If you’re an author, an editor, or a publicist, you want to know about this, because Whatever has a readership that hovers nicely between 30,000 and 40,000 unique visitors most days, “most of whom,” as Scalzi notes, “like books and learning what’s new in the bookstores.” His contact guidelines are straightforward—and this is, to my mind, perfect proof that there’s an audience for smart and engaging content that introduces readers to writers and vice versa.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

“There are people who feel like because it doesn’t have a huge audience, it’s not healthy, but artistically, it is super-healthy. The quality of the stories we’ve been reading, the books we’ve been reading—I can’t imagine there was a better time for short fiction artistically… I keep thinking there’s going to be a lull one year, and it can’t possibly be as good as the year before, and they keep equalling or surpassing them.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

LA Times Book Review editor David Ulin began this year’s announcement of the paper’s Book Prize finalists with a tribute to Dutton’s Brentwood Books, the independent bookstore that recently announced it will close in April, reiterating the feelings of loss so many have expressed since the news broke early Monday morning. Then Kenneth Turan took the podium to read out the finalists in the nine different categories. I wouldn’t say there were many major surprises in the shortlists, although there were a lot of “that’s nice that they spotted that one” selections, like Stewart O’Nan‘s wonderful novel Last Night at the Lobster, or Rebecca Curtis‘s short story collection Twenty Grand in the first fiction category—where it was joined by Pamela Erens‘s The Understory, from tiny Ironweed Press. And the fact that Harcourt‘s stake in the mystery/thriller category consists of two novels in translation was an interesting twist—actually, now that I think of it, the fact that the entire mystery shortlist consists of European writers might be worth discussing…

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“I quit my job, and I was lying on my bed in the sunshine for two weeks. I was utterly bone-deep relaxed. I was lying around watching my ass grow, and I loved it. After two weeks, my mom called and started bitching at me and telling me I need to get a job. So I went back, and of course I didn’t keep my clips, so I had to copy and paste everything from the Web site.”

Now that the book’s done, says Schoenkopf, “I am still looking for jobs… Hopefully, I can be the editor of my own paper somewhere.” Meanwhile, UnBeige, mediabistro.com’s design blog finds something to look forward to from Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen‘s Influence: It’s going to be designed by Rodrigo Corral, whose most famous jackets include A Million Little Pieces, The Subject Steve, and a bunch of Chuck Palahniuk novels.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

“What PW has is exclusivity,” she says. “If they had a deal database available only to the magazine subscribers, it would be a huge success, because to have a PW subscription means you’re not a one-horse operation… I’d love to report deals to the trade only.”

Getting more insular may seem like a counterintuitive strategy, but to borrow a page from Seth Godin, it’s about “spending all your time finding products for your customers instead of searching for customers for your products.” It’s an approach that requires cultivating intense customer loyalty; you might lose some customers by narrowing your focus, but you should be able to make it up by being the source for the objects of desire your customers all have in common. And, as today’s anonymous source points out, sometimes what doesn’t come with your services can be as attractive as what does… Whether it’s the right approach for PW and the other brands in RBI’s portfolio, though, remains to be seen.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

I also got reactions from novelist Karen Shepard (Jim’s wife) and short story writer Amy Hempel…

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“Popped collars abounded last night at the release party for Tom Dolby‘s latest novel, The Sixth Form, at the Rugby Ralph Lauren store at University Place,” reports Amanda ReCupido. “The young, hip crowd mingled amongst khaki pants and copies of Dolby’s book as they enjoyed foosball, tunes from DJ Johnny Dynell, an open bar, and hors d’oeuvres of American classics like PBJ, grilled cheese, and popcorn, all courtesy of Dean & DeLuca (I admit, it’s the first time I’ve ever paired jelly with Merlot).

“When I caught up with the man himself, he explained his choice for the unique event location: ‘It’s right downtown in the heart of it all,’ he said. ‘I wanted to draw a younger, edgier crowd.’ And draw he did. Somewhere around a table of angora sweaters, I ran into Daniel Vosovic from last season’s Project Runway (pictured with Dolby above), who told me about his own book, Fashion Inside Out, coming this fall. ‘But I’m no writer compared to this guy,’ he said, motioning to Dolby. ‘He’s in a class all of his own.’”

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Kristin Harmel (center) is flanked by fellow chick-lit authors Lauren Lipton, Brenda Janowitz, Alison Pace, and Sarah Mlynowski at the book party mediabistro.com threw Monday night at Touch to celebrate the publication of Harmel’s latest two novels, The Art of French Kissing for adults and When You Wish for YA readers.

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Jim Shepard, the winner of the fourth annual Story Prize, chats with fellow nominee Vincent Lam after the ceremony, held last night at the New School. Accepting the $20,000 prize for Like You’d Understand, Anyway, a clearly moved Shepard had nothing but praise for Lam’s Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures and Tessa Hadley‘s Sunstroke and Other Stories. “They focus with economy and grace our empathetic attention,” he said of the two collections. “They compel our interest in lives other than our own.”

During the presentation, each of the three authors read from their work and then sat down for a brief interview with prize director Larry Dark; Shepard discussed how he came to write “The Zero Meter Diving Team,” an emotionally wrenching story that interweaves family dynamics and Chernobyl, comparing the Soviet Union’s chronic denials that there were any flaws in their nuclear energy program with the way families might say “Uncle Billy doesn’t have a drinking problem, when I’m pretty sure he does—his liver just exploded.” How’d he latch onto Chernobyl as a short story subject? “I’m enough of a nerd that I’ll take a big pile of oral histories of Chernobyl out of the library just because I want to read it,” he admitted; that led to him recognizing an emotional theme that could work as a story, after which the deeper research began.

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When Amanda ReCupido and Tracy Bova went to Town Hall Monday night to observe the all-star tribute to the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Chinua Achebe‘s Things Fall Apart, they weren’t allowed to take photos inside the event—but at least we have a glimpse of the crowd that gathered to honor the legacy of Africa’s most prominent literary figure, as a parade of authors humbly offered touching tales of how Achebe affected and ultimately changed their lives.

“Edwidge Danticat remarked that Achebe’s name alone helped remind her of her own heritage,” ReCupido reports. “Chris Abani, who first began his speech in his native tongue and then switched to ‘the more primitive language of English,’ told an amusing story of a woman in an airport asking him if he knew Okonkwo, the novel’s protagonist, (because, don’t all Nigerian writers?). Abani recalled reading Things Fall Apart in four days, publishing his first short story in response to the novel two weeks later, and never stopping from there. ‘It’s central to everything we do,’ he said of the book.”

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Last night, at a party hosted by ICM agent Jennifer Joel, Parag Khanna celebrated the publication of The Second World, based on his globe-spanning travels to suss out the shifting power balances in the new world order. “It’s like witnessing the birth of a pundit,” quipped New York Times Magazine editor Scott Malcolmson, who worked with Khanna on last month’s much-talked about article distilling his thesis, as Random House and ICM staffers mingled with political scientists and international journalists around Joel’s living room. And it’s true: When it comes to making sense of globalization, Khanna seems like he just might be the MTV generation’s answer to Thomas Friedman.

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“Michael Cader doesn’t do much original reporting,” he continues, “but his daily newsletter and multi-faceted Web offerings are much more useful to most of us in the industry than PW’s thin reported content. All they offer now that distinguishes them are the reviews, which anyone with a few bucks could start producing tomorrow.”

(Note: Having frequently reviewed and written features for PW, my own perspective on the magazine’s content is slightly biased.)

This agent’s final assessement? “RBI may sell successfully, but whoever has to buy it will be well advised to throw out their entire on-line operation and start from scratch.” It’s not an entirely unfair assessment; as I observed Monday, compiling news is one of several services that book industry professionals clearly value, and the perspective that comes with that compilation—both implicitly and explicitly—is another. (And the observation isn’t even limited to Lunch; Shelf Awareness works this particular angle quite effectively, too.) Perhaps, in the long run, “services” might even be a better place to be than “media,” particularly when everybody’s chasing after the same publishing industry stories anyway. And that’s something that anybody thinking about buying part or all of RBI should be thinking about.

Along those lines, an independent publisher emailed me to wonder, “It generally seems like successful industry magazines run the primary conventions in the industry they write about. Makes me wonder why Reed didn’t put PW and BEA together more aggressively.”

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Maybe you don’t want to spend $25 on a debut novel. Fair enough, but you can’t use it as an excuse to not read Beautiful Children anymore: Until midnight this Friday (February 29), Random House is giving away free PDFs from the book’s website. Not only that, online booksellers like Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Powells and Northshire Books will also provide access to the files, which appear to be DRM-free. Bock’s reasoning for approving this giveaway is simple: “I want people to read the book. If that means giving it away for free on-line, great.” UPDATE: Not that he’s letting this “free” stuff go to his head; as an anonymous tipster pointed out, in tiny, faint lettering at the bottom of the website, there’s a little note that says “© Copyright 2008. Charles Bock. This is our intellectual property, so kindly don’t fucking steal it.”

(Full disclosure: One of the websites Random’s buying adspace on to promote the giveaway is my own Beatrice.com.)

(photo: Eric Ogden/NYT)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

(photo from New Zealand Book Council)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Sunday night, poet Owen Sheers read from his first novel, Resistance, at KGB, pairing off with Richard Gwyn for one of the first events of Wales Week USA, an eight-day celebration of Welsh culture featuring, among other events, musical performances, art exhibitions, and a closed-circuit screening of last Saturday’s rugby game pitting the Welsh national team against the Italians (which, happily, they won 47-8).

Sheers and Gwyn will also read Wednesday night at Housing Works and Saturday afternoon at The Ear Inn with their fellow countryman, Lloyd Robson, and Thursday night Sheers is going to lead a discussion at the New York Public Library with the acclaimed travel writer Jan Morris. After the KGB event was over, I got out my camcorder and asked Sheers to tell me more about his participation in Wales Week USA, and about his fellowship at the NYPL’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers…

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