STATUS: The day has just begun but I’m hoping to really finish my entire To Do list before I leave tonight.
What’s playing on the iPod right now? I WANT YOU by Marvin Gaye
This is such a classic from the New Yorker on the marketing plan. It begins with an introduction from the unpaid intern who has replaced the promotion department at XYZ books.
Need I go on from here? Oh but I must! My favorite line is this one (coffee alert!):
“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.”
Grin. All in good fun, certainly, but every day I’m happy for having our marketing director.
Enjoy and have a great weekend.
ahhh, i too have a Chitt-chaTT and Nit-Pickr 😉 Fun read!
I nearly snorted coffee out my nose when I read this paragraph:
“If you already have a blog, make sure you spray-feed your URL in niblets open-face to the skein. We like Reddit bites (they’re better than Delicious), because they max out the wiki snarls of RSS feeds, which means less jamming at the Google scaffold. Then just Digg your uploads in a viral spiral to your social networks via an FB/MS interlink torrent. You may have gotten the blast e-mail from Jason Zepp, your acquiring editor, saying that people who do this sort of thing will go to Hell, but just ignore it.”
I posted about this on my blog the other day. Hilarious! I think I called it laugh out loud and three tissue sad.
funny…laugh out loud funny is what I said.
Hi, longtime lurker here. Wanted to know if you’ve seen this Tina Brown interview about her move into book publishing:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5dd46b90-b906-11de-98ee-00144feab49a.html
From the article:
However, Daily Beast writers are to be encouraged to “exercise their narrative journalism muscles” through a tie-up with Perseus Books to produce books of no more than 50,000 words.
“People’s time spans are so short, they either want a short ‘nerve centre’ piece immediately, or they want a short book they can read on a plane,” she says. “A lot of stuff about the [financial] meltdown I would have liked to be marinated over three or four months, but I didn’t want to wait a year and a half.”
The model, which will be tested in January with a book by John Avlon called Attack of the Wingnuts, will be to launch e-books for Amazon’s Kindle or Sony’s Reader, and then to print paperbacks for titles that have sold well.
Thanks for the hilarious Times story.–probably funnier to those close to publishing. Poor Jason, so behind the times.
Hey Anon,
I’m telling you, this is what’s blowing in the wind for fiction. The day is coming, and maybe it’s already arrived, when fiction will move to the e-market. The overhead for publishing fiction is just too great.
It makes sense to only go to print with books that have legs (that is the ones that would walk off the store shelf).
As a reader, I am way more inclined to take a chance reading an unknown e-book on my Kindle than I ever would be to lay out 25 bucks at Barnes & Noble.
I preordered Stephen King’s book, Under the Dome in hardback so I could have a first edition of it. He’s that famous and I’ve been reading him since I was 18 years old. But I will never open that book to read it (just once to make sure all the printing is there!). I’ll buy it again and read it on my Kindle. What that means is that I haven’t bought his book as a book. I’ve bought it as a collector’s piece. I’ve bought it for nostalgia. I would never pay twenty-five dollars for a book for reading.
The shift to e-publishing for fiction will be greatly noticed in 2010, and will pick up a great deal of pace by 2011. By 2012, only the most famous authors will be in print, and ten years down the road, only the Stephen King’s and the John Grisham’s will publish in book form, and probably only in hardcover, and probably only first editions–for the nostalgia-seekers.
Within ten years, there will be major e-book awards and major reviewers will be reviewing them–they’ll have to or they won’t have a job.
This will also allow the rise of independent publishing to one again flourish. Small publishers will be able to enter the market place as a result, and as a result we may once again see the rise of great literature.
Do I book myself on The View before or after Oprah? I assume there’s an appropriate order? Madonn’! Did you see JA Konrath’s post on his ebooks versus his print books and royalties? Eye opening.
Enjoy the weekend. We saw our first snowflakes (albeit wet drippy ones) yesterday in CT. And now for a Nor’Easter. Good day to stay home and read. Or write.
Uh Oh, Wordver? Hexcured.
Kim,
You clearly go on Oprah first… she’ll propel you to the top shelf faster. You save the view for your second printing or maybe when you go to trade paperback. The View will get you a second fifteen minutes of fame.
You should also finish it off by trying to get yourself booked for a cameo appearance on Californication on Showtime.
I love this too. Scary it’s so close to reality though!