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.

Remember The Art of Racing in the Rain, the million-dollar novel by Garth Stein that HarperCollins picked up last summer? Looks like they'll make every penny back and then some: Starbucks is going to start selling the book in a few weeks.

Just so you know what to expect: Imagine all the emotional drama of Love Story, Kramer Vs. Kramer, and that Jon Voight remake of The Champ rolled into one novel... and then have it narrated by the most adorable dog in the world. Polished to an unabashedly commercial sheen—as in, the style is solid, even great in spots, but never gets in the way of keeping the story moving forward—this book already had bestseller written all over it; the Starbucks deal just removes whatever suspense was still lingering. (Although, really, after this and How Evan Broke His Head and Other Secrets, it may be time for Stein to retire the "guy raises a kid on his own after the mother dies" plot device; where else can he take it?)

Security expert Bruce Schneier has a fun column in this month's Wired about the mindset it takes to succeed in his line of work:

Uncle Milton Industries has been selling ant farms to children since 1956. Some years ago, I remember opening one up with a friend. There were no actual ants included in the box. Instead, there was a card that you filled in with your address, and the company would mail you some ants. My friend expressed surprise that you could get ants sent to you in the mail.

I replied: "What's really interesting is that these people will send a tube of live ants to anyone you tell them to."

The article jumped out at me because of its thematic similarities to an afterword Schneier has contributed to Cory Doctorow's new YA novel, Little Brother, in which he persuades teenage readers that "security is fun," and encourages them to look at the world with an eye towards how its systems might fail—in order to make them stronger. "You'll start noticing that many of the security systems out there don't actually do what they claim to," he writes, "and that much of our national security is a waste of money."

Oh, yes, he goes there: Because one of the coolest things about Doctorow's novel, apart from the fact that it has not just one but two afterwords (the other is by Xbox hacker Andrew Huang), is that it's the literary world's most explicit assault on the "War on Terror" yet, a not-quite-science-fiction story (think William Gibson's Pattern Recognitions) in which a teenage hacker takes on the Department of Homeland Security after a terrorist attack on San Francisco prompts a government response much like the one that's actually taking place, tweaked just a little stronger. It's a level of direct political engagement I've seen few "adult"/"literary" novelists attempt in the last few years—granted, I'm not especially well-read, but the only book that sticks out in my memory is Nicholson Baker's Checkpoint, which is certainly passionately argued but unfortunately doesn't hold up that well as art.

Little Brother does hold up, and Doctorow makes the technology so easy to understand it becomes practically invisible—except, of course, to eyes trained to find ways to make it break. Granted, some of the strokes he uses to paint the bad guys are overly broad, but this is still one of the most awesome books any young adult could read this summer... and one of the most important novels anyone of voting age could read in the months leading up to our next election. As Schneier says in his afterword, "Trading privacy for security is stupid enough; not getting any actual security in the bargain is even stupider." Or, as Huang observes, "We don't win freedom through security systems... We win freedom by having the courage and the conviction to live every day freely and to act as a free society, no matter how great the threats are on the horizon."

In just under three minutes, Jen Lancaster gets to the core message of Such a Pretty Fat, about how, after her doctor's diagnosis, "I found myself actually having to go about losing weight, and I kinda didn't want to." Lancaster's quick tour through the premise of her third memoir features just the right blend of talking and action, with cameo appearances by her personal trainer, Barbie, and her long-suffering husband, Fletch. If you're trying to figure out how to boil down your personal narrative to a brief promotional message, this TurnHere video is a pretty solid guideline.

Can the same approach work with a novel? In another TurnHere production, Marc Acito makes a strong case for it, rollerblading through Central Park as he explains the central premise of his new book, Attack of the Theater People, with frequent cutaways to fellow musical theater geeks. You ever see The Rutles, with Eric Idle chasing after the camera to deliver his narration? It's sorta like that, only less goofy and more sincere... and, of course, with a lot of jazz hands. Again, the key lies in just the right proportion of "talking about the book" to "stuff happening." (Now, if you don't love showtunes like I love showtunes, you might think there's too much stuff happening, but I suppose that's a matter of taste.)