NPR Books Watch — 7/24-7/30

For those of you who haven’t yet seen, NPR has revamped its website, so book stories now include transcripts of interviews.  (No more buy links to books, though.)

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Here are the NPR interviews for the last week.  Anyone who emails me the imprints of all the books listed (or houses if no imprint is available) will win the NPR Books Grid for the prior week that includes, in addition to the information below, interviewer, pub date, imprint, genre, post-interview Amazon ranking, pre-interview ranking (if the book was mentioned on Shelf Awareness and I was able to look up the number before the interview), and interview hyperlink.

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TOTAL book stories for the past week: 30

All Things Considered: 8

Diane Rehm: 3

Fresh Air: 3

Morning Edition: 6

NPR.org: 4

Talk of the Nation: 1

Tell Me More: 1

Weekend Edition Saturday: 2

Weekend Edition Sunday: 2

All Things Considered	Writer E. Lynn Harris Dies
All Things Considered	Zeitoun	Dave	Eggers
All Things Considered	Ratio	Michael	Ruhlman
All Things Considered	Wisdom Trail	Janet	Lieberman
All Things Considered	Big Rewind, The	Nathan	Rabin
All Things Considered	Books Set On Beaches Capture Seaside Scene
All Things Considered	Inherent Vice	Thomas	Pynchon
All Things Considered	Fahrenheit 451	Tim	Hamilton
Diane Rehm	Camus, a Romance	Elizabeth	Hawes
Diane Rehm	Dangerous Games	Margaret	Macmillan
Diane Rehm	Chasing Medical Miracles	Alex	O’Meara
Fresh Air	Money-Driven Medicine	Maggie	Mahar
Fresh Air	Slamming Open the Door	Kathleen Sheeder	Bonanno
Fresh Air	Art of Harvey Kurtzman, The	Dennis	Kitchen
Morning Edition	Dead Silence	Randy Wayne	White
Morning Edition	First Family	David	Baldacci
Morning Edition	Satchel	Larry	Tye
Morning Edition	Neptune Avenue	Gabriel	Cohen
Morning Edition	In Fed We Trust	David	Wessel
Morning Edition	Operation Homecoming
NPR.org	Stranger Than Fiction: Summer Science Books
NPR.org	Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?	Alan	Moore
NPR.org	Audience Picks: 100 Best Beach Books Ever
NPR.org	Fahrenheit 451	Tim	Hamilton
Talk of the Nation	Pill Head	Joshua	Lyon
Tell Me More	E. Lynn Harris Made Sexuality A Best-Seller
Weekend Edition Saturday	Embedded	Wesley	Gray
Weekend Edition Saturday	Glover’s Mistake	Nick	Laird
Weekend Edition Sunday	Masters of Doom	David	Kushner
Weekend Edition Sunday	Four Corners of the Sky	Michael	Malone

Little (but important) things to get ready before a book’s publication

It’s easy for authors and book publicists to get caught up in the bustle of finishing a book and promoting it.  But here are a few things that can easily be prepared ahead of time — and that are really useful for book publicity departments to have on hand — lest everyone be left scrambling at the last minute.  (Because you know someone will ask for these items ASAP precisely when you don’t have them handy.)

— At least one excerpt, about 1000 words in length, from the book: Usually the preface or first chapter works, but you can use whatever you like / makes sense.  (As with all excerpts, you should consult subsidiary rights or the literary agent — whomever holds serial rights to the book — before the excerpt is provided gratis to anyone.)  The excerpt should be saved in Word (although occasionally someone may need to convert it into a PDF document).

— A color photo: Have on hand (and have the rights if the photograph was professionally shot) at least one color photo that has *not* been used on the book jacket or in the press materials.  If you have the time / money to have a photograph professionally taken, that’s great — those pictures will probably look better than anything you could take yourself — but snapshots can suffice.  They do need to be high resolution (300 dpi) and show the face clearly.  The lighting should be good and there shouldn’t be anyone else in the picture, nor should the background be busy.  If you don’t already have something you can use, have a friend or family member take some pictures of you with a digital camera — you will want to experiment with some indoor and outdoor shots to see what looks best.  Always make sure to provide photo credits.

— Video (if available): Many TV producers like to see how an author interviews.  If video interviews are available, authors should make sure to provide these to the publicity department well in advance of the book’s publication.  Links to online videos are ideal since they can be provided instaneously and don’t clog up anyone’s inbox; DVDs are second best.

I know a lot of effort goes into preparing for a book’s publication and many things take a lot of time to put together — websites, press materials, author Q&As, etc.  But what other relatively quick and easy items should authors / publicists pull together beforehand?

NPR Books Watch — 7/17-7/23

Here are the NPR interviews for the last week.  Anyone who emails me the imprints of all the books listed (or houses if no imprint is available) will win the NPR Books Grid for the prior week that includes, in addition to the information below, interviewer, pub date, imprint, genre, post-interview Amazon ranking, pre-interview ranking (if the book was mentioned on Shelf Awareness and I was able to look up the number before the interview), and interview hyperlink.

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TOTAL book stories for the past week: 26

All Things Considered: 6

Diane Rehm: 5

Fresh Air: 2

Morning Edition: 3

NPR.org: 3

Talk of the Nation: 1

Tell Me More: 1

Weekend Edition Saturday: 2

Weekend Edition Sunday: 3

All Things Considered	Books We Like / Rocket Men	Craig	Nelson
All Things Considered	Beckham Experiment, The	Grant	Wahl
All Things Considered	Song is You, The	Arthur	Phillips
All Things Considered	Accidental Billionaires, The	Ben	Mezrich
All Things Considered	In the Kitchen	Monica	Ali
All Things Considered	My Guilty Pleasure / Time and Again	Jack	Finney
Diane Rehm	Satchel	Larry	Tye
Diane Rehm	Evolution of God, The*	Robert	Wright
Diane Rehm	Wauchula Woods Accord, The	Charles	Siebert
Diane Rehm	Anatomy of Evil	Michael H.	Stone
Diane Rehm	Larry’s Kidney	Daniel Asa	Rose
Fresh Air	Mad Ones, The	Tom	Folsom
Fresh Air	Young Woman & the Sea	Glenn	Stout
Morning Edition	Colossal Failure of Common Sense	Lawrence G.	McDonald
Morning Edition	Jericho’s Fall	Stephen	Carter
Morning Edition	Checkout	Anna	Sam
NPR.org	You Sexy Beast
NPR.org	Bolter, The	Frances	Osborne
NPR.org	Farm City	Novella	Carpenter
Talk of the Nation	Shelf Discovery	Lizzie	Skurnick
Tell Me More	Eye of My Heart	Barbara	Graham
Weekend Edition Saturday	Between the Assassination	Aravind	Adiga
Weekend Edition Saturday	Love Affair with the Romance Novel, A
Weekend Edition Sunday	Why is My Mother Getting a Tattoo?	Jancee	Dunn
Weekend Edition Sunday	Where’s My Jetpack?	Daniel	Wilson
Weekend Edition Sunday	Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It	Maile	Maloy

* rebroadcast

Finding friends on Facebook

With so many more people joining social networks, of which Facebook is one of the most popular, the question becomes how to find connections since, after all, a network is only as good as its contacts.

Facebook’s Friend Finder function will allow you to go through your email address books to find contacts who are already on Facebook (and other networking sites have similar applications).  Once you’ve friend requested your contacts with Facebook profiles, you will be asked to invite your contacts who do not have profiles.  Do *not* invite them.  This is the thing: you’re not the first one on Facebook.  Your friends have profiles … that were opened with alternate email addresses.  (It’s 2009 and lots of us have multiple email addresses for multiple purposes.)

It is, in fact, frustrating getting a request from a friend that’s been sent to the “wrong” email address since there’s no way to redirect the request to your profile to accept it.  (Well, maybe there is a way to redirect the request / look up your wayward friend, but that certainly can’t be done after you’ve accidentally deleted the request because you thought it was spam.  Which may or may not have happened to me.  More than once.)  Any who.

Facebook also has a “Suggestions” function that, well, suggests people you might know.  It finds people who are friends of your existing friends and, although I don’t have this on good authority, I swear it now also trawls through your address books automatically.  (I’ve seen people pop up in my suggestions box who are not mutual friends of any of my friends but whose names I know are in my email address books.)  A third way to add friends is to simply scroll through the Friends list of one of your friends.

If you find yourself adding friends willy nilly, you will want to make sure that you either censor yourself so that your posts are appropriate for a general audience (and by “general” I mean “your boss and your parents / children”) or you should set your privacy settings / group your contacts so that your narratives of your enchanting but untoward behavior is not shared with people with whom you should not be sharing enchanting but untoward behavior.  (Authors should use the lowest privacy settings, however — unless a profile is for personal use only — since the point of joining Facebook is so that fans and readers can find and see everything.)

Different networking sites will have different etiquette when it comes to “friending” people you do not know.  On Twitter, for example, most people follow friends as well as random people who just seem interesting.  On Facebook, though, while some people (like authors wanting to connect with readers) accept friend requests from everyone, many others prefer to only accept requests from people who are actually friends.

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For those of you looking to join / become more active on Twitter, check this post about the Follower / Following lists.  Do you belong to other networks popular with people in publishing like Good Reads?  Any tips / tricks for finding contacts?

What is a browser? (And why does it matter?)

Last month, Blogspotting posted about Google’s poll in Time Square in which pedestrians were asked, “What is a browser?” The vast majority of people surveyed mixed up the term “browser” (the application you use to access the Internet) with “search engine” (a site like Google or Ask.com on which you, well, search for stuff).

The question, of course, is why the heck is the definition of browser important and what does it matter what browser you use?  It matters.

Late last week, the social media blog Mashable posted a piece, IE6 Must Die for the Web to Move On, about the sinking ship (browser) that is known as Internet Explorer 6.  This browser, ubiquitous for years since its launch in 2001, has fallen out of favor in recent years with the debut of browsers like Google’s Chrome, Mozilla’s Firefox and its own successor, IE7 (and, as of a few months ago, IE8).  I am told there are any number of programm-y, tech-y reasons why IE6 no longer passes muster, few (okay, none) of which I understand.

What I do understand is that a lot of applications don’t work in IE6.  For book publicists, authors and others in the publishing industry, the list of programs that don’t work / don’t work well with IE6 include Facebook and Pitch Engine and TechCrunch reports that YouTube and Digg have also been making noises about dropping support for IE6.   TJ Dietderich sent along this cartoon lampooning IE6.

What I also understand is that IE6 lacks “tabs.”  This means that each time you open a page in IE6 — and if you’re a book publicist like me constantly monitoring news sites, you have at least half a dozen sites open at once — you have to open a new window which slows down your computer and increases the chances something will freeze / crash.  With tabs, you only open one window and each site appears as a seperate tab within that window.  In this day and age, using a browser without tabs simply isn’t an acceptable way to live.

NPR Books Watch — 7/10-7/16

Here are the NPR interviews for the last week.  Anyone who emails me the imprints of all the books listed (or houses if no imprint is available) will win the NPR Books Grid for the prior week that includes, in addition to the information below, interviewer, pub date, imprint, genre, post-interview Amazon ranking, pre-interview ranking (if the book was mentioned on Shelf Awareness and I was able to look up the number before the interview), and interview hyperlink.

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TOTAL book stories for the past week: 26

All Things Considered: 3

Diane Rehm: 4

Fresh Air: 3

Morning Edition: 1

NPR.org: 3

Talk of the Nation: 6

Weekend Edition Saturday: 3

Weekend Edition Sunday: 3

* rebroadcast

All Things Considered	Shop Class as Soulcraft	Matthew	Crawford
All Things Considered	Waxman Report	Henry	Waxman
All Things Considered	Three Books … / Radio Reads
Diane Rehm	What Do You Want From Me*	Terri	Apter
Diane Rehm	1959	Fred	Kaplan
Diane Rehm	Evolution of God, The	Robert	Wright
Diane Rehm	Myth of the Rational Market	Justin	Fox
Fresh Air	Moveable Feast, A	Ernest	Hemingway
Fresh Air	Wauchula Woods Accord, The	Charles	Siebert
Fresh Air	Dolphin Mysteries	Toni	Frohoff
Morning Edition	Collection: Mandela’s Favorite African Folktales
NPR.org	Mirrors	Eduardo	Galeano
NPR.org	100 Best Beach Books Ever
NPR.org	American Painter Emma Dial, The	Samantha	Peale
Talk of the Nation	End of Overeating	David	Kessler
Talk of the Nation	Heart of Power	James	Morone
Talk of the Nation	Empire of Illusion	Chris	Hedges
Talk of the Nation	Beyond Bars	Jeffrey Ian	Ross
Talk of the Nation	Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?	Neil	Gaiman
Talk of the Nation	$20 Per Gallon	Chris	Steiner
Weekend Edition Saturday	Wildflower	Mark	Seal
Weekend Edition Saturday	Prize, The	Daniel	Yergin
Weekend Edition Saturday	Voices from the Moon	Andrew	Chaikin
Weekend Edition Sunday	What the Heck Are You Up to, Mr. President	Kevin	Mattson
Weekend Edition Sunday	Organic and Chic	Sarah	Magid
Weekend Edition Sunday	Chicle	Jennifer P.	Matthews

What is an imprint?

At my first (and only!) publishing job interview 10 years ago, the HR recruiter asked me if I was familiar with the concept of “imprints.”  How fortuitous — I’d just spent all of 30 seconds glancing through the catalogs in the waiting area, so I said intelligently, “Oh yes — those are like departments,” despite having only the vaguest notion of what I was talking about.

Needless to say, imprints have a significance far beyond job interviews.  Larger publishing houses — like Random House, the Penguin Group, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, etc. — are divided into departments called imprints.  Sometimes, several imprints are affiliated in an official “group” like The Crown Publishing Group which includes the imprints Broadway Books, Clarkson Potter, Crown and many others.  Sometimes imprints work together — like The Penguin Group’s mass market division that includes imprints like Ace, Berkley, Jove, Roc and many others — although the department doesn’t have an “official” name. 

This is all pretty unimportant for the average reader who’s more concerned with reading a book rather than ruminating over who published it, but for those interested in book publishing — authors, literary agents, book bloggers, journalists — it’s valuable to know about the building blocks of publishing houses.  (Book publicists — feel free to forward this post to anyone who might have questions about imprints.)

Imprints typically have a defining character or mission.  For example, the objective of Viking, an imprint of The Penguin Group, is “To publish a strictly limited list of good nonfiction, such as biography, history and works on contemporary affairs, and distinguished fiction with some claim to permanent importance rather than ephemeral popular interest.”  Many imprints publish only one type (or one format) of book — Crown Business (Random House) and Portfolio (The Penguin Group) publish business books for example, Fireside(Simon & Schuster) publishes (paperback) inspirational books and HarperPerennial(HarperCollins) publishes paperbacks.  Other imprints like Penguin Books and Random House publish a variety of fiction and nonfiction titles.

Which brings me to one of the most confusing (yet one of the most important) distinctions to make in publishing: the difference between publishing houses and their eponymous imprints.  So Random House the company has a division called The Random House Publishing Group which is itself broken down into several imprints including Ballantine and the Random House Trade Group (known as “Little Random).  The Penguin Group (the company) has one imprint called The Penguin Press, that publishes hardcover fiction and nonfiction, and another imprint called Penguin Books, that publishes paperback fiction and nonfiction.  (And to make matters even more confusing, Penguin Press titles are published as Penguin Books paperbacks.)

Several months ago, Sarah Weinman of Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind broke down the imprints at all the major publishing houses: Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, HarperCollins, The Penguin Group and Random House.  (You should note, though, that her series was written before the reorganization at Random House, so the scene’s changed a bit since then.)

For bloggers and journalists attempting to get in touch with authors, make a note of a book’s imprint and contact that department, not the company as a whole.  I can’t tell you how many people contact atrandompublicity[at]randomhouse.com or penguinpublicity[at]us.penguingroup.com not realizing that these addresses are *not* for their respective companies, but for specific departments within those companies.  If you’re in the book reviewing / author interview business, you need to make it your business to know your imprints.

If you’re trying to locate contact information for imprints, I link to the Contact Us pages at several major publishing houses in this Media requesting review copies / trying to contact authors post.  You can also find more information about review copies (and why you may not be receiving the ones you request).

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What do you find most confusing about imprints?  Ever tried to find contact information for an imprint but couldn’t?

NPR Books Watch — 6/26-7/9

Here are the NPR interviews for the past two weeks (since I missed last week).  Anyone who emails me the imprints of all the books listed (or houses if no imprint is available) will win the NPR Books Grid for the prior week that includes, in addition to the information below, interviewer, pub date, imprint, genre, post-interview Amazon ranking, pre-interview ranking (if the book was mentioned on Shelf Awareness and I was able to look up the number before the interview), and interview hyperlink.

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TOTAL book stories for the past two weeks: 38

All Things Considered: 10

Diane Rehm: 9

Fresh Air: 4

Morning Edition: 2

NPR.org: 7

Talk of the Nation: 3

Weekend Edition Saturday: 1

Weekend Edition Sunday: 2

* rebroadcast

All Things Considered	Touch	Francine	Prose
All Things Considered	I’m Not Hanging Noodles on Your Ears	Jag	Bhalla
All Things Considered	Peasant Prince	Alex	Storozynski
All Things Considered	Leap	Elizabeth	Haukaas
All Things Considered	Methland	Nick	Reding
All Things Considered	My Guilty Pleasure / Sweet Savage Love	Rosemary	Rogers
All Things Considered	Photographer, The	Emmanuel	Guibert
All Things Considered	Conquest of the Useless	Werner	Herzog
All Things Considered	Between the Assassinations	Aravind	Adiga
All Things Considered	Bad Writing Leads To Literary Award
Diane Rehm	American Passage	Vincent J.	Cannato
Diane Rehm	Hemingses of Monticello, The	Annette	Gordon-Reed
Diane Rehm	American Passage*	Vincent J.	Cannato
Diane Rehm	The Thing Around Your Neck	Chimamanda	Ngozi Adichie
Diane Rehm	Waxman Report	Henry	Waxman
Diane Rehm	What Do You Want From Me	Terri	Apter
Diane Rehm	As You Were	Christian	Davenport
Diane Rehm	Let the Great World Spin	Colum	McCann
Diane Rehm	Justice at Guantanamo	Kristine A.	Huskey
Fresh Air	Family, The	Jeff	Sharlet
Fresh Air	Short History of Women, A	Kate	Walbert
Fresh Air	Free	Chris	Anderson
Fresh Air	Netherland	Joseph	O’Neill
Morning Edition	You Are Here	Colin	Ellard
Morning Edition	Seeds of Terror	Gretchen	Peters
NPR.org	Help, The	Kathryn	Stockett
NPR.org	Three Books … / Red, White And True: The Great American Biography
NPR.org	Books We Like / Unit, The	Ninni	Holmqvist
NPR.org	Books We Like / Busted	Edmund R.	Andrews
NPR.org	Books We Like / Devil’s Tickets, The	Gary M.	Pomerantz
NPR.org	Books We Like / I Am Not Sidney Poitier	Percival	Everett
NPR.org	Books We Like / Elegy for Easterly	Petina	Gappah
Talk of the Nation	You Are Here	Colin	Ellard
Talk of the Nation	Cheap	Ellen	Shell
Talk of the Nation	As They See ‘Em	Bruce	Weber
Weekend Edition Saturday	Last Best Hope, The	Joe	Scarborough
Weekend Edition Sunday	What We Eat When We Eat Alone	Deborah	Madison
Weekend Edition Sunday	Queen Takes King	Gigi Levangie	Grazer

What to include on author websites

Ann from McGraw-Hill suggested a while back that I post about author websites.  You know (or can guess) what basics should be on an author website, but here are a few items that you may not have considered:

— Publishing house: The house doesn’t much matter to the average reader, but many journalists and organizations looking for guest speakers will make note of this.  Make sure you know (and list) the imprint that published your book as well as the publishing house.  If you’re an author and don’t know what an imprint is, ask!

— Contact information for yourself: If you wanted complete privacy, you probably shouldn’t have written the book (or you should have gone the John Twelve Hawks path of anonymity, but we all know how well that one worked).  You need to give readers a way to get in touch with you.  Many authors create separate email accounts for this purpose.  If you’re into the social networking scene, include information for your profiles, but keep in mind that not all readers use these networks and they will appreciate being able to contact you via plain vanilla email.  Depending on the book you’ve written and its target demographic, you may want to consider opening a post office box and including that address.  If you want, include a phone number, but I can’t recall the last time I saw an author list a phone number on a website (or perhaps I just blocked it out).

— Contact information for a publicist and / or lecture agent: Useful for journalists and organizations looking for guest speakers.  It helps if you clarify that the publicist contact is for media requests only.  I ask authors to post my email address but not my phone number because I will inevitably need background information from random journalists and bloggers who find their way to me from an author’s website and it’s impossible to provide that information in a phone call.

— Contact information for your literary agent: Agent Stuart Krichevsky points out that rights and other inquiries can come to literary agents via author websites.  No point in losing out on an opportunity simply because someone couldn’t locate your agent.

— A media room: If you have the capability to do so, consider storing hi-resolution (300 dpi) images of yourself and your book cover on your website that bloggers and journalists can download.  If you are using a professional author photograph, check to make sure you aren’t violating the terms of the contract by allowing the photo to be downloaded by anyone and their cousin.  (You may need to use a snapshot taken by a family member or friend for this purpose.)  Consider uploading a variety of photos (head shot, full length with different backgrounds) to provide some choice for journalists.  In any case, make sure to include a credit lines for photos.  Make it clear that people can download the images.  Many journalists also like using brief (under 1000 word) excerpts from books.  You can consider posting a short excerpt on your site, but prior to doing so, you will want to check in with the publishing house or your literary agent — if serial rights to your book have been sold / are being worked out, you don’t want to jettison the deal by giving out the information for free.

— Additional information about yourself and the book(s): Consider including additional information about yourself (extended bio, Q&A) or about the book (how you came to write the book, research process, etc.)

— Permalinks: A permalink is an address for a specific page of your site.  So www.authorwebsite.com would be the home page and www.authorwebsite.com/events would be the permalink for the author tour and www.authorwebsite.com/media would be the permalink to interviews and reviews.  Some sites are built entirely under one URL, making it impossible for online journalists to link to any one section of a site.  This isn’t 1994.  You need permalinks.

— Buy links: When you link to an online retailer, make sure to spread the wealth.  At my publishing house, we ask authors to link to at least Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders and Indiebound (which represents most independent bookstores).  Some authors also link to Powells, an independent bookstore in Portland that also runs a large mail-order business.  Ebook militant Mike Cane reminds us to also include buy links to ebook editions (and not simply to the Kindle and Sony eReader editions of the ebook).  The same could also apply to the audiobook.  Since we’re now up to, oh, about a dozen buy links, I think you’d probably have to break them down the purchase options into print, ebook and audio editions and then from there readers can click through to the retailer of their choice.  I know this seems cumbersome, but a) there are a heck of a lot of retailers out there selling your book and you should give them each a fair shake and b) there are a lot of readers out there wanting to experience your book in a lot of formats.

— A community / discussion function: If you anticipate (or hope to build) a community of readers who will want to discuss your book, consider using a site like Ning or FiledBy that allows readers to connect.  Author websites can be built with either application (for free, although there are, of course, paid premium options), or you can integrate the sites into existing author websites.

For more information about author websites, check out What not to have on your book website.  If you have the money, go ahead and set up a really gorgeous website (go easy on the audio and flash, though — it doesn’t matter how great your site looks if it takes so long to load that people give up on it) but keep in mind that people also want information — content.  Substance is as important as style.

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What do you like to see (or not see) on author websites?

Promoting author events on calendar / listings sites

Since we know readers head to Google to check up on their favorite authors, it’s now pretty much de rigeur to post information about an author’s speaking engagements online.  Authors should add this information to their websites and / or social networking profiles / fan pages (and some authors with a lot of followers find it effective to Tweet about their appearances).

Also, make sure to submit information about events to various online calendar / events sites.  Earlier this week, BookTour, the website that lists author events, announced a new partnership with Amazon wherein book events that appear on the BookTour site automatically appear on Amazon’s Author Pages.  (BookTour still includes buy links for multiple online booksellers on their site, though, including Barnesandnoble.com and Indiebound.)

BookTour is also introducing a new service, TourBuilder, that allows you to build your own book tour.  Also, for book publicists / stores / authors tired of entering events individually (or submitting them in an Excel document), BookTour will now enter events information in any format for $1 an event.  Check the site for the various options for submitting author events information.

And a couple month’s back, Bookforum debuted a new website that features an Outposts tab that lists author events.  Information about author events can be sent to: events[at]bookforum[dot]com.  You should include the title of the book as well as the author’s name, the host venue, its address and website and the date and time of the event as well as any ticketing information (if applicable).

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Where else do you like to submit information about author events?  (And more importantly, what calendar / listings sites have you found to be effective in getting a crowd to show up?)