When I was in L.A. last month for the Festival of Books, freelance publicist Shannon Byrne slipped me a copy of the Zagat guide to "Michael Connelly's Los Angeles," which sifts through the regular city handbook for restaurants, nightlife spots, and other attractions that show up in the crime writer's bestselling novels. Flip the book over, and you've got Connelly's BookExpo America schedule, his favorite city locales, and a Q&A about The Brass Verdict, which Little, Brown will be publishing in October—a novel that teams up the protagonists of two popular series, Harry Bosch and his half-brother Mickey Haller, for the first time.

And then that guide, being a slim thing, dropped to the bottom of my computer bag until my memory was jogged late Friday afternoon by a post from Bethanne Patrick, PW's "Book Maven," who was giving away 20 of the booklets before Little, Brown starts handing them out at their BEA booth. It looks like she might still have some left to hand out later today, too...

(Do you have a BEA giveaway worth getting excited about? Not just a galley or a tote bag, mind, but something really out of the ordinary? Tell us about it!)

With this promotional video for the paperback release of James Rollins's The Judas Strain, the book trailer takes on the complete look and feel of its Hollywood counterpart. The sources at HarperCollins who passed the video along confirmed that the action scenes were shot especially for the trailer by Brady Hall, a Seattle-based filmmaker who also works with Meg Cabot on her wacky videos, as well as animated trailers for the Warrior Cats, Septimus Heap, and Dangerous Book franchises. (So, yes, all that swirling hieroglyphic animation is his handiwork, too.)

So we got a press release this morning about how the ninth annual "Get Caught Reading Month" has been going on for over a week now, with celebrities like Dylan and Cole Sprouse reminding kids that "reading is a fun brain-feeder and it stays with you for a lifetime," and this year there's a new component to the campaign called "Get Caught Listening," which is all about, according to the press release, "the particular pleasures of books in audio format." So far, we know "the heart of the campaign will be pre-recorded audio voice-overs of traditional and celebrity authors sharing their passion for audiobooks, complemented by a print campaign of those authors 'getting caught' listening to their favorite audio books," but we probably won't find out who those authors are until the campaign's official launch at BookExpo America—a launch that is scheduled to spill over into June's National Audiobook Month.

Which I thought was some new marketing gimmick, but according to Google it's been going for a couple years now. Huh. But it's that "traditional authors" nomenclature that cracks me up, every time. You don't see this in other creative fields; Scarlett Johansson doesn't get billed as a "celebrity vocalist," for example, and you never get an exhibit of "traditional and celebrity painters."

To promote What Rhymes With Bastard?, a memoir scheduled for late-summer publication, MacAdam/Cage will be handing out CDs at BookExpo America with some original songs written by the author, Linda Robertson, in her capacity as the accordionist for Cotton Candy Cabaret, a San Francisco-based cabaret act. The lyrics to "Heavy Petting in the Great Outdoors," the track that was emailed to me as an advance preview, make it completely NSFW, so we won't be showing that off to you, but you can download some songs from their website. Or, visit their the band's MySpace page, which features a streaming version of "No Butts," another slightly risqué song slated to appear on the CD.

Naturally, an extract from the memoir printed in the Sunday Times in late March (the book's already out in the U.K.) has NSFW bits in it, too. Boy, the reading tour is going to be fun.

(If anybody else is planning to give stuff away besides the usual galleys and book bags, and wants to give us a sneak peek, that'd be cool.)

The 'Fight Club' author's latest, which PW says "reads like a cross between the Spice Channel and Days of Our Lives," is about the guys waiting in line at an aging pornstar's career-ending 600-dude gangbang. So Doubleday's marketing department decided to get "creative" and make a bunch of tired jokes about porn, creating a MySpace page for the pornstar character and a book trailer (fairly SFW, actually) that poses as a trailer for one of her early films, "The Wizard of Ass." According to that MySpace page, her filmography also includes lit-inspired porn titles like "The Gropes of Wrath," "The Ass Menagerie" and "Catch Her In The Eye," which would all be a lot funnier if they hadn't been thought of already or didn't actually exist.

In this four-and-a-half-minute video for Why Popcorn Costs So Much at the Movies, the camera never cuts away from economist Richard McKenzie as he explains—well, not why popcorn costs so much (he's saving that for the book) but why the medium-sized bag has more popcorn in it than the large-sized tub, even though it costs a dollar less. And granted, the video probably could use a few cutaway shots—closeups on the containers is the most obvious possibility—and maybe McKenzie could be a bit more at ease in front of the camera, to match the naturalness of his writing.

But, all those quibbles aside, I think this video comes very close to "getting" one of the most important elements of a successful book trailer, which is that a consistent style of visual storytelling matters as much as the textual story you're telling. The static shot "works" for the majority of this video because it contains all the information we need to understand what McKenzie is trying to tell us: the three containers of popcorn, the price differentials, and the demonstration of the disparity between the medium and large portions. Some additional shot selection might offer a way to emphasize those elements, true, but they're laid out straightforwardly enough. It's only at the end, when McKenzie is trying to discuss what else he's put into his book—including discussions of gender imbalance in wages and the longterm impact of the 9/11 attacks—that the popcorn becomes distracting. Still, this is definitely a case where I'd rather see too little editing in a book trailer than too much.

Junta42, the search community site focused on content marketing and custom publishing solutions just announced their second quarterly Top 42 Content Marketing Blogs (which actually lists 118 blogs)and although Mediabistro.com's Galleycat ranks at # 64 on the main list, it is actually the fifth ranked blog with a publishing focus.

The list is based on five standards including the number of posts, substantiveness of posts, regularity of posts, Junta42 member ratings and of course, Google pagerank.

Here's how the publishing blogs stacked up based on Junta42's list:

#1 Joe Wickert's Publishing 2020
#2 Naptown Jams
#3 Dan Blank
#4 Custom Publishing Council
#5 Galleycat
#6 Paul Conley
#7 Publishing 2.0
#8 NXTBOOK
#9 TSTC Publishing's Book Business Blog
#10 Publishing Executive Blog
#11 Custom Publishing News
#12 eMedia Strategist Blog

Drop us a line and let us know what publishing blogs you think Junta42 overlooked.

Natalie Bovis-Nelsen, the cocktail mixologist who blogs and vlogs as The Liquid Muse, wrote an article for mediabistro.com about PR techniques that'll get you mentioned on blogs. You'll want to get mentioned on blogs, she says, because they've got global audiences, and they've increasingly become the place where "big media" outlets get story ideas—in some cases because bloggers also have a second career in freelance (or staff) journalism. "The new generations of consumers... expect to know what's new as it happens," Bovis-Nelsen declares. "By pitching blogs, your client and products can be exactly where readers want them to be: right in front of them, from the point of release onward." (As long as you don't screw up the pitch; Harlequin would no sooner send Maud its latest, for example, than Viking would try to tout All the Sad Young Literary Men to The Elegant Variation.)

So what does Bovis-Nelsen recommend to get their attention? Among other tips those of you in the online marketing departments will instantly recognize: Look before you pitch, keep it simple, have images or videos (or product samples) ready to send, and don't try asking them to revise away negative opinions after the post has gone live.

This article is one of several mediabistro.com features exclusively available to AvantGuild subscribers. If you're not a member yet, you can register for as little as $49, and start reading those articles, receive discounts on mediabistro.com seminars and workshops, and receive all sorts of other bonuses.

Here's Matt Taibbi reading from his new book, The Great Derangement:

This is a great example of what makes book trailers fun: You build up a strong visual dynamic around your book's concept, and then you play it out for two-and-a-half minutes. Of course, it helps when you've got recognizable public figures like George W. Bush and Hillary Clinton to play with.

There really isn't that much to say about "James Frey's Morning After," the profile running in June's Vanity Fair that Michael Cader didn't say last night at Publishers Marketplace. Save, perhaps, to note that this bid at redemption may have begun back in February, with a convenient Page Six item in which the newspaper owned by the company that owns the book publishers behind Bright Shiny Morning rechristened Frey as an "outsider."

Or to wonder whether the article's fourth-quarter assertion that "it was something of an open secret in the publishing world that the industry had been complicit in the scandal," based on the idea that everybody "knows" memoirs have some element of fabrication, isn't a rather melodramatic way of framing the situation. Granted, the "Margaret B. Jones" fiasco demonstrated that not much has changed in the way memoirs get chosen for publication despite all the post-Frey assurances—but "complicit in the scandal"? Whatever sells magazines, I suppose.

(That said, Evgenia Peretz is no doubt right when she suggests the novel "will test to what extent the public is willing to read James Frey the writer, and not, as he puts it, 'James Frey the asshole,'" so we'll be looking forward to getting our hands on a copy of Bright Shiny Morning and deciding for ourselves whether it's any good.)

UPDATE: Though Frey tells Peretz he "doesn't plan to speak to the press again after this interview," Sarah Weinman emails that he may be cramming his schedule full of media interaction before calling it quits, as per the Bookseller profile also running this week.