• Richard Lea at the Guardian blog: If you can’t get Roth, Palin, or Rowling on the Kindle, what can you get?
• David Suzuki’s garbage gets combed through for incriminating Kraft Dinner boxes, and now archeologists are looking at what the Bard may have tossed away
• The L.A. Times picks their 25 favourite books of the year and actually selects some – gasp – poetry! That provoked a hearty booyah from this cubicle
• Web 2.0 marketing guru and Bookmadam Julie Wilson has teamed up with Books on the Radio’s Sean Cranbury to offer the Advent Book Blog: Great Books Recommended by Great People
• Those funny book blog dudes at the National Post noted this year’s Canada Reads pics and wondered, what should Canada also read? Get your answers in by 5:00 p.m. this afternoon and maybe you’ll be able to participate in the alterna-reads version of the popular CBC book debate show

The International Festival of Authors took to the streets this morning in downtown Toronto to drum up public interest in the fest, which gets underway at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre on Oct. 21. Festival organizers hired a rag-tag band of actors to give impromptu readings from a number of books featured in the fest – including Ian Weir’s Daniel O’Thunder (Douglas & McIntyre), Lauren Kirshner’s Where We Have to Go (McClelland & Stewart), Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist, and Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger – and to give away hundreds of free books. [UPDATE: Organizers are handing out backlist titles by some of the authors featured at the fest, so don't expect to get a free copy of The Anthologist.]

Organizers will repeat the stunt at Nathan Phillips Square from noon to 1 p.m. See below for photos from this morning’s happening.

In the latest issue of The New Yorker, Ellis Weiner takes a satirical look at how U.S. publishing houses are coping in a down market. In this Shouts & Murmurs piece, an intern “brought on … to replace the promotion department” at the fledgling (fictional) Propensity Books outlines the company’s marketing plans for an author’s book:

To start: Do you blog? If not, get in touch with Kris and Christopher from our online department, although at this point I think only Christopher is left. I’ll be out of the office from tomorrow until Monday, but when I get back I’ll ask him if he spoke to you. We use CopyBuoy via Hoster Broaster, because it streams really easily into a Plaxo/LinkedIn yak-fest meld. When you register, click “Endless,” and under “Contacts” just list everyone you’ve ever met. It would be great if you could post at least six hundred words every day until further notice.

The company has its eyes set on traditional media “gets” as well:

Once we get back from Frankfurt, we’d like to see you on morning talk shows like the Today show and The View, so please get yourself booked on them and keep us “in the loop.” If I’m not here – which I won’t be, since after the book fair I go on vacation for two weeks – just tell Jenni, my assistant, when she gets back from jury duty.

Marketing books has always been tricky, but it’s become even more so in the hyper-connected Web 2.0 world. And with atrophying review space and publishers’ limited marketing budgets, authors can’t rely on getting coverage in traditional venues.

An article in The Washington Post focuses on one debut author, Kelly Corrigan, who sold approximately 80,000 hardcover copies of her 2008 memoir, The Middle Place, and an additional 260,000 in paperback, despite not having a book tour or a review in any major newspaper.

She cobbled together a trailer for her book on her home computer, using iMovie software, downloading a free tune off the Web for background music, and stuck it on her Web site. Her agent helped get her on one network television morning show. About 20 friends hosted book parties, which she hit on a self-funded three-week blitz, selling books out of the trunk of her car. A guy shot video of her reading an essay at one of these parties, and she posted it on YouTube when the paperback came out.

This DIY approach, the Post suggests, is becoming the rule, rather than the exception, for the majority of authors.

Book publishers actively market and promote authors, of course, particularly the big names, but for thousands of writers it’s a figure-it-out-yourself world of creating book trailers, Web sites and blogs, social networking and crashing on friends’ couches during a tour you arrange.

“Being an author has become much more of an ongoing relationship with your audience through the Web, rather than just writing a book and disappearing while you write the next one,” says Liate Stehlik, publisher of William Morrow and Avon Books. “You have to be out there in the online world, talking and participating.”

(Of course, it’s not just new or mid-list authors who are marshalling the power of new media to promote their works: Margaret Atwood is on Twitter and has a blog to promote her latest novel, The Year of the Flood.)

MobyLives points out U.S. author Stephen Elliott’s subversion of the usual promotional plan.

His true crime memoir, The Adderall Diaries, was released earlier this month, and rather than send out the advance reading copies to the media, he started The Adderral Diaries Lending Library. Basically, he sent an ARC to anyone who wanted one, and who promised to lend it out after they read it in a timely manner. Readers had one week to complete their read, and they would be sent an Email address of the next person on the list scheduled to receive a copy. Then they’d have to priority post them the book.

This fall Elliott is touring D.I.Y. style, by connecting with readers in their towns and giving readings at their houses. Here is a Facebook group of people who read an advanced copy.

This kind of word-of-mouth promotion is PR gold. For every book review that gets printed, a few sales may result, but any publicist will tell you that nothing beats a personal recommendation.

While it may be standard practice to see book covers with blurbs that read “In the tradition of [insert best-selling author's name here],” the Internet is abuzz today about one of the most blatant abuses of this questionable technique. MarketingWeek is reporting that the cover of Deadline, a new novel by British thriller writer Simon Kernick, features The Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown’s name well above, and much more prominently than the book’s actual author.

The cover (which can be seen here) states, “If you like your thrillers as fast, furious and unputdownable as Dan Brown, then we thought you’d enjoy…,” followed by the real author’s name and book title way down at the bottom. The top half of the back cover copy lists reasons to read Dan Brown – only the bottom half mentions Deadline.

Photos of the cover indicate that this edition is exclusive to U.K. chain WH Smith. From writer Pace J. Miller’s blog:

There is no right of publicity in the U.K., but I’m sure both Brown and Kernick would be spewing if they knew about this cover (and at least a prima facie case of passing off could be made). It’s designed to mislead and deceive the careless book buyer, or at the very least cause what is commonly referred to as “initial interest confusion.” The danger is exacerbated when this book is placed right next to Dan Brown’s books, which it was when I found it in WH Smith.

The thing is, Kernick is not some crappy first time author who can’t sell a copy. His previous novel, Relentless, was the 8th best-selling paperback, and the best-selling thriller in the UK in 2007.

American author Janet Evanovich launched her new book, Finger Lickin’ Fifteen (St. Martins Press/H.B. Fenn & Company), at the Queensway Chapters in Toronto last Wednesday (June 24). Here are some outtakes from the evening:

Evanovich at the signing table.

Fans line up for an autograph.

Fenn marketing associate Krystle Forget (left), a chicken, and Fenn publicist Katherine Wilson (right).

We’ve all heard of audiobooks, but videobooks?

HarperCollins is trying to pitch short films of authors summarizing their books (until recently known as an online promotional trailer) as a new format – even going so far as to sell the resulting 23 minutes on Amazon for slightly less than the cost of a new paperback.

Even if watching Jeff Jarvis talk about his book, What Would Google Do?, turned out to be as informative as reading the book would be, how do you consult it for reference? Sure it saves on printing costs, but so do e-books and audiobooks – without sacrificing valuable content.

If HarperCollins wants to move into the self-help video market, they should just say so.

In the New York Times, Motoko Rich looks at the dying glitz and glam of the publishing world, which, according to Rich, once “came with a milieu that mixed cultural swagger with pure Manhattan high life.”

Stark contrasts are drawn between company parties past and those planned for the future: Macmillan, which announced mass restructuring and layoffs in mid-December last year, will trade their Hotel del Coronado spring list meeting venue for meetings via webcam. Simon & Schuster cancelled its holiday party, while one division of Random House had pizza and beer in a cafeteria room. Other “glittery and cozy traditions” of the industry that are being clamped down upon are flights, hotel bills, cocktail hours, and, of course, the lunch tabs.

Nobody expects one of the staples of the business — the long lunch — to die off completely because of these straitened circumstances. But publishers, editors and literary agents, who have often been among the best diners in the city, are now reconsidering their favorite restaurants.

Besides the flash, though, other aspects of the publishing business are being examined, like distribution of advance print galleys, the return of unsold books by retailers, and cash advances for authors.

At HarperCollins a new unit is experimenting with a model that substitutes profit sharing with authors for cash advances and eliminates returns of unsold copies from booksellers.

Jonathan Galassi, publisher of the literary powerhouse Farrar, Straus & Giroux, said the custom of accepting returns from booksellers was created during the Great Depression to persuade bookstores to take more copies. “In a moment where getting people to put stock in a store of anything, not just books, is harder because of the money it costs to front them,” Mr. Galassi said. “I think it might be counterproductive to have a return-free business at this point.”

It’s not quite Oprah, but in the U.K. it’s the closest thing there is. Television celebrities Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan are the hosts of Britain’s wildly popular Richard and Judy’s Book Club, and this year two Canadians have made their reading list.

From the CBC:

Steven Galloway’s The Cellist of Sarajevo and Winnipegger Andrew Davidson’s The Gargoyle are two of 10 books to make the special list.

Books chosen by Madeley and Finnigan — who appear on digital TV channel Watch — often become bestsellers in Britain.

Galloway’s novel has already been singled out here in Canada by the 2008 Scotiabank Giller Prize jury, which included the book on their longlist, and by Indigo’s self-appointed “chief booklover,” Heather Reisman, who chose it as one of “Heather’s Picks” last year.

Doubleday U.S. must be turning cartwheels at the announcement of the Davidson endorsement, since the novel has performed below expectations south of the 49th parallel. Maybe the endorsement from Richard and Judy will help Doubleday recoup at least some of the gargantuan $1.25 million advance it paid out to the author.