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Welcome
to the
Index (scroll down for stories) 1.
Book sales decline as consumers cut spending in contracting economy 1. Book sales decline as consumers cut spending in contracting economy Net sales of books in April
fell 3.5 percent to $472.7 million, based on data from 79 publishers as reported
to the Association of American Publishers. For the year to date, net sales of
books were $2.183 billion, unchanged from the same period last year.
Among declining categories:
2. Book trailer features risqué opening line of J.J. Salem’s sexy beach read Every author knows that the opening line of a novel is an important element – so important, in fact, that we’ve run features in the Southern Review in the past about the opening lines of 100 of the world’s greatest novels in the hope other authors would be inspired. That’s why we were both interested and amused when Sarah Goldstein, a marketing team member at St. Martin’s Press, posted a book trailer on YouTube featuring different people reading the risqué first line of J.J. Salem’s trashy new beach read, Tan Lines, released on July 8. The curious can find the book trailer at YOUTUBE.COM.
In addition to receiving favorable reviews from a number of publications, Tan Lines, whose publicist is John Karle, was named a “Summer Reading Pick” by “Good Morning America.” On July 10, two days after the novel was released, the book was at No. 2,453 on Amazon.com, a good start. The St. Martins video on YouTube had 924 views the same day, but that will likely go up. The opening line, if you’re curious, is “There are 8,000 nerve endings in the clitoris, and this son of a bitch couldn’t find any of them.” What’s amusing about the clip of people reading that line is the number of males who don’t know what that part of the female anatomy is, much less how to pronounce it or how to find it. As for the book, here’s an excerpt from the review in Publishers Weekly: “A Jacqueline Susann–style thriller by way of Candace Bushnell, Salem's scorching debut follows three young women on a wild Hamptons summer of reinventing themselves. Unhappy with fireman hubby Justin (whom she married in the aftermath of 9/11), fashionista feminist and political media pundit Liza Pike, 29, is harvesting her eggs for future momhood and considering divorce. Former actress Kellyanne Downey is the depressed mistress of wealthy, possessive businessman Walter Isherwood, while indie rock chick Billie Shelton finds herself on a downhill slide… A prologue foretells that a grisly murder, a premature birth, and a public meltdown, will be the eventual fate for the three at the posh Hampton summer rental they're sharing, and Salem doesn't disappoint. Her poolside read throbs with intensity, spiked with erotic detail…” With a name like J.J. Salem, you can’t blame Publishers Weekly for getting the sex of the author wrong. It’s usually female authors who use initials these days. But that’s not the case here. Author J.J. is a male.
Salem, 40, resides in Jackson, Miss. He earned a master’s in American studies from the University of Alabama and has since published more than 20 books in genres ranging from suspense to chick-lit. He celebrated the July 8 release of Tan Lines with a signing at Lemuria Books in Jackson. So how did a man come to write a trashy beach-read romance? Here’s the story according to J.J. himself. “I was barely a teenager when Jackie Collins ruined me for life. It happened the day I discovered Chances in my sister’s college apartment. The novel belonged to her roommate, who was away on a beach vacation with a married man, and I stole it with the rationalization that the home wrecker would be better served reading a self-help book in the vein of Smart Women, Foolish Choices. “Prior to ripping into Chances, I had existed on coming-of-age stories by Judy Blume, comic books, and entertainment magazines, so Jackie Collins’s seductive brand of high glam, riotously raunchy pulp fiction was like crossing over to a forbidden zone. It was ‘Dallas’ and ‘Dynasty’ on acid - exhilarating and, for me, transformative. Right away I knew that I wanted to do what she did - write guilty pleasure escapist fiction that shocked, titillated, and held readers captive from first page to last. “What also drew me in was Jackie’s author/celebrity profile. She was as beautiful and as take-no-prisoners as her ball-busting heroines, and she instantly became my career idol. I remember being dazzled by her publicity junket for Hollywood Wives (the breakout bestseller that made her a household name in America). Rather than fight me on the issue, it was easier for my parents to just give in to my insistence on being late for school in order to watch Jackie make the media rounds on ‘Today,’ ‘Good Morning America,’ and the ‘Merv Griffin Show.’ This was 1983… “My passion for Jackie’s work stayed with me through high school, college, and graduate school… “I spent several years honing my craft in genre fiction, publishing everything from suspense, romance, teen fiction, and chick-lit to ghost writing for Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen. I was polishing my first real attempt at a Jackie Collins-type novel when I met her for the first time at a book signing in Atlanta… But Jackie was warm, gracious, funny, and even encouraged me to seek out her new publisher, St. Martin’s Press, as a possible home. “Amazingly, that’s where I landed eighteen months later - at the same publishing house, and with the same editor, too. An endorsement quote from Jackie Collins will even grace the cover of Tan Lines, my first all-out bid to claim the literary voice I knew was inside me when I got lost in Chances so many years ago. In pure career idolatry terms, it’s a gorgeous full circle. “And it makes me believe that therapists and life coaches have it right when they ask this question of clients who are uninspired, unfulfilled, or ambivalent about their work: ‘What did you want to be when you were twelve?’ (Ed. Note: J.J. was 12, not quite a teen-ager, when he boosted that copy of the Jackie Collins’ Chance from his sister’s roommate.)
3. Breaking news from the book barons According to Book Industry Trends, released by the Book Industry Study Group (see Southern Review, July 2008), U.S. publishers sold 3.13 billion books in 2007, compared with 3.1 billion in 2006, an increase of just 0.9 percent. Higher retail prices helped net revenue increase 4.4 percent, to $37.3 billion, from $35.7 billion. Worth noting are the study’s projections. BISG expects the number of copies of books sold in 2008 to fall by 0.7 percent. Growth through 2012 is expected to be flat or less than one percent each year… Random House's Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group has rebranded itself as the Doubleday Publishing Group. The group is comprised of four divisions: Doubleday, Broadway, Waterbrook Multnomah, and Spiegel & Grau. Other labels, including Nan A. Talese and Flying Dolphin, are imprints. President Steve Rubin said that with so many divisions "we have outgrown the Doubleday Broadway name.” Web site for the rebranded group is at Doubleday.com… Doubleday, which bought North American rights to Andrew Davidson’s The Gargoyle for $1.25 million in 2007, is scheduled to bring out the book in August. Davidson is a Canadian, and Gargoyle is his debut novel. Doubleday is co-oping the book with Borders and B&N in an effort to hype it to best-sellerdom. The book has explicit sexual content - the sort of vampire material from small indie e-book operations with cut-rate prices that has saturated the market - so it should be interesting to see if similar content can earn back $1.25 million when the book is promoted by one of the major trad publishers… One segment of the digital book market growing particularly fast is the professional category, which includes books about business, law, medicine and technology. According to the Book Industry Study Group, although sales overall of digital (toner on paper) books were up just 1.7 percent in 2007 from 2006, and projections are for essentially flat growth over the next few years, publishers and consumers in this (professional) market are converting to digital editions much faster than those in other book market segments. 4. An easy test for telling if your book is above (or below) average Ever wonder if your book is better than or below average? The next time you’re wondering, here’s a tool from the Southern Review that might help you to answer that question. Start with the fact that Bowker says 411,422 new titles were published in 2007. Of those, 276,649 were traditionally manufactured titles (ink on paper), and 134,773 were digitally manufactured titles (toner on paper), sometimes called print on demand (POD) titles. Here’s the test. According to the Book Industry Study Group (BISG), U.S. publishers produced 3.13 billion copies of their books in 2007. Using the Bowker figure of 411,422 new titles, that translates to a mean average of 7,608 copies per title. Any book title for which more copies than 7,608 copies were produced would be "above average," and any book for which fewer titles were produced than the mean would be "below average." Some qualifiers pertain. Remember that the mean is an average for low-run POD titles mixed with high-run traditional titles, a fact discussed in greater detail below. Seldom is a POD run in excess of 1,000 economically feasible, so POD titles from the start are below average. Similarly, offset runs for ink-on-paper titles become economical above 1,000 copies, so traditionally published books are more likely to be found in the above-average category. Note also that the average applies only to titles published in 2007. Finally, keep in mind that the numbers from BISG and Bowker are based on reporting systems that don’t produce absolutely accurate information. One other qualifier deserves comment. Of the 3.13 billion books manufactured by U.S. publishers in 2007, some were reprints of backlist titles from prior years, printed without a new ISBN. We don't know how many of the books printed in 2007 were backlist reprints, so all we can say is that the true mean for the number of copies of 2007 titles is going to be somewhere to the left of (lower than) the computed mean of 7,608. The test thus provides a rough benchmark only, but a benchmark nonetheless. If we knew how many copies of each of the POD titles had been produced, and if we knew the number of copies each of the traditionally published titles that were manufactured, we could compute separate mean averages for each type. It's reasonably safe to say that the mean average for the POD titles will fall somewhere between 1 and 1,000, and probably considerably to the lower side of 500, since it's rare for self-published and vanity press titles produced by POD technology to sell more than 100 copies. It's also reasonably safe to say that the mean average number of copies produced of the traditionally published titles will fall somewhere between 7,608 and the size of the press run for the last of the Harry Potter novels published in 2007. If we had production data (number of copies manufactured by title) for each of the 411,422 titles published in 2007, we could plot a distribution that would likely somewhat resemble a bell-shaped curve. In a normal unskewed distribution, we would expect 68 percent of the 411,422 titles produced in 2007 to fall within one standard deviation of the mean. Put another way, 139,883 titles would be slightly above average (one standard deviation to the right of the mean) and 139,883 would be slightly below average. The great majority of the books published in 2007 would fall near the mean, within one standard deviation. Another 27 percent of the books would fall within two standard deviations of the mean. Put another way, 55,542 of the 411,422 titles published in 2007 would be moderately successful (but more successful than the one standard deviation books), and 55,542 would be moderately unsuccessful (but considerably more unsuccessful than the books falling within one standard deviation. That leaves 4.7 percent of the titles remaining to fall under the tails of the curve, three standard deviations either side of the mean. So, 9,668 titles would be three standard deviations to the positive side - the extremely successful titles, and 9,668 would fall under the negative tail of the distribution as very unsuccessful titles. And what about the 0.3 percent of the titles we haven’t accounted for? The 617 titles that fall more than three standard deviations on the positive side from the mean are those blockbuster best-sellers you see on the New York Times and USA Today best-seller lists with 250,000 copies on up in print. And the 617 that fall more than three standard deviations from the mean under the negative tail are the POD books for which only one or two copies were produced, the dogs with no legs. A final word of caution. It’s not likely that the books published in 2007 would fall under an unskewed normal bell-shaped curve distribution. That’s because roughly two out of every three new titles were conventional ink-on-paper titles with large press runs, while one out of three, or a third of the total, were toner on paper print on demand books that likely had small press runs well below 1,000 copies on average. That would produce a distribution skewed to the right, or positive/traditionally published side of the distribution. 5. Simba says second half of 2008 will be challenge for trade book publishers Simba Information expects the balance of 2008 to be difficult for the U.S. trade book market and is projecting a sales decrease of about five percent; erasing the gains of 2007, the year of runaway hits such as Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and The Secret. The projections were made in "Business of Consumer Book Publishing 2008," the latest strategic market report from Simba, a media industry forecast and analysis firm. "There are several factors at work here - the lack of a blockbuster book drawing in sufficient store traffic, consumers feeling the heat of a tough economy and bookstores under pressure to perform - all combining to make 2008 a rough year for the U.S. trade book market," said Michael Norris, senior analyst at Simba. For the first time, "Business of Consumer Book Publishing" has a detailed analysis of sales channel allocation, which provides a perspective on the challenges of book retailing in the current market landscape. The expanding role of 'non-bookstores' is documented in the report and helps show why the largest bookstore chains seem to be having many of the same challenges as independent booksellers. "In a bookstore, the future of the store depends on the book. In a non-bookstore, the future of the book depends on the store," said Norris, who added that the concentration of attention around a small number of blockbuster titles and the ability of non-bookstores to price these titles as low as they want has created a "volatile situation." The report isn't all bad news. Simba identifies several consumer book categories that are the most likely to see an increase through 2008.
6. News about bookstores, publishing, marketing and promotion In 1982, Bob Hawkins, Sr., founder of Harvest House Publishers, asked home- and life-management guru Emilie Barnes to write a book about organizing. More than 60 original books and 26 years later, Harvest House announced that titles by Bob and Emilie Barnes (all of which have been published by Harvest House) have sold five million copies. The figure includes both collaborative and individual works. Walk With Me Today, Lord by Emilie was released in July, with the revised More Hours in My Day and gift book Christmas Teas of Comfort and Joy (with artist Susan Rios) were released in June. Bob Barnes’ most recent book is 5-Minute Bible Workouts for Men (released in March)… Following the untimely death of NBC Washington Bureau chief and “Meet the Press” host Chief Tim Russert, demand for his books skyrocketed. Random House started shipping an extra 100,000 paperback copies of Wisdom of Our Fathers, while Hyperion has gone back to press for an additional 100,000 copies of Big Russ and Me, Russert’s memoir about life with his father. 7. Publicity 101: Is it better to send news releases by snail mail or email? An inquirer asks: "From experience, can others tell me which resulted in more printed articles and/or interviews--sending news releases via e-mail or snail mail? Which media list sources worked best?" The Southern Review editor answers: Back in 1960, when I was fresh out of college, I worked for one of the biggest publicity agencies in the nation. Back then, clipsheets, mimeographed news releases, asbestos mats for boilerplate and offset proofs were the order of the day. All were distributed by snail mail, messenger or AP Wire, since there was no such thing as e-mail. After some time as a newspaper reporter and editor in Chicago, and a two-year stint as an Army officer, I went to work in AT&T's PR department, at that time perhaps the most effective PR operation in the country. PR folks wrote the news releases, but the Bell System operating companies relied on local managers to personally deliver the news releases to the appropriate local newspaper, radio and television editors and news managers. AT&T and its Bell System affiliates were big newspaper, radio and TV advertisers, so the news releases were generally accepted eagerly and seldom went unpublished. I left the Bell System to get two more degrees, and ended up teaching public relations in the journalism departments at the Universities of Wisconsin and Georgia. Newsrooms at that time were just going digital. The old news releases once mailed to the newsrooms and set on Linotypes now had to be hand-keyed by reporters and editors into layouts. Optical scanners had not yet come into widespread prominence. But the world of publicity was changing in a big way - and those old snail-mailed news releases were becoming ever less popular. By the 1980s, I was back in corporate PR. From then to now, desktop publishing became the norm. Today, email is the preferred method for news release distribution. An editor can pick up an e-mailed news release and edit it without scanning it or keyboarding it. A news release that's snail-mailed would have to be optically scanned or hand-keyed, which not many newsrooms are going to be willing to do. In the last study I saw, gatekeepers were making decisions about whether or not to use a news release in six seconds or less. So your lead paragraph better be interesting, or the release will quickly be trashed. And a word of warning. News releases mailed as spam to those lists of editors, news managers, producers and talk show hosts you can buy from various services usually end up unseen in the news contact’s spam folders. Unless your news release has source credibility and a peg that makes it interesting to editors, it isn't going to much matter what directory you use to compile lists for broadcast emails. Are you writing about a best-seller by a well known author published by a major publishing house? Is the release going to editors you know who cover the book beat? If not, you're going to be fighting an uphill battle for limited space in the marketplace of ideas. If you've got a local peg, you might have a little luck with the local media, but the national media are likely to be uninterested. What you
might consider is placing information on the Internet. Sure, an appearance
by your author on “The Daily Show,” “Oprah!” or “Good Morning America” is going
to sell books. So will mentions by Motoko Rich of the New York Times, Ed
Nawotka of Publishers Weekly or Hillel Italie or Frazier Moore Jr. of the
Associated Press. But with 411,000 new book titles coming out annually, what are
the odds of your newsmaker making the limited space/time in those venues? At Anvil Associates, the publicity arm of Anvil Brokers/Anvil Publishers Inc., we put out a hundred or so news releases a year, most of them for our book show clients. We distribute by e-mail to our own list of newspaper, radio, TV and magazine contacts assembled from various directories. But we also distribute to appropriate Web sites using lists we've developed over several years. The Internet is giving us 25 to upwards of 70 placements per news release. The last news release we put out before this was written received 109 Web placements, not counting trade press and other pickups. You might have more luck following the Web route.
8. Author’s advice: It’s good business to buy your own books at signings One of the common responsibilities of authors is to conduct book signings, at sponsoring bookstores and other venues. A string of signings on a book tour can be more trying than most B-list to D-list authors might think. According to USA Today, author Janet Evanovich is wearing a brace on her right hand after a six-city tour to promote her latest book, Fearless Fourteen. "It's at least 1,000 people at each signing, which goes on for at least five hours, and they all have four or five books," she said. "The human thumb is not designed to do that six days in a row." Atlanta’s Patricia Sprinkle
is also doing signings these days for her two most recent books, What Are You
Wearing To Die (February 2007, 978-0-451-22325-8) and Sins of the Fathers
(November 2007, 97
No matter what she was writing, she soon noted, she was reading mostly mysteries. Sprinkle met and married her husband Bob in 1970. In the 37 years they have been together, their family lived in Atlanta (four times), Chicago (twice), St. Petersburg (twice), Mobile, and Miami. Her first mystery, Murder at Markham (reissued by Silver Dagger in 2001), took 13 years to complete. But she quickly made up for lost time. Since 1988, she has written 19 mysteries, two other novels and five non-fiction books.
Says Sprinkle of signings, “I seldom buy books from my publishers to sell to others directly. I do buy from bookstores at a 25-30 percent discount after I do a signing for which they ordered too many books. They get to count those books against returns on other books. “Contrary to what I once believed,” she continues, “they aren't allowed to send back everything they buy. I earn my 25 percent plus my royalty by buying from the bookstores. But the best part is, the books count at the publishing house as sales, so they have a better figure for how many I am actually selling, as opposed to the figure they'd have if they did not count all the books I sell at appearances at libraries, book clubs and other events. It seems like a win-win for everybody as far as I'm concerned. I started doing this after I realized the books authors buy direct from their publishers to sell at events don't get counted at all.” 9. Update journalism: Latest skinny on past Southern Review stories We’ve
noted in the past that Oprah Winfrey’s influence on the book business is waning
along with her decreasing audience.
Ms. Winfrey has been pushing Eckhart Tolle’s spiritual guide A New Earth,
which she selected for her book club in January. But the book that is dominating
the spiritual market continues to be The Sh 10. How Steve Kaplan’s marketing plan led publisher to accept his book In a special to the
Chicago Tribune, Ann Meyer relates how best-selling author Steve Kaplan sold
his first book. As an entrepreneur, Kaplan built Sampling Corporation of America into a $40 million business before selling it in 1997 to Snyder Communications. Kaplan’s first book, Bag
the Elephant, went to Bard Press, but not without some hard selling on his
part. "Ray Bard said no four times, but I finally convinced him to have a
meeting," Kaplan said. His next book, Sell Your Business for the Max, is due out in January from Workman Publishing.
11. Articles worth reading: J.J. Salem on self-publishing In an interview with the Jackson (Miss.) Free Press, author J.J. Salem (see story about Tan Lines above) discourses on the self-publishing phenomenon. “(T)here’s so much self-publishing, I think a lot of people don’t know the difference (between traditional publishing and short-run vanity press titles),” he says. “It’s like: ‘Oh, you’ve written a book. Well, that’s nice. My Uncle Clem just wrote a book about his family growing up in Pelahatchie.’” The interview is at http://www.jacksonfreepress.com/index.php/site/comments/dish_jj_salem 12. The antiquarian bookseller and the missing $1 million Audubon prints
The recent re-broadcast on a local PBS station of a one-hour “American Masters” special on the life of ornithologist-artist John James Audubon brought to mind the Southern Review editor’s precious memories of St. Francisville, La., where Audubon lived for a time, tutoring the daughter of a wealthy plantation owner. And it also brought to mind one of the more bizarre episodes involving Audubon’s classic and extremely valuable Birds of America prints. Antiquarian book dealer John Holmes Jenkins III was only 49 when he was shot dead, his corpse found floating in the Colorado River near Bastrop, Texas, in 1989. He was shot in the back of his head, while doing field research for a biography of Edward Burleson that he was writing. The killing was investigated as a homicide, but never solved. No weapon was recovered. According to Carl George, emeritus professor of biology at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., and an Audubon expert, Jenkins was rumored to owe gambling debts to organized crime figures and may have committed suicide (by shooting himself in the back of the head?). Jenkins’ body was found in the river not far from his abandoned Mercedes-Benz. His wallet was empty, causing investigators to suspect a robbery and murder. It was a highly unlikely end for Jenkins, a sixth-generation Texan who was born in 1949 in Beaumont, home of the Spindletop oil gusher. An Eagle Scout, he graduated from Beaumont High School in 1958, the class valedictorian. During his high school years, he spent his summers editing the memoirs of his great-great grandfather, John Holland Jenkins. The resulting book, Recollections of Early Texas, was published by the University of Texas Press in 1958, on the same day Jenkins graduated from high school. The book went through several printings. Jenkins attended the University of Texas. After a year in law school, he began his career as a publisher and bookseller in Austin. Between 1963 and 1990, the Jenkins Publishing Co., encompassing the Pemberton Press for trade publishing and the San Felipe Press for private (vanity press) publishing, produced more than 300 titles, several of which Jenkins wrote or edited. In 1965, he compiled and published Cracker Barrel Chronicles: A Bibliography of Texas Town and County Histories, a comprehensive bibliography of Texas titles listing some 5,000 books. His 10-volume Papers of the Texas Revolution was the winner of the Summerfield G. Roberts Award from the Sons of the Republic of Texas as the outstanding publication on early Texas history for 1973. An equally important work by Jenkins, Basic Texas Books, published in 1983, is a descriptive bibliographical guide to the most important books on Texas history. Along with writing and publishing, he dealt successfully in rare books. In 1971, he was instrumental in recovering some stolen books and national art treasures including an irreplaceable original portfolio of the Birds of America engravings drawn by world-famous ornithologist John James Audubon stolen from Union College. The story of how this set of Audubon prints ended up at Union College dates to 1844, when Union's president, Eliphalet Nott, invited Audubon to visit the campus. That was 13 years after the prints were first published in 1831. Isaac Jackson, a mathematics professor at Union who suffered from stomach ailments, had taken to gardening to relieve his dyspepsia, creating a garden that became the envy of the East Coast. It was the desire to tour that garden that brought Audubon to Schenectady. After giving Audubon a tour of the garden, Nott decided Union must own a set of Birds of America. Fewer than 200 of the double elephant folio editions had been produced and all had been sold, mostly in Europe, except for two sets owned by Audubon himself. The elephant folio prints were produced from copper engravings, using black ink only. All the other colors were hand-painted on each lithograph. Today, only 12 of the original sets of the 435 etchings still exist worldwide. Any one of those folios has a value in excess of $1 million. Back in 1844, Nott offered Audubon $2,000 in gold for one of the sets. Audubon wrote to his son and asked him to take down one of two sets of the bird collection from the shelves of Audubon's own Manhattan home library, and ship it to Schenectady. There, the 26 x 39 lithographs were bound in four gargantuan leather volumes, all 435 lithographs in the set. Each volume weighed more than 40 pounds. The Audubon folios resided safely at Union College until the summer of 1971, when a thief broke a window in the college’s Schaffer Library. He smashed open a case and used a box cutter to cut out 100 of Audubon's lithographs from a leather-bound volume and made off with the stolen art, trailing blood from a glass cut. One month later, tipped off by Austin antiquarian book and art dealer Jenkins, federal agents recovered the stolen Audubons. The FBI set up a sting at a motel near LaGuardia Airport, where the thief tried to fence the prints. The FBI arrested Kenneth Pall, a parolee from Pennsylvania who had done time for robbery. The 100 stolen lithographs were returned to the special collections vault in the college library later that summer. There they were kept under lock and key until 2006, when some of the prints went back on display under glass in a new secure facility. The college paid Jenkins a $2,000 reward. Jenkins gave the money back to the college, to be used for a $250 annual award named the John H. Jenkins Award for Bibliography. Jenkins wrote an autobiographical book, Audubon and Other Capers, about his involvement in the recovery of the prints. He returned to Union in 1976 to receive an honorary doctor of letters degree. A few years later, when the $2,000 ran out, his award was discontinued. As part of an ongoing $50,000 restoration at Union, each lithograph is now being permanently removed from its binding. The artwork is being repaired and cleaned by a conservator and placed in an individual archival mat. In 1980, nine years before his mysterious death, Jenkins was elected president of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America. In this role, he worked as principal organizer of a national system for identifying and publicizing the theft or loss of rare books and other valuable materials from libraries, booksellers, and private collections.
13. Actor Leslie Jordan is using a tricked-out bus for 30-city book tour Emmy Award winner Leslie Jordan rolled into Atlanta in late June in a tricked-out bus that Loretta Lynn would envy for a three-day stay promoting his new book, My Trip Down the Pink Carpet (Simon & Schuster Inc., $21.95). The bus will take him in style on a 30-city book tour covering the U.S. and Canada.
For those unfamiliar with the diminutive 4-foot, 11-inch actor, Jordan is best known for his Emmy-winning role as Karen's nemesis in the "Will & Grace" TV series. For that role he received an Emmy Award for Best Guest Actor in a Comedy Series at the 58th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards in 2006. Other work includes guest appearances on “Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman,” “Star Trek: Voyager,” “Reba,” “Boston Public,” “Boston Legal” and a secondary role on “Hearts Afire.” He has recently guest-starred on the popular comedy-drama “Ugly Betty” as celebrity-trashing Quincy Combs. Jordan is an accomplished stage actor and playwright. In one of his best-known performances onstage, he played Brother Boy in “Sordid Lives,” a role he took to the big screen in the popular cult film of the same name. He wrote and starred in the autobiographical play “Lost in the Pershing Point Hotel,” which was also made into a motion picture. He recently toured the country performing his one-man stage comedy, “Like a Dog on Linoleum” to rave reviews. In this show, he tells stories of the high and low points of his life, from his father's death in a plane crash when he was just 11 years old, to his battles with substance abuse and his weakness for street hustlers. Jordan’s appearance in Atlanta, one of the first stops on his tour, included a signing/reading and performance of his one-man show. He performed two shows in Atlanta at the 400-seat 14th Street Playhouse on June 22-23. His first book, My Trip Down the Pink Carpet, includes reflections on growing up in Chattanooga and life’s twists and turns before he achieved fame in Hollywood. “Like a Dog on Linoleum” is the foundation of this book, supplemented with funny anecdotes about stars with whom he has worked. Betty White, Boy George, the cast of “Will & Grace,” Cloris Leachman and Matt Lauer are all name-checked along with the tale of a practical joke played on him by George Clooney. Jordan said his publisher’s original plan was to send him on a traditional book-signing tour. But friends know that would have been too tame for this showman. He decided he would “act out the book” in a stage show much like “Dog” at each stop on the tour. “On my own dime, I hired a marketing firm from Palm Springs that puts together marketing tours. They came up with the bus tour going city to city,” Jordan told a Chattanooga newspaper. “My plan was to do the show, and then say everybody meet me after for a book-signing in the lobby.” But Simon & Schuster nixed his idea of selling books at the theater venues, because sales reports from the major booksellers are what supply statistics from which best-seller lists are made. “Even if I bought a million books myself, I couldn’t sell them at the (theater) venue,” Jordan explained. “I am seeing how corporate America operates.” Jordan said he sold 240 books at his first signing in a Barnes & Noble. “Book sales have been slow, but steady. I’m not a Tori Spelling or Lance Bass, this is the kind of book that will take word of mouth to sell books,” said the author. Jordan said he wrote the autobiography over four months in the summer of 2007. “Writing was a lonely profession,” he drawled. “I made the mistake of wanting to read it to people. I started noticing that people weren’t inviting me anywhere. Then a friend finally told me ‘We don’t invite you anymore because you make us listen to that book!’ Their eyes would glaze over. You can’t have that need to get patted on the back and be a writer,” he noted wryly. Jordan, who is openly gay, contends that he's "the gayest man in the world." Whether or not that's true, he may be the lustiest. In My Trip Down the Pink Carpet, he unflinchingly describes his substance abuse and sex addiction. He relates a series of crushes on his male (and mostly straight) co-stars. "Dean Cain was stunning, and the sight of him strutting about in his Superman outfit was truly magnificent," says Jordan, recalling his cameo on "Lois and Clark." "I showed up on the set determined not to 'peter-gaze,' or at least not to get caught at it." He became obsessed with Billy Bob Thornton while filming "Hearts Afire" after co-star John Ritter hinted to him about the size of Thornton's manhood. Ritter told Jordan the sight of Thornton's "rope" would cause him to "fall in love." He met Robert Downey Jr. while they were both in jail. Jordan was there for DUI convictions. For half a day, they shared a cell. Jordan later wrote Downey a letter asking him to befriend an outcast HIV-positive inmate. 14. Bertelsmann sells Direct Group North America to Najafi Cos. Najafi Companies, a private investment company located in Phoenix, Ariz., is acquiring Direct Group North America, the direct-to-consumer business, from Bertelsmann AG, the two companies announced on July 11. The sale agreement, which was entered into earlier, is expected to close in the third quarter of 2008. Financial terms between the parties, both privately held, were not disclosed. Direct Group North America is one of the largest direct marketers of books, DVDs, and recorded music in the U.S. and Canada. The company is home to such marketing-leading book, DVD and music club brands as Doubleday Book Club, Book-of-the-Month Club, Mystery Guild, Black Expressions and Columbia House. The company serves millions of members in the U.S. and Canada through its various club catalogs and online. Direct Group North America has offices in New York, Pennsylvania, Indiana, South Carolina and Toronto, Canada. Bertelsmann had announced its intention to sell Direct Group North America at its annual press conference in March of this year as part of a worldwide strategic review. 15. Regnery, publisher of anti-Kerry ‘Swift Boat’ book, plans tome on Obama Regnery Publishing, the right-wing publishing house that put out a 2004 book critical of Sen. John Kerry’s military service, is preparing a new book that will take a similar tack toward Barack Obama. The Case Against Barack Obama is due out in August and will be written by National Review Online writer David Freddoso. The National Review is a far-right publication. Regnery published the critical and controversial Unfit for Command, which was co-written by John O’Neill, a member of the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth,” which led a campaign to discredit Kerry’s military record during his 2004 presidential run. “I think it’s critically important that the country gets a clear and honest view of who is running and what they stand for, warts and all,” says Regnery President Marjory Ross, according to the Politico.com Web site. Ross said the book will explore several areas of Obama’s political life, beginning in Chicago, and include an examination of Obama’s ties to Rev. Jeremiah Wright and former Weather Underground member William Ayers. It will also look at his voting record in the U.S. Senate, which, Ross noted, was the most liberal in the chamber in 2007, according to National Journal. It will be Freddoso’s first hardcover book, according to Amazon.com. Publicity material on Amazon says the book will answer questions like, “Why Obama’s inexperience and extreme left-wing voting record is more dangerous than any threat we face today.” (Please also see commentary item on this book in “News of chicanery, dishonesty and tort-feasing in the book business” feature below.)
16. Brother’s memoir says Madonna's true love is her career, herself A memoir by Madonna's brother says the singer really does love her husband, director Guy Ritchie, but, apparently, not as much as she loves her career and herself, according to a July 10 review by the Associated Press’s Hillel Italie. In the expose, Ciccone writes about how he hopes his sister's Kabbalah faith will help her overcome her own ego. "I hope that it is Kabbalah's lesson that she is not the center of the universe," Christopher Ciccone writes in Life With My Sister Madonna, released on July 15. The 342-page book, published by Simon Spotlight Entertainment, arrives at a time when Madonna has been linked to the breakup of the marriage between New York Yankees star Alex “A-Rod” Rodriguez and his wife, Cynthia Rodriguez, who filed for divorce on July 8. Madonna issued a statement on July 6 saying that she has "nothing to do with the state of his marriage or what spiritual path he may choose to study," apparently referring to reports that the singer had introduced the ballplayer to Kabbalah, a form of Jewish mysticism. The book was co-authored by celebrity biographer Wendy Leigh, who has written books on Liza Minnelli, Grace Kelly and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Simon Spotlight, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, said the first printing was 350,000 copies. According to her brother, she and Ritchie love each other, despite rumors that they are splitting up. He believes they are "passionately committed" to staying married, with the help of Kabbalah. Christopher Ciccone, 47, worked often with his older sister, designing and directing her "Girlie Show" tour in 1993 and serving as artistic director of her 1991 documentary, "Madonna: Truth or Dare." But in his book, he says they are no longer close. Madonna's representative, Liz Rosenberg, told The Associated Press on July 9 that the singer had not read the memoir but found it "very upsetting" that Ciccone "has decided to sell a book based on his sister." Ciccone's memoir includes everything from gossip about Madonna's sex life (she lost her virginity to a "guy named Russell") to anecdotes about such ex-lovers as Sean Penn (Madonna called him a "paranoid control freak") and Warren Beatty. Some of Ciccone's stories have already been thrown into doubt. His revelations of Madonna enjoying a same-sex smooch with best pal Gwyneth Paltrow at a New Year bash was dismissed by a fellow partygoer. 17. Useful information and free services for writers Health Communications of Deerfield Beach,. Fla., on July 1 lost the right to publish and distribute new titles in the Chicken Soup for the Soul series. The rights were acquired by a Connecticut investment group headed by William Rouhana and Robert Jacobs from series creators Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen. Peter Vegso, owner of Health Communications, will continue to publish and distribute older titles known as the back list - about 180 titles. More than 112 million copies of Chicken Soup titles have been sold since the series began in 1993, Publishers Weekly reports. While not as popular as they were in their heyday in the late 1990s, the Chicken Soup books still account for healthy sales. The new owners will self-publish new Chicken Soup titles. Simon & Schuster |
"Southern
Review of Books Archives" hyperlink at the bottom of this page. The search
engine for the current edition and archives may be accessed by the button
at the bottom. The
Southern Review is edited by Noel Griese. The author of 17 books and
numerous articles on various subjects, he has been a newspaper reporter
and editor and has taught English and journalism at the Universities of
Wisconsin and Georgia. Elected to both Phi Beta Kappa and Phi Kappa Phi,
he holds three degrees in English and journalism.
ers,
"How To Write Romances and Get Them Published"
ation. The
2009 show will be held Friday-Sunday, March 6-8. 2009, at the Cobb Galleria
Centre in Atlanta. If you have overstocks,
your titles need to be represented. More than 50,000 bargain-priced titles
represented by 100-plus dealers will be up for sale.
ack,
which we began covering some months ago, before USA Today or the New
York Times recognized its existence. The Shack is a story of
redemption and God’s love. It’s a good example of how word-of-mouth viral
marketing can make a book a financial success. Out for about a year, it only
recently became available in chain bookstores and discount stores. After
Hachette took over marketing and publishing responsibilities from Windblown
Media, the original publisher of the book, it debuted immediately at No. 1 on
the New York Times trade paperback fiction best-seller list on June 8. At the
point where Hachette picked up the book, it had somewhere between 400,000 and
800,000 copies in print, most of them sold directly to churches from the
publisher’s Web site and garage. It now has a reported one million copies in
print. In late June, it was also at No. 1 on Borders Group’s trade paperback
fiction list, and at Barnes & Noble it has been No. 1 on the trade paperback
list since the end of May. The book at that point was doing much better than
Tolle’s New Earth, despite the Oprah bump for that title. Claims that the
book has sold a million copies may be exaggerated. According to Nielsen Bookscan,
which tracks about 70 percent of book sales, the book has sold only about
350,000 copies, but those numbers do not include sales at stores like Wal-Mart
or direct sales from the publisher’s Web site,
