Authors@Google
Earlier today I met with Ricky Opaterny, who heads up the author program at Google. Many of you have worked with him to arrange author talks at Google and know the basics, but here are a few items with which you may not be familiar (plus some basics):
– Author talks are taped and uploaded to YouTube. The average talk gets about 3,000 views. Not surprisingly, authors with strong online presences get the most hits.
– The biggest events are at the Mountain View mother ship, but they hold events in many of their other offices nationwide (and overseas) including Ann Arbor, Boston, Boulder, Irvine (an hour from LA), Kirkland (20 minutes from Seattle), and Santa Monica. You’re probably wondering if they will hold multiple events with authors — they rarely do since once a talk is uploaded to YouTube it’s then accessible to all their employees.
– Events (at all locations) draw a median of 60 people, but usually range from 50-250 people and can draw as many as 1000.
– A lot of their speakers are well-known front list authors, but not all. In some cases, they may consider covering local travel / accomodations for an author who is not touring, i.e., sending an author from NYC up to Boston. They will never pay speaking fees or honoraria.
– Google purchases books from Ingram (most of the time) for all event attendees. People have the option of attending an event in person or watching it streamed in the Internet (because that’s the kind of thing Googlers do even if we publishing folk don’t).
For those of you who don’t already have Ricky’s contact information, you can get in touch with him here. Keep an eye on the program — no doubt they have cool initiatives in the pipeline as Google invariably does.
New book section at the HuffPo
Wow — good news day for the publishing industry. God of blogs The Huffington Post will be starting a new section too. They say:
The Huffington Post will soon have a book section. It will have news and blogs about publishing, sales, agents, etc., and reviews. Initially the reviews will focus on serious fiction and non-fiction, although the scope will likely be enlarged in the future. Huff Post is seeking book bloggers and reviewers from its current readers and welcomes all suggestions. One of the features in the section will be a list of fiction and non-fiction ‘must-reads.’ In addition to the initial focus on serious fiction and non-fiction, political editor Tom Edsall will write periodically on crime noir.
Catalogs and appropriate books should be sent to:
Nicholas Sabloff
Book Editor
Huffington Post
560 Broadway
Fl 4
New York, NY 10012
New book section at the NYO
Turns out the New York Observer really is debuting a new book section called the Observer Review of Books (reported by Gawker yesterday except I assumed it was a, uh, April Fool’s joke). Mais non! Leon Neyfakh says it launches today; I don’t see it online quite yet, but I imagine it will be in the print edition. Leon will have a new column called “Pub Crawl.”
The L.A. Times’ wiki novel
A lot of publishing houses / marketing departments / authors have thought about delving into the wiki world and Penguin UK did it (last year, I think?) to much fanfare, although the novel itself was pretty much a mess. Holly from Viking Penguin points out that the L.A. Times is now taking a stab at its own wiki novel. Author and LAT columnist Steve Lopez wrote the first chapter; readers have written subsequent chapters. A panel of judges made up of LAT staffers posts the winning chapter as well as the runners up.
Publication for Hispanic / Hispanic-interest authors and books
Louise of Viking Penguin just forwarded the following message from the contributing book editor for AARP Segunda Juventud, a bilingual publication reaching 1.6 million readers both in print and online:
You can check out my past reviews and interviews at www.carlosjqueiros.com or alternatively at www.aarpsegundajuventud.org. I’m writing to you today in order to solicit suggestions of books to cover for the Fall 2008 issue of AARP Segunda Juventud (more or less books to be published from Sept.-Nov.) We are interested in a wide-range of titles, so feel free to suggest titles that you think may not necessarily be a perfect fit. To give you a sense of things, I’ve recently interviewed such authors as: Jose Euduardo Agualusa, Cristina García, David Maraniss, Isabel Allende, Javier Sierra, Ana Castillo, Anthony Romero, Jorge Ramos, Victor Villaseñor, Alberto Ríos, and others.
Morning Brief — April 2, 2008
Today the Bad Pitch Blog talks about how you can use social networking sites and YouTube to pitch. (They’re talking about good pitches, lest anyone get confused …)
