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October 31, 2005
Who’s Minding the Store?
I’ve been reading and thinking a lot lately about book marketing and readership. I’ve come across lots of soul searching and hand wringing, lots of great advice, some of which I even subscribe to, about the virtues of author tours and creating buzz instead of reliance on dwindling—in both space and impact—reviews and on advertising and branding. I’ll admit to the hand wringing myself, if not to the soul searching.
October 05, 2005
The Quick and the Sharp
I just signed a contract for a memoir that has set me to thinking—not because of the subject of the book, not because of the nature of the writing (or maybe so, but I’ll get back to that), and not because it is an historically revealing memoir. Indeed, what set me to thinking was not the book at all.
It was the author.
September 21, 2005
A Reader’s Response to Ed Falco
Finding some reading time on my hands this summer, I polished off Unbridled Books’ two Ed Falco titles in succession – Sabbath Night in the Church of the Piranha, followed by Wolf Point. From time to time, I found myself brushing this pesky fly from in front of my face: “Good grief—this guy is Carmella Soprano’s [Edie Falco’s] Uncle!”
If you think about it, the association doesn’t seem entirely frivolous. There is a dark necessity that drives the lives of the compromised characters in The Sopranos, the ones I find the most interesting, like Carmella. In order to survive, she is compelled to live in a delusional universe – to maintain a basic disconnect from reality. And woe to Carmella when she confuses the two and tries to divorce Tony, for instance, as she did this past season. Reality will out.
September 07, 2005
Time for Vision and Revision
I had wanted to post an entry here last week. But in light of Katrina it seemed trivial if not unsavory to do so. These are only publishing matters, after all. With the first evacuees arriving in Colorado — as elsewhere — some sense that the nation is not still only flailing in high water arises. There’s nothing I can say that hasn’t been said, at least silently.
In the August 22 issue of Business Week, Jonathan Karp explained his new imprint, Warner Twelve — so named because it is slated to publish twelve (12) books a year. He is doing this, he says, to afford him the opportunity to promise “authors and their literary agents that we will publishing nothing other than their books for a full month.”
We at Unbridled suspect he will quickly learn that — for the books he handles that are neither blockbuster novels nor celebrity-authored — “a full month” is nowhere near long enough.
August 25, 2005
What Does “Literary Fiction” Mean When You’ve Left the Island?
The recent Associated Press wire story by Hillel Italie —"Pickings Thin for 2005 Literary Fiction"— seems to have sparked conversation in the Off-the-Island Bookworld. It certainly has us scratching our heads and waving our arms in reaction to the presuppositions that permeate the article. Wasn’t the question about literary fiction?