Salon on the money woes of McSweeney’s

As you’ve probably heard by now, the U.S.-based McSweeney’s is appealling to its readership to help them out of a financial jam, one brought on by the 2006 collapse of its distributor, AMS. They’re offering a discount of 30% off new titles and 50% off backlist in order to bump up orders, as well as auctioning off works by Art Spiegelman, Miranda July, and several others. Now, Salon has posted a piece about McSweeney’s’ difficulties and about the similar difficulties faced by all small presses post-AMS.

The bankrupt company in question, Advanced Marketing Services, was the parent company of Publishers Group West, which distributed books for more than 130 independent book publishers. “For us the timing was particularly bad,” says Eli Horowitz, the publisher of McSweeney’s Books, which has lost about $130,000 in actual earnings as a result of the bankruptcy. “We had a new Nick Hornby book and [Dave Eggers'] ‘What Is the What,’ which was our best seller of all time.”

But it looks as if things are improving, or at least for McSweeney’s anyway:

Horowitz says McSweeney’s has received “thousands of orders in the last few days,” [and says] “In a way this feels like a whole town coming together, and to me, this is all of a piece with what we’re about.”

Major U.S. book awards announced

The nominations for the U.S. National Book Critics Circle award were announced last weekend, and, as always, a few big names were snubbed in the fiction category, most notably Thomas Pynchon. The fiction list was also noteworthy in that none of the 2006 National Book Award nominees – including the eventual winner, Richard Powers’ The Echo Maker – were included.

Two of the nominations went to relative newcomers: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for Half of a Yellow Sun (Knopf), and Kiran Desai for her Man Booker-winning The Inheritance of Loss (Grove/Atlantic, and Penguin here in Canada). The other nominations went to three authors already ensconced at the top of the American literary scene: Dave Eggers, for his tale of a refugee from the Sudanese civil war, What Is the What (McSweeney’s), Richard Ford, for the third installment in his Frank Bascombe series, The Lay of the Land (Knopf), and Cormac McCarthy, for his post-apocalyptic tale The Road (Knopf).

Just a day after the Book Critics Circle announced their nominations (the full list of which can be seen here), the American Library Association announced the winners of their annual Newbery and Caldecott awards for children’s literature.

The Newbery Medal, for a work of prose fiction, went to a surprise winner: the relatively untouted The Higher Power of Lucky (Simon & Schuster), by Susan Patron, about a motherless girl in a small California town. Meanwhile the Caldecott Medal, for picture books, went to illustrator David Wiesner for his wordless tale Flotsam (Clarion), about a boy who finds an underwater camera at the beach. The award makes Wiesner a three-time Caldecott winner: he won for Tuesday in 1991, and for The Three Pigs in 2001.

This witty and wise piece will render you near-catatonic with delight and admiration

Over on the CBC Arts website, Andre Mayer looks at the fine art of book blurbing, and he leads off with a doozy of an example from Dave Eggers.

Writing about Adverbs, a new adult short-fiction collection from his pal Daniel Handler (known to some as Lemony Snicket), Eggers serves up this bit of prime nonsense: “Anyone who lives to read gorgeous writing will want to lick this book and sleep with it between their legs.”

Counters Mayer: “Reading Adverbs, I felt no such impulse. But perhaps that’s a personal shortcoming — maybe I don’t feel books as intensely as Eggers. At any rate, he exercises creative licence the way most of us exercise our lungs.”

There are more examples from Eggers and others — some chummy, some lazy, some so over-the-top as to be meaningless — and Mayer makes some nice sport of them. He also talks to Canadian publishing types (Craig Pyette from Random House and Noelle Zitzer from HarperCollins Canada) about what makes a good blurb.

Related links:
Click here for the CBC Arts story on blurbing

Man keeps expensive Stephen King habit

Stephen King fans around the world watched as the right to name a zombie in his forthcoming novel was auctioned off on eBay. The auction was held to raise money for the First Amendment Project, a non-profit that defends writers’ and artists’ right to freedom of speech. eBay’s most-watched item at the time, the auction was won by Florida resident Pam Alexander. Paying $25,100, she beat out the bid’s next contender, Paul Stegman of Nebraska, who was ready to mortgage his home to cough up the needed funds. “How many times do you have the opportunity to purchase immortality?” said Stegman, who owns 300 King books.

King was just one of many authors donating the right to name a character in this first round of auctions for the Oakland-based not-for-profit. The second round of auctions continues on through Sept. 26 and offers the right to name a character from books by John Grisham, Dave Eggers, and Neil Gaiman to respective highest bidders.

Related links:
Click here for the full story from the Chicago Tribune
Click here to for a list of participating authors and links to their auctions
Click here for more information on the First Amendment Project