Daniel Altman, Black Inc. (Outrageous Fortunes) Sydney.

If you’re thinking a relative of mine died and left me a fortune, sadly, no. But almost as valuable, an edition of a book I’ve been searching for over 15 years is now in my ...

Although I remain ambivalent about Vogue Italia choosing to single out black models instead of just integrating black models more fully into their spreads year-round, I am still excited about this month’s issue, which has a tribute to black beauties. Although I gave up fashion magazines generally a couple of years ago, I’ll once again [...]

Chris Adrian's The Great Night fuses the heavy weight of the mortal coil with the mischiefs of the faerie kingdom when three individuals crossing San Francisco's Buena Vista Park en route to a party find their world intermingled with that of Titania, Oberon and Puck, fairies from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Read review.

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I started doing a fifteen minute sketch for myself on Fridays... here is this week's sketch...

-MC

Barnes & Noble will announce a new e-reader later this month. Maybe it'll be a Nook - or maybe not.

Writer-director Ethan Coen will publish a book of poetry, The Day the World Ends, cleverly scheduled for publication in 2012.

Some stories stick with you a long, long time. Twenty years ago, a friend named Rob recounted a horrifying scene that he had witnessed at a local country club. Rob was seated where he could observe a group of members who had been drinking heavily. One of them, a prominent local man, grabbed his wife by the crotch and announced to everyone, “See this? I bought and paid for it. None of you can afford it!”

Rob later learned that this man regularly beat his wife, but the local doctors “owed” him, so they patched her up and sent her home. All the best local attorneys were in his debt as well, so there was nowhere for this woman to turn.

I knew of this man and his wife. After all, they were regulars on the society pages. I’d seen the woman around town and I often admired her beautiful clothes and jewelry. Now I winced to think of the shame and pain that she lived with daily.

In Make, Take, Murder, I called this abused woman Cindy Gambrowski. In the first scene of the book, my protagonist Kiki Lowenstein is Dumpster-diving for her lost paycheck when she reaches into a pile of trash and pulls up Cindy’s severed leg. (And yes, Gambrowski is a bit of a pun, since “gam” is slang for an especially attractive female leg.)

To write accurately about Cindy’s life, I consulted with an expert on domestic violence. I also talked to a judge and an attorney to get the legalities right.

I tried to put myself in Cindy’s place. To the outside world, she has everything. But she’s living in a cruel cage, and her jailer is her husband. Knowing that abusers don’t stop, I wondered, “What might a woman risk to be free?”

Readers will quickly learn that Cindy isn’t the only abused woman in the book. Again, my domestic violence expert filled me in on what happens when a woman with kids tries to escape her persecutor. My expert also explained to me one of the common ways that an abuser often tracks down his family. I also learned about some of the psychological baggage that later marks the psyche of an abused woman.

Even though I outline, there are often surprises along the way. In this book, I decided to create WAR, the Women’s Above-ground Railroad, a fictitious organization that would assist women who needed to escape from abusers. My imagination conjured up a dedicated and secretive group of women who would help their frightened sisters adopt new identities in new towns.

Wow, was I ever shocked when my domestic abuse expert told me that such an organization really does exist!

When I finished the book, I felt so passionate about the cause that I donated a portion of my advance to Lydia’s House, which provides transitional housing for abused women and their children in the St. Louis area. I also included information about abuse in my acknowledgement section. It’s my hope that one of my readers might recognize the signs of an abusive relationship early enough that she can escape the sort of torture that Cindy Gambrowski endured.

Note: The "official" release date for Make, Take, Murder is May 8, but most bookstores already have their copies in stock. But before you visit, call and ask if they have their copies of Make, Take, Murder. Also...whenever possible, please put your money where your house is and buy locally.

QUESTION: When will Make, Take, Murder be available on Kindle or Nook?

ANSWER: I have no idea. See, my publisher converts the files to a format that e-publisher can use. Then it's up to the e-publishers (Amazon or Barnes & Noble) to post the books. (Feel free to bug Amazon and Barnes & Noble. And tell me what you find out, okay?)

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QUESTION: Will Make, Take, Murder be available in large print?

ANSWER: I have no idea. So far, Wheeler Publishing has purchased large print rights to the other books in the series. You can contact them at Thorndike Press.

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QUESTION: What's the next book in the series and when will it be out?

ANSWER: I don't know. I used a working title of Ink, Red, Dead, but that's been changed. The publication date will be April, 2012. I have turned the book in.

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QUESTION: Will there be more books in the series after the book formerly known as Ink, Red, Dead?

ANSWER: I don't know. My editor has said she wants another book. My agent is planning on talking to my editor. I've written three chapters of a 6th book.

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QUESTION: Is it true you are writing another series? What's it about?

ANSWER: I've been blessed to sell a new series featuring Jane Eyre as an amateur sleuth. The first in that series will be out Spring or Summer 2012. The publisher is Berkley, and part of the title will be The Jane Eyre Chronicles.

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QUESTION: Joanna, how can you know so little?

ANSWER: I'm a mom. We work on a need to know basis. Seriously, authors have control over the universe they create, not over the details of the publishing world. I really do adore both my publishers. Obviously they have superlative taste! So when I get more concrete info, I'll pass it along. One nice tidbit of news...while I was at Malice Domestic my agent was contacted about foreign rights to The Jane Eyre Chronicles. That's a very good sign indeed!

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QUESTION: Where do you live these days?

ANSWER: I divide my time between Washington, DC, and Jupiter Island, Florida. If you become my friend on Facebook, you'll see that I often post photos from both places.

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QUESTION: How can I get an autographed copy of Make, Take, Murder?

ANSWER: There are lots of ways. 1.) Call Mystery Lovers Bookshop at (412) 828-4877. They have copies. 2.) Call ScrapbooksPlus! at
(703) 263-9503 3.) Email me at JoannaSlan@aol.com and put BOOKPLATE in your subject line. Then tell me how you want me to personalize a bookplate, share your postal address with me, and I'll pop a bookplate in the mail to you. (A bookplate is a fancy sticker.) 4.) Come to one of my signings. I try to post them at http://www.booktour.com/

Fifty years ago this month, the Freedom Riders -- a group of seven black and six white civil rights activists --embarked on a journey from Washington D.C. to New Orleans on a series of interstate busses. Along the way, they...

Book ordering is critically important in how customers view a store, stock is (if not the most important) one of the single reasons a customer will purchase in your store. But is there some ...

There are some books which are always on school book lists and most customers will have on ‘to-be-read’ lists.  Those books which, even the biggest reader, will sometimes get “You haven’t read “Insert Incredible Classic ...

Mother's Day is this Sunday, and for our last round of Ask the Editors recommendations, we'd like to suggest some books that we love (and/or have given our moms ourselves). They are, in no particular order: No kitchen would be...

Elizabeth Rubin

Osama bin Laden’s death in a mansion in exclusive club house territory of retired Pakistani officers has exposed the terrible paradox at the heart of our war in Afghanistan—Pakistan’s hypocrisy and our acquiescence. Bin Laden’s Pakistani hosts, two rich businessmen called Arshad and Tariq Khan who owned the house and were killed with him, hail from Charsadda, 15 miles north of Peshawar. Their uncle was a retired Brigadier. (Arshad was apparently the courier, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, who led intelligence officials to the compound.) This is not a lawless land. This is highly controlled territory.

We give billions in aid to Pakistan’s military and civilian government. Yet Pakistan is harboring our enemies and even the enemies, one could argue, of its own healthy survival. Portions of our money are being funneled into the variety of insurgent networks whose fighters are killing American soldiers, Afghan soldiers, American civilians, Afghan civilians, European civilians, Pakistani civilians—mothers, fathers, children on multiple continents. Why, asks a US army major, did all his friends die in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province when the real problem is on the other side of the border? Why, asks a twelve-year-old Afghan girl in Kandahar whose family has been wiped out by US air strikes, are you bombing us? How has this come to pass?

In 2006, I traveled through Baluchistan and the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan, meeting with many Taliban fighters. I described it at the time as a kind of Taliban spa that offered them rest and rehab between battles in Afghanistan to which they would be returning. But it was more than that. I met Afghan Taliban who’d tried to make a deal with the Afghan government to get back to a life without fighting. One told me he was then arrested by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, the ISI, and blackmailed—they would release him if he would resume fighting and dispense with notions of reconciliation. He rose up the ranks of the Taliban command, traveling freely between Quetta in Pakistan and Zabul, a province in Afghanistan, where he was an intelligence commander for Afghan Taliban fighting coalition forces.

Another young Afghan Taliban I met in Peshawar was involved in the production and distribution of propaganda and recruiting DVDs—beheadings, inspirational music videos, and killings of American soldiers, all set to Pashtun war songs. But after spending hours and hours with him, I noticed his anti-infidel rhetoric beginning to subside, and when the subject of the ISI’s operatives came up, his whole demeanor changed. “Snakes,” he called them. Their first offense, he said, was trying to oust Mullah Omar and create a more obedient Taliban leader—like Jalaluddin Haqqani, an old jihadi we once financed to fight the Soviets but who has now set up shop in Waziristan under ISI protection. (Along with his son Sirajuddin, Haqqani stages the big-media-grabbing attacks in Afghanistan but seems to abide by the rules of his hosts—no attacks against Pakistan. He also runs a virtual kidnapping factory in Waziristan and the Pakistanis have done nothing to stop it.)

Then he said:

I told you that we burn schools because they’re teaching Christianity, but actually, most of the Taliban don’t like this burning of schools or destroying of roads and bridges, because the Taliban, too, could use them. Those acts were being done under ISI orders. They don’t want progress in Afghanistan.

He told me about ISI orders to behead an Indian engineer who was captured (and these orders were later corroborated). “People are not telling the story, because no one can trust anyone,” he told me. “And if the ISI knew I told you, I’d be fucked.”

That was 2006. Since then, just about everyone has learned the rules of the game: The ISI will continue to support the various jihadi groups (like Lashkar-e-Taiba) in order to attack and intimidate India, and get what it wants in Afghanistan—more or less a semi-independent extension of Pakistan. In 2008, American intelligence even proved definitively what Afghans and Indians on the ground already knew: that the deadly attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul was planned with the help of the ISI.

And it isn’t just the ISI that is supporting the Taliban. During my travels through Pakistan, I had a long discussion about the Pakistan Army’s conflicted loyalties with Najam Sethi, the longtime editor of Lahore’s Friday Times. What does it want? Where does it stand? The Pakistani military retains a secular strain, but religion is central to its ideology. Since its inception in 1947, its raison d’etre has been to defend the Muslim world. This mission, however, is constantly undermined by the fact that, while Pakistan was founded as a refuge for South Asia’s Muslims, more Muslims live in India, and most of the attacks by the militant groups it supports have ended up killing fellow Muslims. There is a contradiction at the heart of the Pakistani Army and it’s expressed in what everyone has come to call Pakistan’s “double game.”

The military officers I met—many of them retired, living better than bin Laden, in lavish Latin-American style mansions with pure-bred dogs, English-style cooks, and manicured lawns—spoke to me as if they envied the jihadists’ clarity of purpose, their moral vision. In Sethi’s view, the military also harbors “a degree of self-disgust for selling themselves” to the Americans. They are still angry with the US for abandoning them after the Afghan jihad, and for sanctioning them over the nuclear program. The standard army phrase about their treatment by the Americans was, Sethi said, “They used us like a condom.”

Despite these widely held sentiments and the evidence against a strong alliance, US diplomats and generals have tried to sustain the image of close cooperation.

In 2010, I had the chance to ask Secretary of Defense Robert Gates about the US relationship with Pakistan. He’d just been to the country to urge its generals to go after the jihadists, the Taliban, and the Haqqani network. I asked Gates how he could possibly consider Afshaq Kayani, the chief of the Pakistani army, an ally. “It’s frustrating,” Gates told me. I waited for more, but nothing came. Your silence says a lot, I said. “Well, I was very specific in a couple of my meetings in looking at them point-blank and saying, ‘Haqqani and his people are killing my troops. I’ve got a problem with that,’” Gates responded. And what did they say, I asked. Gates is all control, but he cracked a small smile as he said: “They listened.”

Admiral Mike Mullen has spent the better part of the first two years of the Obama administration—hours and hours of flight time, face time, and phone time—cultivating a strong relationship with Kayani. Up until recently, Kayani’s Wikipedia entry said that he counted Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, as a close friend and ally. That line has now been removed. US officials maintain they don’t think that Kayani or ISI chief Ahmed Shuja Pasha had direct knowledge themselves about bin Laden. But even before Sunday’s assassination of bin Laden, a friend of mine told me that when he recently saw Mullen the admiral seemed puzzled by the breakdown of the relationship. “What relationship?” my friend asked. “[Kayani] was never on your side.”

Or as an advisor to Ambassador Holbrooke told me not long before Holbrooke died: “We see Pakistan as a flawed ally and the Afghan Taliban as our enemy. The truth is the reverse.” It is the Taliban, the advisor suggested, who can be worked with; they who distrust—and in many cases despise—the ISI overlords they depend on for safe havens and support. All along they’ve let it be known through different channels that they want to talk directly to the Americans. The question is how?

Will the revelation that bin Laden and family were dwelling in a newly built Pakistani Army mansion not far from the capital finally change the nature of the strange dance between the US and Pakistan? One wonders how good and smart men and women are taken in by diplomatic friendships, how they allow themselves to believe lies they know to be lies, or worse, settle for the lie because it seems there’s no way out, no creative solution to change the trusted old forms of diplomacy or the definitions of enemy and ally.

Of course at the heart of the problem lies Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. We’d rather our Pakistani army enemy controls it than our Pakistani Taliban enemy. But will we ever know who is who, and can we tell them apart? And so our policy in Pakistan has collided with the Lot equation: How many righteous men must there be for God to save Sodom and Gomorrah, asks Abraham. And when God says fifty, Abraham keeps lowering the number. What if there is just one? How many American, Afghan, Pakistani, European casualties are worth keeping this Catch-22 policy alive?

Garry Wills

We do not hear much about the Navy Seals, and with good reason. They are a secret set of special operatives. They are in the news now for their spectacular against-the-odds raid that killed Osama bin Laden. But they have been in the news before, and what they did then was also spectacular. In April of 2009, President Obama dispatched the Seals to rescue an American sea captain, Richard Phillips, being held hostage by Somali pirates, who demanded two million dollars for his release. The Seals were authorized to kill the pirates if that seemed necessary.

The Seals decided it was necessary when they saw the bound captain through a window of the pirates’ ship with an AK-47 aimed at him. It was nightfall, on a choppy sea. The Seal snipers on an American destroyer had to use night-vision scopes at a distance, but they killed (through the window) the man threatening Captain Phillips, and two other pirates who poked their heads out of a rear hatch. It was an almost superhuman bit of sharpshooting. If we had remembered this incident, we would not have been surprised at what the Seals did in their even greater and more dangerous descent on Osama’s compound in Pakistan.

But generally we did not remember how the pirates were taken out. It happened only two years ago, but the feat has been swamped by intervening events. The killing of the pirates stilled for a moment—a very brief moment—right-wing criticism that Barack Obama was flaccid or feckless on national defense and military action—the suggestion launched during the 2008 campaign with an ad saying he was not ready to take a 3 AM call about a national emergency. That claim had roared back, after the pirates were killed, and was still in force before the Pakistan raid. Now it is, once again, temporarily muted. In fact, some Americans are reacting, for the moment, like Mattie Ross: “No grit? I’ll say Barack Obama has true grit.” But we can expect the resumption of the old charges soon, just as after the shots that disposed of the pirates. We can also expect what happened after that earlier event. The pirates’ fellow Somalis vowed reprisals. Some in other nations feared that America had stirred up a hornet’s nest of piracy.

Things will be worse this time, since we are in the midst of contagious conspiratorialisms. Some right-wingers are already claiming that bin Laden was not killed (though al-Qaeda itself has now acknowledged his death). They are demanding his picture. Soon they may be asking to see bin Laden’s birth certificate. I don’t remember a demand to see the pictures of the dead pirates in 2009. But if that event had taken place in our current climate, I am sure we would have heard such a demand. We must brace ourselves for the craziness. Nonetheless, through it all, we should keep in mind what superb things can be done by our Navy Seals. And we should keep somewhere in the back of our minds a remembrance that the one ultimately pulling the trigger in both Seal actions was the President of the United States.

Here are some handpicked titles from our New Books section. Want to include your book? Just read our Facebook Your New or Upcoming Book post. Don’t forget to include your title’s exact release date and a link.

Work on Purpose by Lara Galinsky: “The book offers thought-provoking questions and a list of more than 175 career resources and programs to help readers put their hopes for a purpose-driven career into action.” (April 2011)

The Brightened Mind: A Simple Guide to Buddhist Meditation by Ajahn Sumano Bhikkhu: ”This simple, short introduction to meditation, particularly well suited to young people, can help anyone rattled with the stresses of living in today’s society rife with financial uncertainty, war, crime, and the psychological assaults of bosses, teachers, and the media.” (May 2011)

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Michelle Aielli will now serve as director of publicity at Little, Brown and Company. At the same time, Sabrina Callahan has been promoted to assistant director of publicity for James Patterson.

Here’s more about Aielli’s work with that mega-bestselling author: “she spearheaded all major publicity around Patterson publishing events, including the launch of the Michael Bennett series, his guest appearance on The Simpsons, his Guinness World Records induction, the celebration of his 20th anniversary with Little, Brown and Company, and all major media hits, including the front pages of both USA Today and the New York Times Magazine.”

Callahan joined the Hachette imprint in 2007 as senior publicist, working on a number of campaigns including Uwem Akpan’s Say You’re One of Them, Robert Wright’s Evolution of God, and Elizabeth Kostova’s The Swan Thieves.
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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Today’s guest on the Morning Media Menu Morning Media Menu (MP3 link) was Foreign Affairs editor Gideon Rose talking about how the journal rushed a brand new eBook, The New Arab Revolt: What Happened, What It Means, and What Comes Next.

The digital collection pulled together timely articles, interviews, and primary documents to help readers understand the historic changes sweeping through the Middle East. Rose talked about the powerful eBook opportunities available to magazines and journalists.

Follow this MP3 link to listen. Here’s an excerpt: “We did an instant book right after 9-11 called How Did This Happen? We managed to basically pull together within a few weeks a full-scale, serious book. We published it with Public Affairs and it sold more than 40,000 copies.  It was a back-breaking effort. It’s something that I’m proud of, but I wasn’t necessarily looking forward to repeating the crazy experience.”

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Earlier this week, Borders CEO Mike Edwards spoke with AnnArbor.com about the current status of the company as well as its plans for the future.

Edwards explained in the article : “All I can tell you is that we are here fighting to the end. We know we have a business plan that works, but it requires a lot of support to get it there, and our publishers are going to make or break our ability to transform this company at the end of the day.”

Edwards emphasized that Borders’ ability to weather the crisis is dependent on the support of publishers. He also spoke about the factors that lead to bankruptcy, the bonuses for executives, and office morale. Do you think Borders will be able to recover before the end of 2011?

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Cornell Woolrich - Rediscover one of the true masters of murder and mystery writing.

The Organisation of Mind by Tim Shallice and Richard P. Cooper (Oxford University Press, 2011) (amazon.co.uk) Brain imaging has been immensely valuable in showing us how the mind works. However, many of our ideas about how the mind works come from disciplines like experimental psychology, artificial intelligence and linguistics, which in their modern form date [...]

New books that will - or should - incorporate news of Bin Laden's death.

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Grant Barber on Stigmata, a new graphic novel from Fantagraphics by Lorenzo Mattotti and Claudio Piersanti, translated from the Italian by Kim Thompson.

Unless I’m totally forgetting something, this is the first review of a translated graphic novel that we’ve put up on our site. There’s no reason that we haven’t posted more graphic novel reviews, except that we’re way too busy trying to understand the workings and philosophical implications of Facebook commenting.

But seriously, Edward Gauvin is a great translator of graphic novels from the French (and a great translator overall), and there’s no reason we shouldn’t be covering more of these.

Anyway, the first one to be reviewed is Stigmata, and it’s perfect that Grant Barber, Episcopal priest living on the south shore of Boston, keen bibliophile, and frequent Three Percent reviewer, wrote this up. Here’s the opening of his review and an image:

The novel opens with a wordless picture of an overweight guy sitting up on the edge of his bed in the underwear he has slept in. Unshaven, with an untrimmed goatee and a mohawk that seems more born from the necessity of hair loss than style, the protagonist who speaks in first person—relating his tale—is clearly a man living on the margins of his society . . . revealed to be a 41-year-old alcoholic who is occasionally employed, living in a boarding house.

The book moves quickly to the dream vision he has had: called into the presence of a looming, cosmic, God-Child who promises the man that his suffering will soon be over, and that he is now to receive a sign of this promise—bleeding from a single wound in each palm without pain or infection. He rejects this ‘gift,’ which propels the protagonist out of his boarding house, where people have taken to leaving votive gifts of candles and flowers and requests for miracles. He tries first for a medical cure, which brings imposed psychiatric attention, then life as an ordinary person hiding his wounds unsuccessfully. He joins a circus, falls in love with a woman who accepts him for who he is, loses her in a flood. Eventually finds some rest and acceptance of his condition working in a convent, tending the dead for burial and the keeping up the cemetery.

Click here to read the full piece.

As mentioned before, I’m obsessed interested in the ways in which readers find books—especially in the New Digital Reality of Facebook comments and whatnot. The idea of a “Pandora for Books” (or maybe better, a “Last.fm for Books”) has been batted around for sometime now, and apparently a few of the big corporate publishers are putting some $$$$ into just this idea.

From PW:

the main goal of Bookish is to make recommendations about books that will appeal to a reader’s particular taste. He compared the site to things like IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes that mix information about movies with reviews and news. Editorial will include breaking news, author interviews, excerpts, reviews and other marketing materials that publishers feel will help readers pick a book, Lemgruber said. Although backed by Penguin, S&S and Hachette, Lemgruber stressed that Bookish will be editorially independent, covering books from all publishers (excluding vanity presses).

Penguin Group USA CEO David Shanks compared Bookish to Pandora and said unlike other sites that are driven by purchases, Bookish will make recommendations based on the information provided by consumers. “The more information readers provide the more customized the recommendations can be,” Shanks said, noting that Bookish is aimed at helping readers identify books they may like from the tens of thousands published annually. He said the three publishers came together after it became clear that their individual sites would never drive enough traffic to reach a critical mass of book buyers. As print media devotes less space to book coverage, the publishers felt they needed a way to raise the profile of their content, Shanks said.

As with the still not doing shit DiscoverReads, the proof is in the pudding, so to speak. And without being able to check out whether it recommends Harry Potter or The Pale King, based on my muted post horn tattoo it’s hard to say whether this algorithm is worth its weight in silicon. So we’ll see.

I’m all about the idea of recommending software/websites/apps/etc, mainly because I feel that the real challenge for book people in our Age of Abundance (everyone’s a writer! everyone’s a publisher! a million books is year is nothing!) is going to be hooking up the right reader with the right book at the right time. Maybe this is a step in the right direction . . .

Also curious to see how book reviewers respond to something like this. In a sense, a site that automates recommendations takes away a bit from their importance. Rather than puzzle out from a 1,000 word review if I should or shouldn’t read a book, I could just ask Bookish how well it “fits my criteria.”

It will also be interesting to find out how dispersed the recommendations are. I know there’s a better, more accurate statistical term for this that I can’t think of, but basically, will this site end up recommending pretty much the same books you see on tables at Barnes & Noble, or will it end up pushing readers down the “long tail” toward niche publications and books that are outside of the mainstream. There’s a fine balance to be struck here, one that Pandora is only so-so at (in my opinion).

All very curious that the tide has shifted in the direction we (people like myself and Richard Nash) have been talking about for some time now . . . Kind of cool to see a prediction start to come true . . .

What nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish someone had told this to me . . . is that all of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. For example, you want to make TV because you LOVE TV. There is stuff that ...

If you look up “Sarah Dessen” on either Shelfari.com or GoodReads.com it’s clear that she is beloved among young adult fiction readers. Excitement over her tenth novel is practically palpable and more than one fan has professed his/her love for...

Here is a collection of sweet Mother’s Day book stories from our staff and online friends… From Mary Olson, BWB’s Outlet Store Manager - “I recently read The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde (the beginning of the Thursday Next series, which I highly recommend!). Thursday Next, the heroine of the story, is a character in the ‘real’ [...]

Today's guest post is by NO RULES regular Susan Cushman, director of the 2011 Memphis Creative Nonfiction Workshop.

Last month, I wrote about how to plan the budget, faculty, venue, housing, meals, and social events for a writing workshop—specifically for the 2011 Memphis Creative Nonfiction Workshop. Today’s post is about what comes next: scheduling, marketing and promotion.

SCHEDULE
Setting the schedule is a bit like putting together a puzzle—you have to find just the right shape and space for each piece, and the picture isn’t complete until all the pieces are included.

Deciding how much time is needed for each event—craft talks, manuscript critique sessions, panels, meals—is something you learn from experience. And it’s helpful to always remember that things take longer than you think they will.

But arranging the lunches on site (in a room next to the workshop room) saves valuable minutes, and overlapping where you can (pulling participants out of the workshop for 10-15 minutes each for their pitch session with a literary agent) also gives you the most value for the allotted time.

In the end, our schedule ended up with 10 hours of manuscript critique sessions, 7 hours of craft talks/presentations, 1½ hours of panel discussion, and up to 5 hours of pitch sessions, depending upon how many people sign up for those.

You can see the complete schedule here.


MARKETING & PROMOTION
With a large conference, you can count on some extra money for advertising, but with a small workshop the budget is tight. If you spend more than you take in, you put yourself at personal risk.

After considering the options available for paid advertising, I chose to only place one ad, in an online creative nonfiction newsletter that reaches 9,000 active subscribers each month and has an average click-through rate of  28%. The ad cost $75 and will run in May, four months before the workshop.

The rest of the promotion only cost some time and thoughtful "product placement."

Social Networks. Blogs, Facebook and Twitter are great places to promote events. I have a personal blog, and I post monthly here at No Rules and also at the Southern Authors’ blog, A Good Blog is Hard to Find.

You can create an event page on Facebook, and link back and forth between all of these avenues each time you post more information. Keep your readers interested by posting new information at least once a week on the workshop site. This can be in the form of promoting faculty readings at bookstores, linking to interesting posts about various aspects of creative nonfiction (or whatever your workshop’s genre) to start a discussion, and even citing good resources for emerging writers to tap into before the workshop.

And don’t forget the oldest social network—e-mail. If you have access to e-mail lists from neighboring workshops and conferences, send out a group e-mail announcing the workshop to those participants.

Local Media. Press releases are free. So are event listings in community and arts calendars in many city and neighborhood newspapers. Send this information out as many months in advance as the papers will allow, and then follow up with a reminder—just a couple of sentences—a month before the workshop.

How far should you reach? Since this is a small workshop and not a conference, I’m limiting my reach to Memphis, and about 5 surrounding states.

Bookstores and Coffee Shops. Create posters and fliers and take them (or mail them if you can’t get to all of them) to area bookstores and coffee shops, where lots of emerging writers hang out. If you can coordinate your effort with an event—like a book signing by one of your faculty members—all the better.

When I learned that one of our speakers was coming to a bookstore in Memphis in March, I called and asked if I could hand out fliers for the workshop at his signing. Look for ways like this to connect the dots in your marketing and promotional efforts.

A note about libraries: our public library won’t allow notifications to be posted unless the event is free, which is too bad, since I’m not going to make any money off the event. Be sure and check to see if you might be allowed to post information in the libraries near you.

So there you have it. I’m having a great time planning this workshop. If you’d like to organize a writing workshop in your area and have any questions, feel free to contact me. I’d love to hear from you.

And, if you have organized a writing workshop and have more tips and suggestions to share, please leave a comment. Check back in September or October to find out how successful the workshop was!


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You can read Susan's blog here, and follow her on Facebook or Twitter.

Self-published authors don’t have to sell millions of books to be successful.

By covering topics of local interest and cultivating a readership that’s close to home, they can handle their own marketing and distribution – and maybe even quit their 9-to-5s.

Below, we’ve interviewed two authors in the New York City area who have made it work.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Three major publishers–Hachette Book Group, Penguin Group (USA), and Simon & Schuster–will partner with AOL Huffington Post Media Group to launch a mysterious new website for readers this summer. Bookish will provide readers “with a personalized experience connecting them with their favorite authors and books through original editorial features, unique tools and more.”

AOL and The Huffington Post will help reach readers and AOL plans to provide advertising sales support for the new venture. Arianna Huffington explained that they will “use our multimedia, social, and community engagement tools to help connect our readers with authors and their books. And we’ll highlight this content through our entire network and hyperlocal sites.”

Here’s more from the release: “New media veteran Paulo Lemgruber is leading the effort as Bookish’s CEO. Previously, Lemgruber developed and ran digital businesses for Comcast and Reed Elsevier. Also part of the Bookish team is Charlie Rogers, who will serve as Editor-in-Chief. Prior to becoming part of Bookish, Rogers was Editor-in-Chief, Digital Media at NBC Universal and worked at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia and The Paris Review. Technology efforts will be directed by Bookish Chief Technology Officer Andy Parsons, who previously served as CTO for Outside.in and Digital Railroad, Inc., as well as Director of Software Development at Juice Software.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Minnesota House majority leader Matt Dean has issued a halfhearted apology to fantasy author Neil Gaiman for calling him a “pencil-necked little weasel who stole $45,000 from the state of Minnesota.”

Earlier this week, Dean criticized Minnesota’s House Legacy Funding Division for paying Gaiman to appear at a speaking engagement.

Dean told Minnesota Public Radio: “[My mom] was very angry this morning and always taught me to not be a name caller. And I shouldn’t have done it, and I apologize.”  Dean still insisted that the author should have “donated his time” to the patrons of the Stillwater Library.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

In a blog post, Curtis Brown literary agent Sarah LaPolla (pictured, via) recommended five “band-aid editing” tips for fixing a manuscript before sending it to an agent.

LaPolla first advised that authors avoid sentences that begin with a conjunction. Here is an excerpt from the post: “Sometimes standalone sentences that begin with ‘And’ can be used for emphasis. And that’s OK. Other sentences, however, can end up sounding like a mere continuation of the previous sentence, making them sound weaker in comparison.”

LaPolla’s other tips elaborate on how to steer clear of weak sentences, redundant points, and the passive voice. Can you think of other “band-aids” that would be helpful? (via Elizabeth S. Craig)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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