John Warner, editor of McSweeney’s online, author of So You Want to Be President? and Fondling Your Muse, and “Creative director of the struggling TOW Books” writes on Maud Newton’s blog about his new initiative to give away PDFs of four books from his humor imprint to help spread the word. “The sad fact, and I’m afraid that it is a fact, is that the reason we’re struggling is because very few people even know our books exist…. After two years of, let’s call it, non-success, I understand that the problem is at least as much about publicity and distribution […]
Next: Newspaper-Sized eReader
A company called Plastic Logic will announce a new electronic reading device the size of a standard sheet of copy paper, billed as having “a lightweight plastic screen that mimics the look of a printed newspaper.” The price to consumers, and partners enrolled in displaying papers on the device, will not be announced until the CES show in January, and “the reader will go on sale in the first half of next year.” The NYT says it has “a screen size that is 2.5 times larger than the Kindle, weighs just two ounces more and is about one-third the Kindle’s […]
Lunch Weekly for Monday, September 8
Deal Reports Just e-mail to deals@PublishersMarketplace if you aren’t using the online form linked below. Report a deal using the online form The Key As usual, the handy key to our Lunch deal categories. While all reports are always welcome, those that include a category will generally receive a higher listing when it comes time to put them all together. “nice deal” $1 – $49,000 “very nice deal” $50,000 – $99,000 “good deal” $100,000 – $250,000 “significant deal” $251,000 – $499,000 “major deal” $500,000 and up FICTION Debut ANT FARM and FREE RANGE CHICKENS author, and SNL writer Simon […]
Woodward The War Within Excerpts
Here’s the “home page” at the Washington Post for their four excerpts from Bob Woodward’s new book.Post
LAT Fall Books
The paper has an essay on forthcoming fall books as part of their overall fall culture guide. “If 2008 hasn’t already been the year of the spy, the fall list is going to make it so,” the piece begins. Updike, Morrison, DeMille, Gregory Maguire and Thomas Keneally all “return to old territory…. As we might expect, given the election, Fred Kaplan’s Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer is hardly the only presidential history to appear this fall…. Works in translation bring a thrill because they force a new point of view,” and the paper mentions Amara Lakhous’ “Clash of Civilizations […]
WSJ Heavy Hitters
There are no big surprises here, but that’s not the point: the WSJ touts fall releases from some of the best-known authors: Toni Morrison, Stephen King, Annie Proulx and Marilynne Robinson have new novels. So do Christopher Paolini (who wrote “Eragon”) and Candace Bushnell (“Sex and the City”). Prepublication reviews have been strong for Dennis Lehane’s “The Given Day,” a 700-page epic from the “Mystic River” author that includes characters such as Babe Ruth. The buzz is also rising for Philip Roth’s “Indignation,” the tale of a butcher’s boy in an Ohio college during the Korean War. In nonfiction, Bill […]