Quin became a member of Spin‘s book club, where a cluster of musicians gather monthly to talk about books, after being interviewed for the magazine by club organizer Emily Zemler. She says she and her bandmate, twin sister Sara, have different tastes in literature but do have a few authors they both love and frequently swap books while on the road. Right now, she’s reading The Female Brain by Louann Brizendine and In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts by Gabor Maté: “I like to read fiction the best,” she admitted, “but try to change it up and read nonfiction to challenge myself every few books.”

(photos: Getty Images)

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This has already started a flurry of news items suggesting that Sorkin’s screenplay is an adaptation of Mezrich’s unpublished book—which remains to be seen. It is entirely possible, after all, that Sony and Rudin simply bought the rights to Face Off as a pre-emptive measure to avoid a lawsuit from an un-optioned Mezrich over his book being a source for Sorkin’s screenplay.

Either way, do they really think this thing’s going to be more entertaining than the script Jon Favreau wrote for the film version of Po Bronson‘s novel The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest?

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

“My proposal for the book that became Remembering the Bone House created a little flurry, culminating in an advance of $52,500 From Harper & Row. This was by far the biggest advance I have ever had, but I regretted the choice. Except for my editor and a liability lawyer, no one ever read the book, much less publicized it. I felt I had caused tremendous disappointment, as I felt after HarperCollins (by then owned by Rupert Murdoch) published the next book, Carnal Acts, and so I felt more released than dismayed by the rejection of my proposal for Ordinary Time.”

That freed Mairs to submit that book to North Point Press, which at the time was an independent publisher based in San Francisco; they took Ordinary Time but then folded (the name and a chunk of the backlist were later sold to FSG), and that brought Mairs to Beacon, where she’s stayed for nearly two decades. “The lessons of my writing career have proved pretty pedestrian,” she says of her experience. “If you concentrate on the task at hand, without aspiring to a particular outcome—whether wealth, literary acclaim, or audience adoration—something will happen… I can’t tell you whether it will be good, but I can promise you that it will surprise you. You just have to slog along.”

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Obviously, there’s a thematic element running through the two projects—perhaps we’ll see The Rime of the Ancient Mariner next year. Or The Poseidon Adventure?

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Last week’s party at Beauty Bar for rock’n'roll advice columnist Carrie Borzillo-Vrenna (right) and her new lifestyle handbook, Cherry Bomb—packed wall-to-wall and out onto the sidewalk—was also a triumph for publicist Fiona Bloom (2nd from left) of The Bloom Effect. After building up a reputation for promotion and publicity skills in the hip-hop community, both as an independent producer and as an executive at labels like EMI and TVT, the native Londoner threw her first book party three years ago for a Nelson George novel, then did a full PR campaign for BLING: The Hip-Hop Jewelry Book in 2006. Borzillo-Vrenna is just her third literary client, but “I am absolutely looking to get more active in the book world and work with more publishers and authors,” she emailed a few days after the event, citing the enthusiastic response to the party from Simon Spotlight Entertainment personnel (who, GalleyCat had confirmed independently at the front of the bar, were duly impressed by the crowd).

“I love the idea that you can treat a book the same way you have a film project, a new clothing line, an album—the method and process of getting the word out is the same and thus so is the promotion and marketing,” Bloom continued. “The only difference is the publishing world chooses to not spend their money in these places. Perhaps a book party may not be as key or crucial to the overall marketing plan or people feel like the book world—being more intellectual—perhaps isn’t interested in being force-fed or having to react to a title because there’s so much hype or buzz. I do feel like the audience is growing larger and larger and younger—we’re barely pushing the envelope or touching the surface on how large an impact or [demographic] you can reach within the book world. It’s bigger than we think…. I never like to underestimate anyone!”

Bloom says she’s looking forward to doing more book campaigns as the goodwill generated by her fieldwork spreads. “What gets me especially excited about a book is the person behind it,” she wrote, “their track record/experience and journey and how interesting they are—and most importantly—the context and subject matter.” And if just half the celebrity “guest stars” who show up to offer subject-specific advice in Cherry Bomb (like Kat Von D. on getting tattoos or Tori Amos on three important life lessons) got book deals and called Bloom to get the word out, that right there would keep her busy for quite some time…

(photo: Mel D. Cole)

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Well, Doubleday‘s spring 2009 catalogs are making the rounds, and as you can see by the accompanying illustration, it looks like Gross and his designers were able to find a photograph that worked for them. The book, which “looks at the museum’s rich social history and exposes the secrets behind the upper class’s cultural and philanthropic ambitions,” is scheduled for publication by Broadway in mid-April.

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This is exactly right. The difference between true censorship and Random House’s decision to place a higher value on the safety of its proven corporate assets than on a commercially unproven work of artistic expression is, simply, the difference between “you can’t do that” and “I don’t want any part of that.” Random House did not join forces with Islamic leaders to explicitly condemn the book, nor is it sitting on the manuscript to prevent readers from ever seeing it; they have given the rights back to Jones, who is even now working with her agent to secure another American publisher for the novel and its sequel. As Fish concludes, Random’s decision “may have been cowardly or alarmist, or it may have been good business, or it may have been an attempt to avoid trouble that ended up buying trouble,” but declining to publish a book that one has come to view as a potential liability is not an act of censorship—and for anyone who thinks it is, here’s a question: Where were your cries of protest when the hint of a lawsuit was enough to make Random House’s Crown division drop its plans to publish the memoirs of Madonna’s nanny? Don’t you think she was entitled to freedom of expression in the face of outside intimidation, too?

One of the few admirable aspects of this situation is the clearheadedness Jones herself has shown throughout; in an early interview with GalleyCat, she said, “I was never angry about their decision… [and] they’re a private corporation; they can do whatever they want.” Contacted last night via email and asked if she felt censored, she wrote back, “In terms of censorship, I would say that Random House censored itself. This is a classic case of self-censorship based on fear.” Considering Fish’s notion that the cancellation of The Jewel of Medina should be viewed as a corporate decision, she added, “When you pull a book because you think you’ll lose money, that’s a corporate decision. When you pull a book because you fear terrorist attack, that’s self-censorship. Until [Random House] execs heard warnings of possible violence over my book, the company had my book on the fast track to best-sellerdom. So they clearly had expected to make money from its publication.”

(Of course, it’s still entirely possible to weigh the threat of violence in stark economic terms, weighing the potential revenues from the book against the heretofore unseen potential costs of repairing physical damage to 1745 Broadway and replacing dead personnel—just like Madonna’s nanny’s memoir turned out to have potential costs in the form of prolonged legal difficulties—and weighing those against any theoretical losses in revenue sparked by all the hoopla over the cancellation—which, let’s face it, probably aren’t that significant.)

But what Jones would call self-censorship, and Rushdie would call censorship by fear, Fish would describe an exercise of Random’s judgment—poor and short-sighted, perhaps, and almost certainly worrisome to any other author dealing with similarly controversial themes, but judgment nonetheless. What’s at risk here isn’t “free speech,” but Random House’s reputation as a publishing company that values unfettered intellectual and artistic discourse.

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So that’s the $1,000 David J. Langum, Sr. Prize in American Historical Fiction and the $1,000 David J. Langum, Sr. Prize in American Legal History or Biography off the table for Random-affiliated authors until 2009 at the earliest—bad news for, at the very least, David Ebershoff (The 19th Wife), David Liss (the forthcoming The Whiskey Rebels), and Jane Kamensky and Jill Lepore (the also-forthcoming Blindspot), all of whom would appear, based on an admittedly incomplete reading, to have otherwise had as strong a chance of winning the fiction prize as Random House author/editor Kurt Andersen, who won last year’s award for Heyday. (The legal history prize has never gone to a press not affiliated with an American university in the seven-year history of the award.) “Serious ideas, even if offensive to some, flourish in books,” representatives for the Langum Trust wrote. “Random House has exhibited a degree of cowardly self-censorship that seriously threatens the American public’s access to the free marketplace of ideas… We do this reluctantly, since our most recent prize in American historical fiction went to a Random House title. Nevertheless, this issue must be confronted.”

Is this, however, the right way to confront it? Should these (and other) authors suffer a literary penalty for a corporate decision involving another author, one in which they had no hand whatsoever? What do you think?

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It’s Nathaniel Fick (far left), the former United States Marine who wrote about his combat experiences in Aghanistan and Iraq in One Bullet Away while Evan Wright‘s Generation Kill offered another perspective on the role of Fick’s platoon in the latter theater of operations. Fick is now a fellow at the Center for a New American Security, and will be speaking about his confidence in Barack Obama‘s ability to succeed as commander-in-chief. As this picture shows, he’s been behind the Obama campaign for a while now, organizing a rally for the candidate in Kabul just two weeks ago.

FishbowlNY and FishbowlDC bloggers, covering the convention for their respective websites, have been told they should keep an eye out for him today to get an interview.

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⇒”Is the author’s large, whitish face the primary feature of the cover?”

⇒”Can you find the word ‘secret’ anywhere on the cover of the book?”

⇒”Does the book suffer from the overlarge margins, giant type, two-paragraph pages, and ‘inspiring quotations’ that often suggest a rushed, shoddy, or lazy manuscript?”

Perhaps most important of all, “can you imagine a future in which closing this book on the last page will make you angry that you didn’t just go back and re-read A Confederacy of Dunces instead?” But those are just Mann’s criteria—how do you make these decisions?

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As the series had grown, the original bar—which was never really intended to host live music—was no longer able to meet the show’s growing technical needs. “Joe’s Pub can offer us the highest quality sound, a spectacular stage, comfortable seats and…food!” Stern emailed when queried about the move. “While I’m deeply sad to be leaving Happy Ending and all the friends I’ve made there, I’m doing what’s best for the show and I’m thrilled and honored to be part of the team at Joe’s Pub. I planned originally to keep one show at the bar and the other at Joe’s, but that seemed too confusing.” Another concern was that the new venue increased the amount of pre-production work that would go into each show… and then there’s Stern’s understandable desire to find some more time to complete her own second novel, as it’s been five years since the publication of The Long Haul.

The final season of Happy Ending at Happy Ending begins Sept. 10 with Andrew Sean Greer, Hannah Tinti, Darin Strauss, and special musical guest Moby. Although it would not be at all surprising if Strauss brought his guitar along, too.

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Andrea Lavinthal and Jessica Rozler met as freshman journalism students at Syracuse—”we were in different social circles but all the same classes,” Lavinthal recalled, relaxing at the Library Bar after leaving the Cosmopolitan office, where she’s a content editor for the magazine’s Sirius programming. After graduating, the pair wanted to work together on a book project, and took a look at various features they’d written for the school paper. A feature on hookups seemed “more relevant post-graduation than we’d ever thought it would be,” she recalled, and that led to The Hookup Handbook: A Single Girl’s Guide to Living It Up. Their initial attempts to find an agent failed, but they did score a meeting with editors at Simon and Schuster, at which point Rozler (who works as a production editor at Fairchild Books) looked up the agent for The Metrosexual Handbook, Adam Chromy. 24 hours after they contacted him, they had an agent—who got several other publishers to bid on the book before it landed at Simon Spotlight.

Their latest book, Friend or Frenemy?, described as “a guide to the friends you need and the friends you don’t,” has just come out from Harper—but before that, Lavinthal admitted, they had tried writing a novel together. “It just wasn’t working,” she said of the year they spent on that project; one day she turned to Rozler and asked, “Do you like this book?” Rozler mustered up an “it’s all right,” and they knew it was time to move on, keeping a few of the ideas they’d developed and reworking them into another lifestyle handbook. The pair tend to work from outlines, then take on individual chapters “until we can’t look at it anymore and switch,” Lavinthal said. “I’ll get half a list done and tell Jessica to finish it.” Rozler nodded, adding, “Anything scatological is probably me.”

continued…

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Odder still, perhaps, when outlets that report to Nielsen Bookscan have only shifted 7,000 copies of Punk Marketing (frequently referred to in promotional copy as a ‘bestseller”) since it was published by Collins in March 2007, which indeed seems like a rather poor return on investment, though it’s of course entirely possible that the 30 percent of bookselling outlets not reporting to Nielsen had disporportionately larger sales on the title. (Laermer placed his latest book, 2011: Trendspotting for the Next Decade, with McGraw-Hill, and announces at the end of the article that the book after that will be self-published.)

Anyway, Laermer’s complaints are frequently, shall we say, interesting: “How can a 22-year-old editor bid on a book?” he starts off. “What does a post-graduate $32,000-a-year fresh-out know what will hit with the public?” Good questions—and just as soon as a real-life 22-year-old editor making $32,000 a year who’s bid on a book all by herself shows up, she can answer them. She’s probably the one who’s been dealing with the agent who’s so “beyond frightened of pissing off the editors,” he’ll actually tell his authors they’re lucky to get whatever paltry advances the publishers deign to offer. If you were dealing with a 22-year-old who could strong-arm an entire editorial team into approving her bids, you’d be scared too!

Also, did you know small publishers exist only as a marketing gimmick? And that big publishers are a bunch of wussies who spend all day in meetings afraid of offending each other and don’t know how to work the bookstores? Which isn’t to say he doesn’t hit some nails on the head—publishers do spend too much money to acquire too many books that they can’t market properly afterwards—but what do you think about his broader critiques?

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