Dear Producer,

How many galleys do you have piled up on your desk? (Or under your desk.) How many PR blasts do you get a day from faceless publicists claiming such and such debut novel is a “masterly tour de force!!” or x work of nonfiction is “truly ground breaking”?

Actually, don’t answer that.

If I were writing a press release for the book I want to tell you about I would lead with: STARRED KIRKUS REVIEW! STARRED PUBLISHERS WEEKLY REVIEW! SARA GRUEN CALLS DOUBLE TAKE “DEEPLY AFFECTING” AND COMPARES AUTHOR TO JEANETTE WALLS!!

These reviews might mean something to you but I’m not writing a press release. In fact I wish I could strip away the meaningless adjectives and layers of fabricated publicity hype that infest your inbox day in and day out, and speak you directly, as a book editor, about a memoir I think is incredibly special. The book is called Double Take and the author, Kevin Connolly, is a 24 year-old born without legs who travelled the world on his skateboard and photographed over 30,000 people starting at him. Kevin is also a champion skier. I’ve never met anyone like him. If you watch a tape of Kevin Connolly or speak to him for about 2 minutes you will want to book him on your show. I guarantee it. This is a book that will change how you look at other people. (Click here to read the full glossed up description.)

Most books fall into oblivion unless they get a lucky break. Our first lucky break came when Edward Ash-Milby at Barnes & Noble read Double Take and loved it (and loved Kevin when he met him). This blog post is a heartfelt plea to try and get you to pull the galley of Double Take out from under your stack.

Watch the rest of Tamy’s crusade here and here.

via @somerset

Last year we blogged about the success of Radiohead’s pay-as-you-wish album In Rainbows. Looking to the music business as a model, publishers and authors are also starting to grapple with the concept of giving content away for free. It was a nice surprise to see in PW Daily the other day that Robert Kiyosaki has done a similar experiment with his upcoming book Rich Dad’s Conspiracy of the Rich. 

While not exactly a pay-as-you-wish scheme, what he did was release the book in one-chapter installments as free downloads on his website over the course of a year. Now that all the installments are in, the book will be released as a paperback by Grand Central on September 8 with a first printing of 150,000. The jury may still be out until real sales numbers come in, but so far, with over 90,000 registered readers on his website, it sounds like Kiyosaki may end up as the next Radiohead success story.

Buy it!

Check out Bob’s recent piece on PublishingPerspectives.com about why the relationship between Publisher and Author should be a collaboration, not a tug-of-war.

photo credit: Adrian Kinloch

I’ve just read M.J. Rose’s editorial from last Friday, “Publishers Must Change the Way Authors Get Paid,” and I couldn’t agree more that it’s time to re-think the publisher/author relationship.  M.J. deserves credit for moving this conversation forward; indeed, for years M.J. has shown by her own example how authors can and should be full partners in the marketing of their books. If anyone has earned the right to question author compensation, it’s M.J. Rose.

However, I don’t think that the solution is to have authors paid a higher royalty in exchange for their marketing efforts.

First of all, how would this be judged? What amount of marketing effort should be expected of the author before their royalty changes?  Shouldn’t author and publisher alike be doing everything possible to make a book succeed, without needing to count up who has gone beyond the call of duty and who hasn’t and trying to calculate how that should translate into how they share the proceeds of their success? What if the author and the publisher have both made herculean marketing efforts, but the book has lost money? Should the author get a higher royalty, even as the publisher is taking a loss? (Similarly, I don’t see how publishers and authors would know how to apply the author’s marketing expenses to their advances, as M.J. suggests here.)