Publishing Insider

one of my fave stores is 30, just like me!

Square Books is heaven on earth: wood floors, high ceilings, second floor iron railings..and lovingly picked books, great staff, authors always around, great food there and all over that gorgeous town. I have great, great memories of my Mississippi trips. And they are celebrating 30 years this year! See the anniversary video.

Jess Walter rules!

Great guy! Amazing writer. His new book is just out - Financial Lives of the Poets - and here's a delightful youtube!

music

New fave site: For Folk's Sake.

send in the clowns!

Bestselling books by comedians are a long-standing tradition, going back to Johnny Carson in the 50’s and up through the years. The big difference now is how much earlier in a career, and can even take a comedic career to a higher level. I’ve been pursuing Brian Regan for a book, the only worry being that a lot of his impact is visual…but I’m not too worried; he is our new George Carlin for his absurd takes on our absurd daily lives. He is the funniest guy around right now, in my, umm, book. And happy to see David Cross’ book on the bestseller lists. His turn in Arrested Development is classic. OH!!!! It’s a one-note schtick but I have not laughed as hard as I did at John Pinette on DVD for I’m Starvin’. I mean, I hurt afterwards. Get out of line!

we met this guy and love him! very impressive

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind.

fresh paint!

“It’s late September and I really should be back at school.”-- Rod Stewart

 

Labor Day is my New Year’s Day.

            The first Monday in September is a much more significant milestone for me than some arbitrary day in the middle of winter. I take stock at the end of each summer, make my resolutions then. We are sad to see a string of sunny days at the beach come to an end, but secretly, we look forward to a little more structure back in our day, and, admit it, seeing our kids off to the school bus again.

            As part of the catalog of tricks our minds play on us, recent years telescope down to a blur, but the distant time of our lives when things felt so dramatic and important remains crystal clear. For me, the memories of heading back to college are so vivid that September still holds the place in my annual rhythm as the time of new beginning, of new year. And nothing lingers in my synapses more, as signal and symbol, than the smell of fresh paint. That slightly stinky sting of paint fumes is forever melded in my head with the fresh start that college presented each fall, and with the four – okay, five - years that were at the center of my transition from teens to twenties.

Paint?

            Going as I did to a huge state school, maintenance was light and the chaos was heavy. It became standard practice, at least at that place in the early Seventies, for everyone to paint their rooms the first week back. Over the summer, an institutional pale green or yellow may have been slapped on, or not. Either way, we arrived with suitcases, records…and paint. I like to think we were just expressing our individuality, but mostly, we were just trying to impress the opposite sex. A really wild color could elicit much comment for quite awhile, often past the point where you got sick of living in a purple box.

            I was a dark blue guy myself. Something about sky and water. But we all felt cool and “individual,” all of us in our matching long hair, beat-up jeans, and wrinkled t-shirts, The Dead or Pink Floyd blaring out of most every open door or window.  Did I ever paint a heart or a girl’s name on a wall, then quickly paint it over? I don’t think so, but I can see the possibility in my mind’s eye and suspect that maybe I did. A deep sigh, an adjustment upwards of the volume knob of the stereo, and more paint to complete the fresh start.

            I may sound overly nostalgic but don’t be fooled. I love looking back but would never want to go back. Now, I have great family and friends, a job I love and a car that starts without drama. And a new smell rules my life -- the smell of books. Every day is a day of discovery, of finding words in a sequence I’ve never experienced before. And different from college, where everyone is off doing their own thing, I am in a community of like-minded book lovers, a place where everyone is teacher to the other. I am in school for life, and I am still learning, thank goodness.

fresh start

In a new book I’m five chapters into writing, I say that Labor Day has long been my New Year’s Day resolution-wise. First, I hate New Year’s parties, but more important, the bittersweet transition from summer to fall always forces me to stop and prioritize, to gear up for a busy fall. (I’ll post the entire essay soon.) Not that summers are quiet anymore; this one has been especially busy as we kickstarted a slew of good books while planning the 2010 books and setting our priorities for the fall shows.

This fall, it’s another round of 9 regional trade shows, with which I have a love/hate relationship, but mostly love. They are hell to organize but the payoff is tremendous, especially as we bring authors and booksellers together, one of the best things we do. I’ll be at GLiBA and MBA this year, introducing a # of debut writers to booksellers, but also taking Garth Stein, Mike Perry and David Wroblewski on well-deserved victory laps. Our sales reps will showing the same love and care at their shows. I’ll be writing more about these shows in the coming weeks and giving thanks to the very forward-thinking and selfless reg’l execs.

And I do hope to get on track blog-wise here. Apologies, a wild summer: getting my daughter off to college (about which I wrote an essay for a father-daughter book coming out next year), editing a 172 page book of essays by booksellers called the Great Lakes Reader (to be ready by GLiBA; and 8 more regional volumes to come – booksellers, need more essays); teaching in Denver for a week; watching IndieBound grow and flourish; watching e-book sales grow faster than expected; reading great stuff on our fall lists; finishing edits on two winter 2010 original trade pb’s; launching a backlist-book-of-the-day blog with my associate Marcus; and finishing the last draft of Work 101, which Richard Hunt at Clerisy is going to publish. On the music front, my boomer5 blog is in full swing, if also slim for August, and I got to see the Subdudes, Tom Rush and Cracker in concert in cozy venues. (My summer anthem this year was Cracker’s Euro-Trash Girl.) I also accomplished the modest goal of not wearing any socks the entire month of August!

I am lucky enough to live on the same street I work, albeit six blocks away, and the street at my end is tree-lined, forming a shaded tunnel every summer. It’s a modest neighborhood, and in keeping with that, I heard a lone cicada walking home one night. I have never heard just one cicada and never one in the city. It was both a lonely and encouraging sound in an otherwise noisy August for this country. One voice, not raised, but I heard it perfectly. Is the cicada trying to tell us all something?