Morning Brief — Wednesday, July 9

Had a big surprise this morning as I was on my way to work, when I ran into someone I wasn’t expecting to see.  You know, good thing my heart’s in shape from all that running …

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Oline H. Cogdill “will be leaving her full-time job as a senior copy editor at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel as of July 31 but she will be in no way leaving her job as mystery fiction columnist.  She will still be freelancing her weekly mystery reviews and writing for the Sun-Sentinel’s Off the Page blog.

She also will be supplying McClatchy-Tribune Wire services with at least one to three ADDITIONAL reviews a week.  The MCT Wires are distributed to some 500 newspapers worldwide and at least 250 regularly pick up Oline’s reviews in the U.S., U.K., Canada, and also China, Japan and Australia.”

If you did not already receive Oline’s email with the new address to which books should be mailed, she asks that you contact her at olinecog[at]aol[dot]com.

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Booktour.com is unveiling a new feature next Monday which will “show users which authors are based nearby, making it about 100x easier for local groups to get in touch with you and your authors to arrange events that never would have happened otherwise.”  For those who aren’t familiar with the site, BookTour, well, lists book tour schedules for authors on tour.  They also send out a weekly email featuring author events in your zip code.

One BookTour feature I find particularly useful is the ability to upload multiple events for multiple authors in an Excel spreadsheet — truly, I love Excel whether I’m organizing media contacts, listing author events or calculating mileage and injuries — although you can also add events individually if you are submitting just a handful.

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Andy at GalleyCat pulls together several blog posts about the author-publicist relationship.  For more about the APR, check Phenix & Phenix Literary Publicists’ post from yesterday about the process of following up with media contacts.  Not to be outdone, The Bad Pitch Blog runs a Q&A with an Adweek editor about how he feels about PR.  Isn’t this Publicity 101 fun?  I do so enjoy naval gazing from time to time.

Morning Brief — Tuesday, June 10

If you’re an author considering blogging (or someone in publishing encouraging an author to blog), keep in mind that actually writing the blog is only one part of the equation.  Another piece of the puzzle is getting people to read the blog.  Social media guru Chris Brogan explains how to get and expand an audience for a blog.  Copyblogger also posts about how to increase blog traffic.

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Booktour.com, a site that lists author events across the country, has made some changes, including providing an interactive map of events in your area.

New venue for authors in L.A.

Holly from Viking Penguin just passed on some information about Justin Kern’s new author venue in LA called Not to be Reproduced, “a vintage clothing store that is also a venue for holding events for musicians, artists, authors, etc.  The store has already been featured in Vogue and it sounds like they want to feature him again for one of his events in July.  He holds the events about once a month and is most interested in pairing authors with others–as mentioned, musicians, artists, etc.–unless it is a bigger name author.  The author will read for about 20-30 minutes and then instead of having a sit down book signing, they have cocktails (there is an open bar and the events are free but you have to be invited) where people mingle and have books signed.  He generally gets about 60 or more people to come to one of these parties and the crowd is very diverse, but not necessarily comprised of people who would ordinarily come to readings so it is a good place to get your author’s name out to new people.  His audiences tend to be more fashion/music/movie people–as he put it, these events give the author more of a ‘rock star’ feel and make his attendees feel more ‘cerebral.'”

Holly says Kern has arranged for books to be sold by BookSoup in the past.

Something to consider when booking author tours this fall

There are two things in life I am currently obsessed with (besides Battlestar Galactica): racing and work.  I found a somewhat unexpected nexus in … the author tour.  When scheduling tours, we try to take into account national holidays, long weekends, etc. ,and it occurred to me it would make sense to at least consider when  big-city marathons are held since these races can draw 40,000 runners, many of whom are from out of town.  (I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest not sending an author to a city marathon weekend, but I do think it would help to be aware of the races, knowing that hotel rooms and possibly airfares during these periods will skyrocket, not to mention traffic will be a real doozy.)  Here are some of the big races for the remainder of the year in the cities to which we often tour authors:

Chicago: Sunday, October 12 (also Columbus Day Weekend)

DC: Sunday, October 26 

New York: Sunday, November 2

Philadelphia: Sunday, November 23 (the weekend before Thanksgiving Weekend)

Portland: Sunday, October 5, 2008 

San Francisco: Sunday, August 3

Seattle: Sunday, November 30 (Thanksgiving Weekend)

Although few authors will do events on Sundays themselves, keep in mind that hotels will be at a premium all weekend.  And if your author is in one of these cities for one of these weekends, book early (particularly in Chicago, DC and NYC) because runners are already snapping up rooms.

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 reading series with Beatrice.com and the Mercantile Library

Ron Hogan of GalleyCat and Beatrice.com is teaming up with the Mercantile Library Center for Fiction on a new reading series.  He posts some information about it here.  Most readings will match debut and seasoned authors.