (daughter of film producer Leonard Goldberg) and Ruthanna Khaligi Hopper (daughter of Easy Rider Dennis Hopper). The clips dramatize various scenes from the novel and star Autumn Reeser (The O.C.) as Lola Santisi, the daughter of a famed director who agrees to help her gay designer friend by persuading a famous actress to wear one of his gowns to the Oscars; other somewhat familiar performers in the shorts include Mike Vogel (Cloverfield) and Wilson Cruz (Rent).
No word yet on where these spots are supposed to air, but they’re clearly not kosher for network television. We’re thinking it’s probably going to be a web-only, “viral” sort of campaign. In any case, if the book turns out to be a hit, the TV series certainly won’t be long in coming.
As has been covered exhaustively in Q&Q and elsewhere, publishers have been spending a lot of time of late trying to make use of the promotional possibilities of Web 2.0 phenomena like YouTube, Facebook, and Myspace.
There are rules, however, as House of Anansi Press discovered when its Facebook profile was deleted without notice. Their crime? Facebook demands that each profile correspond to an actual person, and Anansi is, well, not a person. (Neither are some of the fictional characters who have created their own profiles on the site – such as a couple from Todd Babiak’s newest novel – but that’s another matter.)
Think of it like zoning: you can’t live in a mall, and – theoretically, at least – you can’t open a store in your living room.
In response, Anansi’s online content developer, Julie Wilson, has posted an “address to Facebook” on YouTube.
November 9, 2007 | 1:18 PM | By Leigh Anne Williams
One advantage of being a musician-turned-author is that when you launch your book, you can turn back into a musician to gather and entertain a crowd. That’s what Dave Bidini will be doing in the front window of Pages Books & Magazines in Toronto on Saturday.
The performance/launch is particularly apt for Bidini’s new book Around the World in 57 Gigs (McClelland & Stewart), which is an account of his post-Rheostatics-breakup solo tour that took him as far as England, Finland, Russia, China, Sierra Leone, and Ghana.
The performance will be accompanied by a marathon reading of the entire book. No word on whether Bidini or any of the band will be dressed as elves to compete with Christmas window displays.
The final three YouTube video trailers for Douglas Coupland’s new novel, The Gum Thief, were released last week. The series has been attracting steady traffic since the campaign started a month ago.
[Coupland’s publisher] Random House worked with marketer Crush Toronto to produce the nine viral shorts, which they hope will attract people to Coupland who don’t usually read fiction.
The most popular videos, which have collectively logged over 3,000 views, are the ones based on Glove Pond, the novel-within-the-novel at the heart of The Gum Thief; they feature Coupland deadpanning over an animated collage of late 1970s-style advertisements for cigarettes and scotch (excerpts from the novel are cleverly worked in as ad copy). The result is surprisingly stylish, casual, and hip, and oh so Couplandian.
The irony, of course, is that Coupland’s viral campaign is itself embedded with ads – whether intentionally or not – for Staples, the office supply superstore in which the novel is set. Three of the videos are filmed in the aisles of an anonymous Staples outlet, while two others feature stop-motion animation using thousands of small “s” staples – what a marketer might call subliminal metonymy.
Whether the real-life Staples is privy to – or paying for – any of this is yet unclear, but Coupland could take a cue from author Jim Munroe, who in 2002 invoiced real-life brands lampooned in his novel Everyone in Silico for (admittedly unwanted) product placements.
October 17, 2007 | 1:42 PM | By Leigh Anne Williams
Christopher Smith, co-owner of Collected Works bookstore in Ottawa, says pressure from consumers unhappy with the gap between U.S. and Canadian prices on books has spurred the store to sell dual-priced books for the U.S. price as a short-term promotion that will last until Dec. 31. Earlier this month, The Ottawa Citizen reported that the store’s owners decided to take this action in light of the Canadian dollar’s continued rise in value relative to the U.S. dollar.
Mr. Smith said the industry cites many reasons for pricing Canadian books differently, including the fact that many books were released months ago when the Canadian dollar was far weaker than the U.S. dollar.
“The consumer doesn’t really care about that,” he said, adding that the promotion will take a financial toll on his store. “We are definitely going to take a loss when we do this.”
Pat Caven, manager at the competing Perfect Books, said selling at that price wouldn’t cover costs, and so her bookstore wouldn’t be following Collected Works’ lead.
The promotion may make book-buyers merry, but just what kind of holiday cheer it brings to the Ottawa bookstore remains to be seen.
Canadian authors are well represented in a book of fictional love letters, titled Four Letter Word, which is being published by Knopf Canada in 2008. Prior to its release, Times Online is inviting readers to sign up for free excerpts, which will be sent to their inboxes beginning Oct. 29, by contributors such as Margaret Atwood and Leonard Cohen.
In the meantime, lonely hearts may find some consolation from a similar series of love letters published in The Walrus in 2005, which also featured contributions by Atwood and Cohen, as well as David Bezmozgis, Sheila Heti, M.G. Vassanji, and Jonathan Lethem.
That earlier series varied widely in terms of tone and delivery – from bald lasciviousness (Cohen: “When I caught her in the flesh / And floated on her hips…), to squalid romanticism (Bezmozgis: “My love has brought neither of us any happiness”), to outright weirdness (Lethem’s entry is addressed to and from inanimate objects) – but remained consistently G-rated. Times readers might be in for something a little racier: the promotion is prohibited to minors under the age of 18.
The New York Times has a story about some recent large-scale publicity embargoes for big books that ended up getting thwarted when newspapers – their appetites whetted, perhaps, by those very embargoes – obtained early copies of the book and reported on them ahead of the publication date.
What does the currently ubiquitous Alan Greenspan have in common with George J. Tenet, Bob Woodward and Harry Potter?
In each case publishers prepared elaborate marketing plans to roll out their books under strict embargoes, hoping to control the books’ reception and focus attention at just the moment they hit store shelves. But each time, news organizations were able to buy early copies and write about the contents, creating a publisher’s nightmare of managing bruised relationships with other media outlets — or fans — that thought they had exclusive first rights to the material.
The task of unveiling a big book— especially one with great news interest or enormous popular demand — has changed dramatically in recent years as players in an increasingly competitive news media seek to be the first to unveil content, and the Internet makes it more difficult to keep books under wraps.
At the same time the delicate publicity dance has taken on a heightened importance as books, like movies, must now explode out of the gates or quickly recede.
Closer to home, a similar situation occurred with the recent release of former PM Brian Mulroney’s doorstopper memoirs – a strict embargo didn’t dissuade a couple of prominent national newspapers from “obtaining” copies of the book and reporting on the contents a couple of days before anyone else had seen it.
The damage that leak had on the book’s fortunes can perhaps never be measured. </sarcasm>
Of all the traditional complaints about e-books – that they are hard to read, can’t be read in the bathtub, don’t actually resemble books, etc. – there is one that has never before been addressed, perhaps because most people assumed it was a point in favour of e-books: the fact that they don’t smell. Specifically, that they don’t smell like old books.
As it turns out, for a whole lot of students – the most lucrative potential market for e-texts – the smell of a book matters. And the older the better.
This is the very failing to be remedied by online e-book provider Café Scribe. According to a press release on its web site, the company will soon be providing e-book users with scratch-and-sniff stickers that give off the odour of a musty, old tome.
Though the target market is students for now, we see these stickers being an in-demand item for ex-used bookstore owners and librarians who are having difficulty adjusting to civilian life. It would be like a nicotine patch for recovering bibliophiles.
Authors and publishers who are still wondering what kind of information they should be putting on this thing called the Internet should take a look at the website D.F. Bailey has built for his new novel, The Good Lie (Turnstone Press). He’s got a detailed synopsis of the book, the first page of text, and book club questions – but that’s only scratching the surface. Also on the site are an essay about the genesis of the book, a “novel diary” with notes made during the years Bailey was writing the novel – including material that he cut from it – plus a bio of Turnstone editor Wayne Tefs, some of the e-mails that Tefs and Bailey traded regarding the editing of the book, and more.
He also links to Turnstone, though, sadly, his book doesn’t seem to appear anywhere on the publisher’s own site. Sigh.
Anyway, Quillblog is impressed – blown away, even. And we have to wonder, if Bailey can do this without the support of a multinational publisher, why is a site like this one such a rarity?
We also can’t help contrasting such a generous, content-rich initiative with the recent embargo trend we’re seeing among large and medium-sized presses – the apparent desire to cling to information jealously.
The blog Two Umbrellas points to an eyebrow-raising scheme: a continuing education course at Temple University in Philadelphia entitled “A Sneak Peek at Tomorrow’s Bestsellers.” According to the course description:
Every fall publishers introduce and promote a new crop of novels, books they hope are future bestsellers. This unprecedented course is your chance to get a sneak preview of five forthcoming novels from major publishers. You will read special advance copies of the books and then, as a class, critique each book and predict what readers and critics will say when the books are actually published. Contributing publishers will include: W.W. Norton, Knopf, Random House and others to be determined.
The fee for the course? $95. That’s right, people are being asked to shell out close to a C-note for the privilege of participating in a publishers’ focus group. No wonder the Two Umbrellas post is titled “A New Low.”
Sometimes, if you want to sell books, you’ve got to go where the people are: that is, bars, community centres, planes, trains, the Internet, and now, thanks to an emerging trend, people’s offices. According to a story in the San Francisco Chronicle, companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Starbucks have been hosting book events for their employees. In the case of Google, the company sweetens the pot by buying a ton of books to hand out free.
“There are so many distractions out there,” said Yelena Gitlin, publicity manager for Bloomsbury Books, who started bringing authors to Microsoft and Starbucks in 2003. “It’s hard to get people into bookstores these days, so book publishers and sellers have to come to readers — and they are often at work.”
Indeed, companies like Google are offering so many perks or “enriched lifestyle” options, as they are called — fitness classes, massage services, dry cleaning, financial advice, ski trips, round-the-clock meals and now lunch hours with famous authors — that the novice might not realize that health, well being and community were previously sought outside work.
At Yahoo, there’s even an employee by the name of Judy Moore whose title is “party princess.” Among Moore’s duties is to oversee high-profile book events.
The corporate author event originated at Microsoft Research in Seattle in the late ’90s, when science and technology authors were invited to address employees of the company’s think tank division. The program became so popular that in 2000 Linda Stone, Microsoft’s “Virtual Worlds” director, expanded it to include all kinds of authors and all of Microsoft, with the help of Kim Ricketts, Seattle’s University Bookstore event organizer. Two years later, SmartMoney magazine picked Microsoft’s author events as the employee “perk of the month,” and according to Ricketts, a new business model for bookselling was born.
“We sold and do sell a lot of books at companies,” Ricketts said. “It immediately became clear to me that this is a more efficient way to sell books.”
It sounds like a sweet gig for the authors – after all, nothing else says “captive audience” like a group of clean-shirted cubicle dwellers. The flesh-and-blood aspect is probably key, though – we’re thinking that the offices of Google and Microsoft are at least a couple of venues where Margaret Atwood’s LongPen would seem less like a novelty and more like business as usual.
Liberal party leader Stephane Dion met with a few Canadian writers last week at the Drake Hotel in Toronto and promised that a Liberal government would restore the $11.8-million in public diplomacy funding cut from the Foreign Affairs budget by the Conservative government last fall, an article in The Globe and Mail reports.
The Writers’ Union of Canada has staged protests and sponsored a petition against the cuts, which have drastically limited the capacity of Canadian embassies to host events and assist with the promotion of Canadian culture and artists abroad.
“The meeting with Dion was a huge relief,” said Susan Swan, chair of the Writers Union of Canada. “We got a feeling of being on the same page with a politician after months of trying to have a dialogue with the Harper government.”
The Liberal leader is on a charm offensive with Canadian artists and arts leaders and has had face time with artists and leaders from the music industry, theatre, museums and dance in Montreal, Winnipeg and Toronto. He is gambling that culture matters to urban voters. Whether or not that’s true, “it’s a weak spot for this Conservative government,” says Peter C. Newman, one of the writers at the Drake. “With globalization, we’ve lost the battle for economic independence, but cultural nationalism is our saving grace.”
So, that should score some points with artists, but Stephen Harper is currently back at the ranch flipping burgers at the Calgary Stampede. How’s your barbequing, Stephane?
Paper Cuts, Dwight Garner’s new blog about books for The New York Times website, is off to a good start. In addition to commenting on current happenings and issues in the publishing world, Garner is planning some interesting features such as a weekly playlist of songs from a writer or someone bookish. “Why? Because books and music, on good days, just seem to go together. And because the ‘celebrity playlists’ on iTunes never get around to asking writers to pitch in.”
And with access to the Times’ archives, Garner promises to “occasionally rummage around in the history of book advertisements in this newspaper, tracing them from the middle of the 19th century through today.” If that seems very retro and printy for a blog, Quillblog recommends the first slide show for an interesting view of how publishers were promoting writers such as Toni Morrison, Ken Kesey, Susan Sontag, Calvin Trillin, Joan Didion, and Cormac McCarthy in the 1960s and ’70s.
An ad for Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, with an extensive quote from Times critic John Leonard, stands up remarkably well 37 years later. But other ads are more tellingly of their time, such as this 1965 blurb from Bruce Jay Friedman for the novel August Is a Wicked Month by Irish author Edna O’Brien: “I don’t know when, in recent years, I’ve read a better book by a lady novelist.” The ad is complete with a sultry close-up of O’Brien smoking. We’ve come a long way, baby. Or have we?
The New York Times investigates that perpetual publishing mystery: what makes a book a bestseller? The answer, according to the article, is: who knows? Books that are bounced from slush pile to slush pile go on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies. Others that seem to be surefire hits get pulped within months of publication.
Brian DeFiore, a literary agent, asks: “Is it the cover? The title? The buzz wasn’t there? Timing? It wasn’t that good?”
The answer is that no one really knows. “It’s an accidental profession, most of the time,” said William Strachan, editor in chief at Carroll & Graf Publishers. “If you had the key, you’d be very wealthy. Nobody has the key.”
It’s the publishing equivalent of a Greek myth in which the gods – on a whim, on a bet, for a joke – take turns interfering in human fate: “This thriller about the Knights Templar shall succeed; this one shall fail. This wry comedy about a lonely, weight-obsessed, husband-seeking office worker shall succeed….”
The New York Times has published an excerpt of British author Steven Hall’s debut novel The Raw Shark Texts. Hall was in Toronto yesterday for the launch of the Canadian edition, which has been marketed with a guerrilla campaign that included sending cryptic letters (like the one the protagonist in the novel receives) to media outlets and reviewers (including Q&Q staff). Similar guerrilla campaigns have run in the U.K. and U.S., but HarperCollins Canada is the only publisher to launch the book with an art installation – “a conceptual boat” modelled on a description in the book. Hall, who is also a visual artist, shaped the boat out of sundry cardboard boxes, planks, coathangers, old computers, and a Weed Whacker gathered by HarperCollins staff.
Hall and HarperCollins also prepared one other Canada-only feature for the launch – 250 copies of an extra chapter. Hall told Quillblog that the chapter was a part of the original manuscript. Labelled Chapter Zero with negative page numbers, it belongs at the beginning of the book, but he recommends reading it after finishing the book as it has been printed. When asked why Canadians were the only ones to get the extra chapter, Hall replied jovially, “I just love you guys.” Assuring Quillblog that he doesn’t just say that to everyone, he added that some of the best discussion he had heard of the book so far happened at a pre-launch event that HarperCollins had organized with a Toronto reading club several months ago. He sounded sincere about that, but then this Canadian Quillblogger might be easily flattered by promotion-savvy authors.
Photos of the launch at Toronto’s SPIN Gallery:
Kyle Buckley of Toronto’s Type bookstore arrives at the gallery with Toronto Life’s online editor and “whoop whoop!” enthusiast, Jason McBride.
Pages Books & Magazines’ Marc Glassman is OK with having his photo taken. HarperCollins Canada publicity director Rob Firing … is not.
The Writers’ Trust of Canada’s James Davies gets ID’d at the bar.
Steven Hall reads from The Raw Shark Texts just off the stern of a “found-object” shark-fishing boat built in the middle of the gallery especially for the launch.
HarperCollins Canada president David Kent, flanked by editors Iris Tupholme and Phyllis Bruce.
HarperCollins publicist Miranda Snyder shows off a copy of a special “Chapter Zero” of Hall’s novel, available only at the launch.
Space TV’s Mark Askwith gets his copy of Chapter Zero.
Word is that the much-loved – er, well, much-remembered – Choose Your Own Adventure books are about to relaunch with a new series (with Canadian Manda distributing in Canada). So it only makes sense that the books’ makers have taken steps to protect the brand. According to a press release that arrived at the Q&Q home office recently, the Vermont-based Chooseco LLC has filed an injunction against DaimlerChrysler and several other companies, including Marvel Entertainment.
It seems that a Jeep Patriot ad campaign that kicked off last month plays on the CYOA conceit and also “features an interactive website and movie which is recognizably similar to the model used for the Choose Your Own Adventure book series.” (We’re not sure where Marvel fits in – perhaps there’s some cross-promotion in which Spider-Man chooses to chase the Sandman in a Patriot rather than a Range Rover.)
If you choose to continue reading this post, click here.
If you choose to go to the Q&Q splash page, click here.
If you choose to watch Alanis Morissette singing that “My Humps” song, click here.
Prominent indie bookseller Richard Bachmann has spoken out about the More Canada initiative, in which several Canadian publishers are seeking funding to subsidize display placement for their titles in Indigo and indie bookstores.
In a statement issued today, Bachmann, the owner of A Different Drummer Books in Burlington, calls the scheme “outrageous,” arguing that “public money should not be used to underwrite marketing expenditures.” He also takes a pragmatic position – saying “we do not quite believe that advertising and focused display tables will work any wonders; those methods are already being employed” – and goes on to wax philosophical about the Indigo-dominated book market (“publishers have co-authored some of their own problems”).
Download a PDF of the full Different Drummer release right here.
Douglas Coupland can add celebrity endorser to his list of roles. The Vancouver author, screenwriter, artist, and all-around Renaissance dude is one of the five “extraordinary people” endorsing Rogers’ Blackberry Pearl.
Not only does the product’s website feature a still of one of these phones with a shot of Coupland on its screen (how deliciously meta) but by clicking on it, you can discover all of the exciting things he does with his new toy, and at what time he does them. For even more Coupland-Blackberry fun, watch a video in which he extols the product’s virtues and tells us that the Blackberry is a part of the future finally feeling like the future that was promised by sci-fi — “I mean, just the fact that I can get e-mail in a parking lot is sexy,” he tells us.
In addition to perusing Coupland’s technological, company-approved itinerary, you can also take a look at a posting on flickr photo sharing titled, “WTF douglas coupland!?” that features, in addition to a shot of a two-page magazine ad of Coupland, Blackberry in hand, a thread of outraged fans bemoaning his corporate stint.
In business, you never miss an opportunity. So when Canadian author and motivational speaker Gerry Robert heard that his book The Millionaire Mindset appears briefly in the #1 movie in North America, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, he immediately leapt into action, sending out a press release to the media and prominently displaying the poster for the movie on his website. In one scene from the movie, Borat finds himself at a yard sale, looking through copies of used books. According to Roberts, The Millionaire Mindset is one of them. (Though Q&Q staffers who had seen the film could only recall the volume on Baywatch that Borat later makes off with.)
Hey, it’s a bit of a stretch, but as Robert himself might say, nobody became a millionaire by not tryin’.
With Thomas Pynchon’s first new novel in nine years, Against the Day, set for release, Time looks at the challenge facing his publisher, Penguin: “How do you market a book written by a publicity-shy author?”
Well, there will be no Oprah appearance, to be sure, nor a boxing throwdown against John Barth or Robert Coover (though Quillblog would like to see that). But Penguin probably won’t have too many publicity problems. After all, how many novels get longish pre-release stories in Time, without even the benefit of an author sitdown? And hey, there’s always The Simpsons, to which the reclusive author has now lent his voice not once, but twice.
A few decades ago, novelist and literary pugilist Norman Mailer, the man Woody Allen once said would be donating his ego to Harvard Medical School, took out a full-page ad for his own novel Deer Park. Instead of the usual puffery, Mailer filled the ad with all of the nastiest quotes he could find from reviews of the book.
Though not quite in the same vituperative league, Random House’s ad for Kevin Patterson’s novel Consumption in last Saturday’s issue of the Globe and Mail book section did contain a rare flash of piss and vinegar. Along with the raves (including one from the Globe itself), there was a quote from the Winnipeg Free Press that read thus: “The Giller Prize jury, which did not include Consumption on its recently released long list, should be shot for dereliction of duty.”
Though Random includes a far less contentious quote from the Free Press on its website, there is word that the Giller jurists — Alice Munro, Adrienne Clarkson, and Michael Winter — have been moved to an undisclosed location for their own safety, just in case.
The Londonstani promotional juggernaut thunders onward and, according to a Globe and Mail story, has now rolled into a couple of GTA theatres.
The appearance of Londonstani’s book trailer at “the Albion in Etobicoke and the Woodside in Scarborough may mark the first time a book trailer has played alongside the rest of the coming attractions at the movies,” according to the article.
HarperCollins chose the theatres due to their specialization in Bollywood flicks. Says the story: “‘We wanted to make sure the core audience for this book would know about it,’ said Shelley Tangney, marketing manager at HarperCollins Canada. ‘There’s definitely a younger audience that we’re somewhat targeting. The author is young, and the whole point of this book is to be quite edgy.’”
According to the Globe, the response was very so-so, with patrons confused about what the spots were advertising (a problem HarperCollins hopes to remedy by adding “available wherever books are sold” to future trailers) or not remembering seeing the trailer at all.
Still, HarperCollins is planning a trailer for Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games for the two theatres for the winter, and is toying with the idea of going national with the campaign. The Globe story ends with the humorous quote from Tangney: “Some fiction books don’t lend themselves as well to a trailer. With some, you really have to read the book.”
After the Starbucks-financed Akeelah and the Bee fizzled in movie theatres last spring, you’d think that other non-Hollywood companies would now be more hesitant to throw their hats into the moviemaking arena. But the L.A. Times is reporting today that Amazon.com has just optioned author Keith Donohue’s fantasy novel The Stolen Child, about a young boy who is spirited away by fairies and replaced by a changeling.
According to the L.A. Times article, Amazon doesn’t plan to actually finance the movie themselves, or even co-finance it. The internet retailer is simply hoping to be — in the words of Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener — “an extremely valuable partner in the development, marketing and distribution of this film.” Translation: Amazon won’t take on any of the financial risk themselves, but they’ll provide a crazy amount of marketing for the film’s theatrical and DVD releases on its website.
An article in today’s L.A. Times should have indie booksellers quaking in their boots – Starbucks is continuing its slow, inexorable crawl toward becoming a jack-of-all-trades in the media arena with the addition of audiobooks to its offerings.
They’ve hopped into bed with Random House, who are fronting the Meryl Streep-narrated audiobooks The Velveteen Rabbit and The Night Before Christmas, which, in a canny money-saving move, were poached from a decades-old series of audiobooks called Rabbit Ears, according to senior vice-president and publisher of Random House Audio Madeline McIntosh.
These new offerings will sit alongside the raft of entertainment products, like CDs and DVDs, already available in the hundreds of Starbucks around the world, and seems to show Starbucks’ making good on their earlier plans to, as In Other Media linked to at the beginning of the month, “find more movie and book projects to market.”
The Starbucks coffee chain has announced plans to expand its in-store marketing program to include movies and books. The company has had tremendous success promoting and selling a limited line of CDs in their stores and recently put their marketing muscle behind the film Akeelah and the Bee. According to an article on the International Herald Tribune site, Starbucks “has signed an agreement with the William Morris Agency to find more movie and book projects to market. The aim is to have one book in Starbucks stores this year and at least two or three movies to promote and sell on DVD next year, with more projects in years to come.” There is no word yet on what that book title will be, but you can bet there are thousands of crossed fingers out there. (Thanks to Bookninja.com for the link.)
Every now and then we book-related toilers are reminded (as if we needed to be) just who’s winning the war for people’s attention in today’s cultural battleground. To wit, The New York Times checks in on the case of Flann O’Brien’s admired cult novel The Third Policeman, a copy of which was seen – for a few seconds – on an episode of the hit TV show Lost last fall. “Within two days of the broadcast, 10,000 copies were sold,” says the Times story.
Wall Street Journal media reporter Jeffrey Trachtenberg gives the Media Bistro site his take on a few of publishing’s recent hot topics, including technology, genre trends, and someone named James Frey. He also discusses the blog-to-book phenomenon, suggesting that while a blog may not be a guarantee of authorial success, it probably can’t hurt. Says Trachtenberg: “It is a significant advantage for authors to have what the industry calls a ‘platform,’ be it a show on radio or TV, a newspaper column, or, increasingly, a popular blog. Book publicists can only do so much.”
A recently posted piece on TheBookseller.com rekindles an old and widely held contention regarding the effectiveness of reviews in selling books. Granted, the piece has its flaws: it is scattershot and far too brief to cover the scope it attempts, and its writer, Damian Horner, works in marketing and promotions, not in the publishing industry, and thus appears somewhat unacquainted with the quirks and unique challenges of the book biz. Yet Horner does make some interesting, if underdeveloped, points. His main charge is that hyperbolic review quotes appear on so many book covers that these quotes cease to mean much to potential readers. He also criticizes a so-called overabundance of reviews in the press, while vaunting the Internet’s role in providing more balanced coverage. According to Horner, readers’ distrust of the conventional gushing review has contributed to the growing importance of book clubs, word of mouth, and popular TV book coverage – such as on The Oprah Winfrey Show and on the U.K.’s Richard and Judy Book Club – on book sales. This trend, says Horton, is something publishers should cash in on. “I suspect we will soon see publishers working much more closely with bloggers and reading groups,” he says.
The world has turned upside down. Stephen Harper looks to be on his way to 24 Sussex Drive, and books are going to be sold in Starbucks. Remember the good old days when it was revolutionary to sell coffee in a bookstore? Starbucks is also going to sell DVDs and promote first-run films, the first of which is about the National Spelling Bee. (In Other Media, for the record, is pleased to see that someone is finally making a movie about the spelling bee. In Other Media, for the real record, is being sarcastic and would be happy if it never heard another word about the spelling bee.)
The Guardian’s Culture Vulture blog features some speculation on what sort of books might find their way into Starbucks. Writer Michelle Pauli imagines something “a little bit clever … but not too clever,” some Nick Hornby “for the boys,” and maybe some “crossover fiction for the kidult caffeine-freak.” Or, writes Pauli, “Could it be that I’m barking up entirely the wrong coffee tree and Starbucks are planning to tout Naomi Klein’s No Logo and a selection of gift books with ‘crap’ in the title?”
A new kids’ book to hit the shelves this holiday season marks a troubling trend in literary co-productions. Published by HarperCollins with what appears to be significant input from the fine folks at Saks Fifth Avenue, Cashmere If You Can is a book about a family of cashmere goats that live on the roof of the midtown Manhattan Saks. Slated to be sold in conventional bookstores as well as at Saks, the book comes just in time for Wild About Cashmere, the department store’s absurd cashmere promotion, which will see its locations filled with everything from tents to hammocks and skipping ropes made of the extremely expensive wool.
Although the contribution of books to corporate branding strategies is nothing new — take for example, The Cheerios Counting Book — Cashmere If You Can is noteworthy for the lack of clear disclosure of its sponsor’s involvement. However, the book is neither the first nor last of its kind. In 2001, bestselling British author Fay Weldon published The Bulgari Connection while under contract by the posh Italian jeweller, and, sponsored by Ford, two future novels by the English writer of romantic comedies Carole Matthews are set to feature Ford Fiestas.
According to Lorne Manly of The New York Times, Saks is reported to have “already signed with [HarperCollins] to produce another children’s book for next year’s holiday season…. HarperCollins is [also] in negotiations with sports and entertainment entities and packaged goods companies.”
September 1, 2005 | 12:00 AM | By Caroline Skelton
Debut author Jeanne Bice headed for a shopping channel to promote her book – and eight TV minutes later, she had sold 15,000 copies. As an article in The New York Times reports, the author of Pull Yourself Up by Your Bra Straps: And Other Quacker Wisdom has sold her line of clothing, Quacker Factory, exclusively on the shopping channel QVC, and therefore used the same venue to promote her book. As the article reports, the book is “a combination of memoir, business advice and collection of homespun aphorisms of the type often found on those shellacked pieces of driftwood sold at a Stuckey’s Pecan Shoppe (‘When you get to the end of your rope, tie a knot and HANG ON!’).”
Good Reports’ Alex Good has posted two mini-essays — one on the Harry Potter debate, arguing for a dismantling of the Potter publicity machine, and the other on the state of Christian lit and its message of a simpler life.
On Book Angst 101, an interview with M.J. Rose discusses VidLit, a movie-style marketing tool she is using to promote The Halo Effect, her latest novel. Rose is hoping that bloggers will help to spread the promotional video across the Internet, with the extra incentive of a $5 charity donation for every site that sets up a link to the VidLit page. Says Rose: “First we came up with the idea of doing blog ads for the book that link to the Vidlit. So for the next two weeks ads will be all over the blogosphere. … It’s pretty innovative and required [publishers] to be willing to test an unproved concept.”
William Safire has a funny piece on the International Herald Tribune site on the unique lexicography of book blurbs. Safire points out that in the “throbbing universe of book promotion … we have a language that treats lesser-known authors like stars shooting toward the firmament of literary fame,” then provides readers with a handy guide to decoding blurbspeak: “Acclaimed, in this fulsome lingo of book ads and catalogs, now means merely ‘the author received at least one good review.’ Widely acclaimed means ‘two or more, plus a cable TV plug.’ Critically acclaimed means ‘it was decently reviewed in a specialized publication but didn’t sell.’” (Thanks to goodreports.net for the link.)
The Toronto Star checks in on McNally Robinson New York, and finds that manager Sarah McNally is displaying such books as Annabel Lyon’s The Best Thing for You and Richard B. Wright’s Clara Callan, and even has Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje lined up for an appearance. (They’ll be promoting the Persea Books anthology Open Field: 30 Contemporary Canadian Poets.) “I was inspired by what my mother did,” McNally tells the Star’s Judy Stoffman. “She has done so much for prairie literature (by selling the local authors). She’s a powerful woman, the most organized person I know.”
Cristina Odone shares some acerbic observations in her Guardian column on the often Faustian bargains authors are forced to make to get their books noticed by the mass media. From changing the titles of their books to compressing five years of research into a 90-second soundbite for TV, many authors feel that they cannot afford to hide behind the veil of obscurity that still shrouds such literary stars as Thomas Pynchon and J.D. Salinger. Some authors have demonstrated a penchant for making nice with the media at any cost. Says Odone: “From Simon Schama to David Starkey, contemporary intellectuals have enthusiastically embraced the challenge of reaching the widest possible audience – even while knowing that in so doing they compromise their academic integrity.”
An article on SFGate.com claims to have found the secret of luring the elusive 18-34 demographic into bookstores: tie more books into popular TV shows. Writer Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg came to this conclusion after analyzing the success of two of the fall’s bestselling titles, both of which are spun off from TV shows popular with the under-35 crowd. The first of these – He’s Just Not That into You: The No-Excuses Truth to Understanding Guys – is based on an episode of Sex and the City, while America (The Book) is by The Daily Show host Jon Stewart.
Jen Bergstrom of Simon Spotlight Entertainment, the Viacom imprint aimed exclusively at people aged 18 to 34 that published He’s Just Not That into You, knows her target market: “Our readers are addicted to at least one reality TV show,” she says, “they own one iPod, and they are in love with their TiVo.” Of course there’s nothing new about TV tie-in books – as those yellowing copies of Happy Days novelizations at your local Goodwill store will attest to – but the article underscores a persistent perception in publishing houses that young people just don’t like reading. No mention is made of such recent books as A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius or The Lovely Bones, which attracted a young readership without beginning their lives as TV shows.
The CBC website has an item on a most unusual poetry tour organized by Tate Young, an Edmonton-based Book TV producer and poet (who released a collection this year under the nom de plume Mingus Tourette). The Write the Nation campaign will see Young and other poets, including Saskatoon’s Glen Sorestad, road-tripping to several Canadian cities in a bright pink ambulance. “Young says that the brightly coloured ambulance – a 1986 Chevy C-30 that was transporting patients as late as August – symbolizes the idea that Canadian poetry is in a state of crisis.”
Prominent indie bookseller Richard Bachmann has spoken out about 
An article in today’s L.A. Times should have indie booksellers quaking in their boots – Starbucks is continuing its slow, inexorable crawl toward becoming a jack-of-all-trades in the media arena with the addition of audiobooks to its offerings.