American Airlines looking for summer reads

Katy Sprinkel is a journalist “writing a Summer Reads roundup for American Airlines’ Publishing.  They are
relaunching their hub for women travelers and I’m looking for a few good summer reads for women to highlight for their first issue.”

Sprinkel’s looking for any June / July titles that might appeal to women (no specific topic) and her deadline is next week.  If you would like to pitch appropriate books, email bookpublicityblog[at]gmail[dot]com for her email address and phone number.

Online book salons

The other day I met up with A.J. Schuler of CommonSense Media Inc.  He sells advertising for a number of political blogs (Raw Story, Crooks & Liars, MyDD, and others) and is also involved with Firedoglake.com.  We don’t do much with ads (I’ll leave that to the ad/promo folks), but I thought Firedoglake might be of interest.

Firedoglake has been around for a few years — I remember authors doing their book salon a couple years back — and now gets about 17,000 hits / day.  It’s a progressive, political site, but they aren’t limited to strictly political titles — any book that would appeal to the progressive, socially active reader could potentially work for their book salon.  The salon is a 90 minute-three hour moderated online discussion with the author and readers.  (Authors who are less Net savvy have the option of verbally answering questions that are then transcribed and posted.)  Schuler says Firedoglake was the first site to conduct online book salons (sites like Talking Points Memo have followed suit) and would like to be given first crack at the book salon.

Bev Wright is Firedoglake’s book editor.  If you don’t already have her information, she can be contacted here.