E! late night television host Chelsea Handler, who is no longer afraid to tell people how she slept her way to the top, is also a do-gooder for the little people. Literally.
She helped her personal assistant Chuy Bravo, who maintains his own profile page on E!’s website, score a book deal. (Even still, Bravo will remain Handler’s assistant.) Little Nuggets of Wisdom, pun-ily named because Bravo is a little person, will feature 90 fortune cookie/Jack Handy-esque tidbits.
Nugget No. 1: Work for a nice pretty lady who has connections. [STA]
Whoever is employed as Sam Gosling’s publicist, congratulations. You somehow got Newsweek to manufacture an entire article promoting your psychology professor client, his new book Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You, and the premise that the crap you keep in your house might say something about you as a person. Well, no crap. CONTINUED »
Don’t be fooled by the cover, Bob Morris’ Assisted Loving is not about a stooped old man eating roast beef in Florida. Well, it is - at times - but this memoir’s more than that.
Picking up soon after his mother’s death, Assisted Loving chronicles former New York Times columnist Bob Morris’ struggle to find his eager beaver father a date. Surely trolling personal ads for one’s father can take a toll, but, after all the arguments and aborted missions and, yes, his own dating misadventures, Morris finally learned to love his father.
That somebody would select James Frey’s new book Bright Shiny Morning as a must-read this summer shouldn’t be all that surprising — the reviews have been generally positive. That the somebody would be Gayle King, special friend to Oprah, is. When Good Morning America’s Diane Sawyer asked her to recommend some sunshine-y reading material, King plugged two books: Scott McClellan’s What Happened, and Frey’s Morning, adding that she even liked A Million Little Pieces.
Frey spectators would be right to question King’s motives.
It’s almost impossible she would recommend the scandal-plagued author without first consulting Oprah; even more likely, King was acting as Oprah’s agent, following direct orders to bring some appeasement, now that the Frey storyline – a demarcation in book publishing lore – has reversed itself to a degree, painting Oprah as the villain, and Frey as a complicit bystander.
This was not a casual, throwaway recommendation. Almost certainly, it was a calculated move from Oprah’s camp to smooth some stones.
If you want to listen to the abridged audio version of Barbara Walters’ over-hyped memoir, you can forget about hearing one thing in particular: moaning coming from the upstairs bedroom. That’s because the five-disc, six-hour spoken edition of Audition cuts out the most talked about talking points: “None of her romantic relationships outside of her three marriages — not even the most-publicized revelation from the book, her secret romance with former Massachusetts Senator (and then married) Edward Brooke — are anywhere to be found.” Some readers (listeners?) might view this as the publisher cheating consumers out of the most interesting, raunchy details of the TV vet’s life, but don’t go crying to them; they’re standing by their “abridged means edited” excuse. And Cindi Berger, Walter’s publicist, says that her client “approved the abridged version of the book,” but just didn’t feel the love stuff was important enough to include. “The focus was just to be about her work,” Berger explains. “The men in her life was not her priority.” Somebody should have told her endless publicity tour that.
Merging the Web 2.0 mantras of “user-generated content” and “don’t pay your writers,” Slate is proud to announce the June 24 release of Obamamania! The English Language, Barackafied, which is composed of submissions some 800 of you submitted to their Encyclopedia Baracktannica since February. All your hard work and due diligence has finally paid off, and you didn’t even need to put together a manuscript, find a literary agent, and shop it to a publisher. See you at your book party! [Slate]
So, Oprah isn’t the only natural force that can move book sales? Amazon.com, which commands 15 percent of the book sales market and has been marketing books for years through carefully selected homepage placements, gets credit today in the Journal for propping up books like David Wroblewski’s 566-page coming-of-age The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, which is now in its seventh printing. Other booksellers like CostCo and Barnes & Noble are moving more copies too.
This is a departure from the other “Amazon Force” story that was just told earlier this week, which focused not on how Amazon.com can move a book to blockbuster status, but on how it can totally screw a publisher out of sales, by disabling the Buy Now button and moving the book to its virtual dustbins (back pages that are harder to find), if they don’t play by the retail giant’s revenue-sharing rules.
But while we’re on a happy note, it might be worth drilling down exactly how Amazon can send a no-name title to household name status with just a few clicks. CONTINUED »
Self-professed “huge exaggerator” David Sedaris believes that if his stories are 97 percent true, they’re “true enough.” That wasn’t good enough for Barnes & Noble, which stocked his new book When You Are Engulfed in Flames in their fiction section. Onlookers might’ve seen it as B&N lumping Sedaris in there with the James Freys of the world. Except that wasn’t their intent! A mixup with Nielsen Bookscan, which put Flames in the wrong category, is being blamed. All wrongs have been righted, and the purchasing public can now find Sedaris’ book in the 97-percent non-fiction section. [NYO]D
When book publishers don’t play nice with Borders or Barnes & Noble, the bookstores have a special ritual for their titles: Hide them. And that’s if they’re feeling generous: If you catch B&N chief Steve Riggio on a bad day, perhaps he just won’t stock your works.
It’s no secret publishers pay big bucks to have their high-profile titles get the best positioning at the major book retailers, with prominent placement up front and entire displays devoted to them. That, and the negotiations between publishers and booksellers, about who gets how much of a cut of book’s sale, are what really determines what books might make it on to a best-seller list.
Then came the Internet, which was supposed to make everything more democratic, from political fundraising to selecting which movies to pirate. Amazon.com was a new business model, free from industry rules, and hopeful to get as many books in customers’ hands as possible.
Or at least that was the thinking. Now, it’s clear the Internet’s (the world’s?) largest book clearinghouse has the same standard operating procedure with publishers as the good ‘ole boys. And while Borders can give a new book crappy placement in the back shelves if its publisher won’t pony up a few more percentage points on the sale, Amazon has what some might argue to be an even more powerful tool: the Buy Now button. And the ability to turn it off. CONTINUED »
As the media industry immediately begins to mourn the loss of one of journalism’s pros, and with Father’s Day right around the corner, our minds immediately jumped to Tim Russert’s Wisdom of Our Fathers: Lessons and Letters from Daughters and Sons, the NBC D.C. bureau chief’s 2005 book composed of letters written by readers about their own fathers, which came flooding in after his 2004 book Big Russ and Me, about growing up with his father. Russert has a son of his own (with Maureen Orth), Luke, who just graduated from Boston College and hosts the XM Radio sports show 60/20 with James Carville.
Below, Brian Williams reports the news. CONTINUED »
What else left is there to say about James Frey? He lied to Oprah, fabricated his way into America’s homes and hands, lost the trust of his publisher, and turned it all around into another book deal that produced a fiction manuscript critics actually like. So after all of these ups and downs and bouts with fame and notoriety, what else can we learn about the guy? For starters, he’s cheap. And lavish. AT THE SAME TIME. CONTINUED »
This handy “Bush Apostate Matrix,” which track’s the president’s turncoats, has the unintended consequence of reminding readers that John Dilulio also wrote a book. [TNR]
Madonna’s brother Christopher Ciccone, who was pushed to the side when Guy Ritchie came into the picture, is coming out with a tell-all book that he “wrote it on the sly without telling Madonna.” And now his publisher wants to put out the huge print run of 350,000 copies before her attorneys can get their hands on it, get a judge to issue an injunction, and keep the book from hitting shelves. Or that’s just one tried-and-true way to drum up publicity for a generally tame manuscript.
John McCain’s daughter Meghan, who you care about because she is blonde and pretty and writes the awfully titled campaign blog McCain Blogette, will honor her father in the most endearing of ways: by penning a children’s picture book about him. Just in time for the Republican convention in early September, the as-yet-untitled tome, from Simon & Schuster, will, says Meghan in a statement, “offer children the unique opportunity to see the character building events that happened over his lifetime, experiences that led up to his current bid to become the future president of the United States.” While we can’t whip together a picture book quite so quickly, we can offer our own version of the character building events that led up to his current bid to become the future president of the United States. CONTINUED »
The titles on this listicle of the “10 Most Terrifying Guides to Sex” will probably not make it on to anybody’s summer beach reading list, but how can you ignore a compilation that includes Make Your Own Sex Toys, How to be the Best Lover: A Guide for Teenage Boys, and the most cleverly titled, A Hand in the Bush: The Fine Art of Vaginal Fisting. For some reason, almost none of these books are available to peek at using Amazon’s Search Inside feature, though Sex in the Golden Years is available on the Kindle. How curious.
Editorial Director
