More Helpful Marketing Advice For Marrieds

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Here is the thing: when you have two unavoidable topics, it is better not to avoid them. Avoidance leads to more questions. If you come up with a highly probable but incredibly dull response to the questions, more power to you. Nothing kills reader interest in a topic faster than dull responses. And why do we have to explain this to Nicole Krauss and Jonathan Safran Foer? Because clearly they cannot be bothered to hire media consultants to do this helpful work for them. Refusing to discuss your spouse and feigning wide-eyed innocence when confronted with the similarity of topics […]

Books/Mags/Blogs

Drunkeness: The Failure of Lad Lit

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MediaBistro continues to make our days easier by going out and doing the interviews we would do if we had the time and energy. We don’t, so we pretend to be reporting by linking to their stories. In a way, it’s a win-win situation for us. Except for the part where we pay for the privilege. Must work on that. This morning, they buttonhole Kendra Harpster of Doubleday and get her to spill on all sorts of topics. We’ll just skip ahead to our favorite parts, though, as always, we suggest reading the full article. That way you’ll know she

Publishers and Editors

Harlequin Plunges Into The Great Cell Phone Divide

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We must say that our readers are busy little bodies. While we took advantage of the electric blanket and the lack of coffee (we were on strike until caffeine was freely available), they were off gathering news and forwarding, forwarding, forwarding. This is how it should be. In what we believe is the second major publisher deal with Vocel, Harlequin is going all cell phone on us. While we’re very exxcited about the possibilities of cell phone content (from an intellectual perspective), we’re already having gag-me thoughts. Maybe it’s the description of the cool services: Harlequin will provide subscribers with

Publishers and Editors

Miracles Do Happen

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LA Observed, in what is surely its second scoop in as many weeks, reports that the evil Calendar Live experiment ends tomorrow at 5 a.m. While normally we’d spend a few moments dwelling on the precision of the timing, we simply don’t have a spare moment to spare. What does this mean for you? Well, first, all the stories we don’t link to on the Los Angeles Times site will become fair game for our thoughts. Second, if we do link to a story, you have an excellent chance of reading it without having your credit card handy. No word

Square Pegs

The Sky Is Falling, Long Live The Sky

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We know, we know. We said we were bored with the death of the book stories. No more, we swore. That’s so 2004. But that was before the Europeans started thinking about this book digitization thing that captivated us a few months ago. Turns out they’ve been studying the fine print while the rest of us have moved on. Probably there’s a life lesson there, but we can’t see it. Robert McCrum starts by quote Nigel Newton of Bloomsbury, a born worrier if his words are anything to go by: According to Newton, professionally cautious, mass digitisation is not a

Books/Mags/Blogs

Librarians: Now More Dangerous Than Ever

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As we now know, while the world was off stereotyping librarians, they were fomenting revolution. Which is exactly the same thing you’d do if you were faced with the prospect of another patron looking for a book “by that British guy. The famous one.” All of this means that if you really want to be radical in library circles (which we imagine are more fun than Disneyland), you have to be a Cuban librarian. Yes, it’s true (or as true as possible, given that we’re not planning on heading south to do any real reporting): in its effort to suppress

Square Pegs

Freud: Still Messin’ With Us After All These Years

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Did Freud destroy the art of creating characters? If so, you’ve got to hand it to the guy. Very few of us have the power to change the course of a single profession. Freud managed to re-engineer at least two. It seems character development was arrested by the introduction of ids and ego and superegos. No great characters have been written since. Much as we were fascinated by this theory, we couldn’t buy into the argument. Maybe because it implies that the entire postwar writing profession fell lockstep into Freudian analysis. We were lost when this statement struck us as

Books/Mags/Blogs

Be Careful What You Ask For

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While we’ve been fighting the Mad Beast of Sinus (new Tylenol product: Severe, written in friendly, easy-to-read-through-the-agony yellow letters), others have been thinking. Normally, we don’t encourage this sort of behavior, but that’s only because we know what sort of trouble ensues. When you throw something out into the collective unconscious, you may eventually be required to do something about it. Mark Sarvas tempts fate by offering his top ten things he would do to resuscitate the Los Angeles Times Book Review. While we’d focus more on important things like dress code and making sure the coffee is always fresh

Books/Mags/Blogs

On The Death of A Favorite Thing

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Now, it could be that I’m overreacting. Maybe the fact that two intelligent and capable writers — in a major book, on an important topic, published by one of the country’s top presses — end up sounding like Alanis Morrissette is not as worrisome as it seems. Isn’t It Ironic?

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