1) For those people who might live under a rock, what are the X Games?

The X Games is an event that collects some of the world’s best extreme athletes in one place to compete in a series of events ranging from big air trick contests to mono skier crosses. The best athletes on snow come here every year to push their individual snowsport further, and as a result you get to see a lot of very different and very talented athletes all crammed together on one mountain. I’m in the athlete lounge right now, sitting across from the French Olympic team (competing in skier cross and wearing tight pink uniforms) and next to two girls getting ready to go out for halfpipe practice (wearing super baggy white ponchos).

2) I bet they don’t get many writers…

Hahaha – I don’t think so. I had to leave my corduroy blazer at home just so that I could fit in.

3) Which event are you participating in?

It’s called the Mono X, which is basically a skier cross for monoskis. You have a gated course that you and three other competitors must navigate at the same time in a race to the bottom of the hill. In between those gates, you have a series of features ranging from big air jumps (80 ft+ for the final), road gaps, step ups, step downs, and woopity woos. It’s pretty funny the names they give some of these features. It’s like they’re trying to take the edge of the insanity of the whole thing.

4) How much time goes into designing and building your monoski?

I started working on my gear back in August after a year’s hiatus. The design process, which I worked on in conjunction with a local R&D company, took about three months in which we stress-tested every other monoski on the market to find out their individual weak points for high-impact scenarios (something you get a lot of in the Mono X). After that, we went in fabrication mode, which was finished by December. By the second week of December I was working on custom valving the suspension (which is just a Fox Float shock taken from the front end of a snowmobile) with another Montana local. We put on the finishing touches about two weeks ago. All told – countless hours and thousands of dollars. And totally worth it. It’s called “Ullr”.

5) What kind of role does advertising play in the X Games?

In a lot of ways, X Games is the most widely publicized winter event in world (with exclusion of the Olympics every four years), and as a result, advertising plays a huge role in almost every aspect of the games. Almost every athlete here has a sponsor ranging from local support to having Yahoo! rent you a mansion on the mountain (well played, Shaun White). Everybody is beholden to somebody, so you end up seeing a lot of logos and free stuff floating around. It’s fun, but definitely nice to get back to the real world after a week of this.

6) You must be scared shitless before you race. How do you calm your nerves?

I just keep moving. When I’m at the hill, I’m trying to get in as many laps as I can just to keep my body warm and my head focused on skiing. I start playing head games with myself if I stay still for too long, so I just try always stay in motion.

7. What’s the craziest thing you’ve had happen during an X Games competition?

I think I’ll be able to give you a good answer by the end of the week. The course has been dramatically stepped up this year in terms of difficulties. Just inspecting it yesterday, the nerves amongst the other competitors was palpable. Also – there are no “optional” jumps, so I get the impression that the real crazy stuff is heading this way…

Kevin Connolly is the author of Double Take. You can watch him compete in the X Games this Sunday on ESPN.

In the month of December, the publishing Gods rained four amazing authors on me. I took it as a sign from the universe that I was in the right place.

After months of questions and angst about the future of the publishing industry and whether it was part of my future, my answer came in the form of Baratunde Thurston. I’d heard him speak at the Web 2.0 conference and I wanted desperately to work with him. After tracking him down, he came to my office for a brainstorm, and it was during that meeting that I had an epiphany: There is nothing in the world I’d rather be doing.How cool is it that I get to go to conferences, hear really interesting speakers, then have them over to my office to figure out their book with them? And then I get to work on that book.

My fate became clear during that meeting with Baratunde Thurston. He’s writing a book for HarperStudio called How to be Black.

The next author to sign with HarperStudio was Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg.com. I’m a huge fan — have been following his blog, twitter, videos, etc. for some time, and think he’s one of the smartest tech entrepreneurs out there with lots of wisdom and experience to share .  He’ll be writing a book about the secrets behind his success called One to One Million.

Jill Kargman is a novelist. I saw her on Samantha Ettus’s show Obsessed TV six months ago and knew I wanted to work with her. We met a few times and completely clicked. The question was , what’s the “HarperStudio” book. In early December she came to my office to have another brainstorm and told me some terrible personal news. The thing was, she told the story with such humor and grace that instead tears and sadness, we were hysterically laughing…and it was in that moment that we realized that’s her gift: she sprinkles the funny everywhere, even on the tough times. Jill’s going to write two books for HarperStudio. The first is called Sometimes I Feel Like A Nut and will be essays about using humor as a tool to get through life –making the fun times funnier and the tough times bearable, in reference to Woody Allen’s magical math equation: COMEDY = TRAGEDY + TIME. The second will be a novel.

The fourth author to sign with HarperStudio during that lucky month of December 2009, was Ryan Tate from Gawker.  I’d been thinking a lot about merits and challenges of being a small company within a large corporation, and Bob suggested that there’s a book in that. Nick Bilton from the New York Times lead me to Ryan Tate at Gawker, and he is now writing a book for us called Skunkworks, which I can’t wait to read.

One more author who I want to mention who signed with HarperStudio, though it was slightly before that December epiphany, but still very much part of my process of realizing how much I love my job, is Melanie Notkin, the Savvy Auntie. She’s writing her Savvy Auntie’s Guide to Life.

So there you have it: now a total of five authors who make me so excited about my work and this industry that I feel like the luckiest girl in the world.

It was only a matter of time before someone made a biopic about Temple Grandin. When you stop and think about it, HBO makes perfect sense- so does Claire Danes. (Oh and add Sheila Nevins to my list of creative heroes.)

Ms. Grandin is currently reading a copy of Elaine Hall’s book Now I See The Moon (Elaine starred in the incredible HBO doc Autism: The Musical). I can’t wait to hear what she thinks!

(update! this just in from Temple Grandin: “Now I See the Moon provides insightful ways to teach and work with individuals with autism and severe disabilities.  It will give parents great hope.” Whoop! Whoop! JC)

Ladies on the interwebs are buzzing about Clay Shirky’s recent blog post in which he explains, in a nutshell, how women are less likely to adopt a blowhard, fake it till you make it attitude when it comes to their career. A student’s request for a letter of recommendation got Shirky going:

“So I get email from a good former student, applying for a job and asking for a recommendation. “Sure”, I say, “Tell me what you think I should say.” I then get a draft letter back in which the student has described their work and fitness for the job in terms so superlative it would make an Assistant Brand Manager blush.

So I write my letter, looking over the student’s self-assessment and toning it down so that it sounds like it’s coming from a person and not a PR department, and send it off. And then, as I get over my annoyance, I realize that, by overstating their abilities, the student has probably gotten the best letter out of me they could have gotten.

Now, can you guess the gender of the student involved?

Of course you can. My home, the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, is fairly gender-balanced, and I’ve taught about as many women as men over the last decade. In theory, the gender of my former student should be a coin-toss. In practice, I might as well have given him the pseudonym Moustache McMasculine for all the mystery there was. And I’ve grown increasingly worried that most of the women in the department, past or present, simply couldn’t write a letter like that.

This worry isn’t about psychology; I’m not concerned that women don’t engage in enough building of self-confidence or self-esteem. I’m worried about something much simpler: not enough women have what it takes to behave like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks.”

The reactions to Shirky’s comments were mixed among my friends. One person said “I know a SHITTON of self-aggrandizing blowhards who also happen to be women. Regardless of gender, I always think karma’s at work anyway and if you are ultimately just faking it, it will bite you in the ass in the end when people eventually realize you’re full of shit!”

I am curious to hear what people think. Is there some kind of ultimate karmic justice in the world? Do people agree with Clay Shirky’s take on women?

Traditionally, if an audio is done for a book, it’s recorded a few months before the hardcover publication so that they can be published simultaneously. The theory is that the audio will benefit from the hardcover marketing. Fair enough.

But what if it’s non-fiction and the world is changing at breakneck speed and there’s potentially updated information that happens in the six months between when the print book was finished being written and is finally published?

When Gary proposed the idea to us last Fall that he wait to record the audio until December, six months after the book was finished so that he could incorporate the latest info, we thought it was genius.

I love the idea that the hardcover is the mother ship, and then the other formats can be derivatives. Vook would fall in this category too.

So here it is for your listening pleasure: Crush It! the remix.

It was published the first week of January and has been selling incredibly well despite the fact that I can’t seem to find anywhere except for a few tweets from Gary that there’s new information here. About every few pages, Gary stops reading and adds off the cuff stories. Even if you’d read the book, it’s enough new info that you might want to listen too.

Check it out…It’s on sale for now $7.49 (from $13.22). Totally worth the $7.49.

In yesterday’s Publishers Weekly, Jim Milliot reported on a new study of online book piracy done by a company called Attributor. According to Attributor, publishers “could be losing out on as much as $3 billion to online book piracy.” On the face of it, this is bad news for publishers. We all know what Napster did to the music industry. And it sure would be nice to have that $3 billion back, no? But reading further into the report, we learn that the average number of free fiction downloads was just over 2,000 copies. Wait a minute. 2,000 copies? Is that a bad thing? It isn’t unusual for publishers to give away more than 2,000 advance reading copies of a piece of new fiction. Why? Because we want people to read the book and tell other people about it. And what about libraries? Don’t we sell copies to libraries that they then lend out over and over again—for free? How much money are we “losing” to free reading in libraries? (I shudder to think of how my wife and I may have contributed to the problem, taking our children to the library every Saturday and letting them each take out ten books. Who knew that we were raising a bunch of pirates?) Furthermore, how much money are we losing to people who lend a friend a book they’ve just read, saying, “You have to read this book!” We’d better put a stop to that right away…

We need to protect our author’s copyrights, and make sure that we don’t get Napstered by massive illegal online distribution. But small quantities of people reading our books for free may not be harmful, and may actually promote literacy, and the joy of reading…and the business we’re so worried about protecting.

Gretchen Rubin’s Happiness Project inspired me to change things up a bit (thank you Gretchen!) Each week this year I’ll single out one of my creative heroes- people whose work makes you go whoa. (This seems more likely to release serotonin than, say, blogging about e-books.)

I was first turned on to Ryan Murphy when he optioned Sin in the Second City a book I edited at Random House. Over the holiday, I finally sat down and watched Glee, the FOX show about a group of high school misfits. I know I’m late to the Glee party but I’ve just got to say: The dude is a genius.

What Glee lacks in subtlety it makes up for in imagination. A show choir performance of Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab,” really?? Murphy is able to take the most cliche ridden material and make it fresh. Check out this clip from “Don’t Stop Believin’.” It’s like tasting apple pie for the first time.

About a year and a half ago I had the pleasure of meeting Gretchen Rubin in person, though I’d been following her on Twitter for some time before that. I was supposed to give a talk to authors about the power of the tools on the internet, and when the list of authors was sent out and I saw Gretchen’s name on it, I immediately called her and told her SHE should be leading the workshop, not me! At that point, a year and a half ago, she had a great blog (since has become even greater) and about 5000 followers on Twitter. Even more importantly, she was engaged with the community — and this was a few years before the publication of her book. We spoke for a few minutes on the phone and decided that she would come to the meeting despite the fact that she was more experienced with the tools than the other authors who would be attending.

Gretchen turned out to be such a gift to have at the meeting because as I would speak to these authors and tell them what I thought they should be doing, she would chime in as a member of their tribe instead of the outsider (me) and give her own perspective about what was easy or challenging.

Over the course of that next year and half I followed carefully what she was doing and was always impressed. We got together in person a few times, and I would tell her what a great job she was doing, we’d compare notes about this and that, and she’d always say “but will it sell books when the time comes?”

Well, it turns out that it does work (I feel like a broken record ). Gretchen’s book, The Happiness Project, went on sale on December 29, 2009. On Wednesday we found out that it will land at #2 on the New York Times bestseller list for the January 17 list. I realize that Gretchen’s subject lends itself to blogging and twittering more easily than other books would, and it’s got a great jacket, title, and traditional publicity — but there is no denying, IMHO, that Gretchen Rubin worked hard, for a long time, establishing a relationship with the community, and it paid off.

Here are 5 things that Gretchen did right:

1) As I’ve said, it’s not a “campaign.” This is a long-term relationship with your readers. Gretchen understood that and started the relationship long before (as in years) it was time to “promote her book.”

2) She talked about her book…but she also talked about other people’s books, and in general, we got to see the world through Gretchen’s eyes and to know her. She posted frequently, linked them up in Facebook (often I found them on Facebook), and had GREAT content. I don’t think there was a post I didn’t love and I felt like I found a little present every time she put one up.

3) Once the book jacket was done she put it up on the site in a place where people could always see it so she didn’t have to always “promote herself.” I hear this a lot from authors: “I’m not comfortable promoting myself.” Gretchen didn’t promote herself; she was fabulously interesting, and when I would click through to read her posts I was always reminded by the book jacket that it was coming out.

4) She didn’t sit around waiting for a publicist to make her famous. Yes, there is traditional media as part of the mix; lots of it in her case. But it’s a healthy mix of traditional and social media and they riff off each other. It’s like having a well balanced stock portfolio…not to mention that she has a tribe with whom she can communicate about all of this media.

5) Here’s my favorite one: The Video. The video the video the video. Every author needs one (kidding); most are not good. The thing I LOVE about Gretchen’s is that it is simple beyond belief, and what it lacks in fancy production and editing it makes up for in spades with heart and soul.

I watched this video a few months ago and was so moved I’ve seen it about another 10 times. I think about it all of the time. Watch here.

UPDATE:  The Happiness Project was published by HarperCollins.

A new year, a new batch of books. I’m particularly excited to have signed Christopher S. Stewart’s book about a lost city in the jungles of Honduras (PJ Mark sold world rights).

Q&A with Christopher S. Stewart:

Chris S. Stewart is The Deputy Editor of the New York Observer. His magazine work has appeared in GQ, Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, and Wired, among others.

1) What is your book about?

The epic search for a lost city buried somewhere deep in the jungles of the Mosquito Coast in Honduras. The city is called Ciudad Blanca, or the White City, and explorers as far back as the Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes tried to find it – with no luck. Some of the men never came out of the jungle; they died or disappeared. Others got lost. It’s one of the biggest and wildest and most impenetrable jungles in the world – known as the little Amazon. But in 1939, one man claimed he located the El Dorado-like city and this is where the book begins.

Theodore Morde was an American explorer and World War II spy. His story is as layered and enigmatic as the White City. But here’s the twist: he died under strange circumstances before disclosing the city’s location. There are people who actually believe that the spirits of the lost city killed him.

But to this day, the mystery remains: What’s out there? What was it that drew in these explorers, and at such terrific risk? This is ultimately a detective story. And some of the answers began to come when I tracked down Morde’s secret journals in North Carolina and then set out with them on my own journey to find this lost place.

2) Broadly speaking, what is considered to be a “lost city”?

Well, a lost city begins with a rumor – that there’s some spectacular and ancient world that vanished at some point in time and is waiting to be found. The city persists in legend and myth, stories passed along over the decades. Its size doesn’t matter much. But it’s likely encased in some impressive and mysterious history. There are lots of incredible lost city

tales: Atlantis, El Dorado, Z. And with these stories, there’s the ubiquitous riddle – if these in fact cities existed, what happened to them and where did their inhabitants go? I heard many end-of-the-world scenarios for the White City. Among them was the story that a volcano covered it up, another was that it was destroyed by an evil army.

But in many ways, a lost city refuses to be discovered. As I stumbled through the jungle and talked to people, the place I was looking for was always around the next corner, up the next river, over the next mountain.

For some of the indigenous people I met, the city wasn’t even meant to be found. They said it would continue to elude because the White City was a spiritual place, and that, like a specter, it constantly migrated from one unreachable location to another.