Didn’t I say there’s a book about everything? The blog Apartment Therapy is giving away an essay/recipe book on eating alone called Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant. Only one copy will be given away, so act now. Deadline is 5:00 p.m. Friday (Eastern).
D’ya Feel Lucky, Punk? Then Plug Your Book
The NY Times is talking about the Internet’s effect on book promotion. Publishers try to control the release of an attention-grabbing book and are undermined by newspapers or networks who work the system to their own advantage. How can we blame them unless bribery is involved?
Publicizing a book is a tricky game.
Jonathan Burnham, publisher of HarperCollins, said that sometimes “there’s an argument that early leaks fan the flames, and in a sense everybody benefits from it at the end of the day.” But that depends on whether readers want more or feel as if they gleaned everything there is to know without buying the book.
The article does not mention a great source on this topic, that is Plug Your Book: Online Book Marketing for Authors by Steve Weber. I have intended to review this book for weeks. What I have read of it is hard-hitting, honest, and informative. Weber writes about many publicity ideas, both good and bad, helping us understand what we’re getting into, not selling us on a promotion designed more for making him a bit of cash than promoting our book. Read the book online here.
Called on account of rain
Can’t post much of anything tonight. I drove home in snake-floating rain, liberally mixed with hail, and a minute after I got into the house, the power went out, where it stayed until about fifteen minutes ago. This left me unable to do much of anything, except read Andrew Klavan’s Hunting Down Amanda by candlelight. Now I’ve got stuff to catch up on. See you tomorrow.
A Personal Post
Whereas I once was on vacation, I have returned to the office. As you can see from my new webcam, I am hard at work.
Don’t Leave Me
I occasionally think about writing personal posts, but I usually avoid it. You don’t want to hear about me, and if you do, maybe I don’t want you to hear about me. It’s probably just my selfishness, which is why I could never be The Next Food Network Star–along with other, larger reasons. Anyway, I may write something personal later this week.
So, Lars was talking about actors a few days ago (Garage door blues), and coincidentally Delancey Place quotes from one of those odd books which lends support to the notion that there are books about everything. Wait, it’s an article, not a book. Still there are books about everything out there, such as The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification and Better Never To Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence. But to the point of this post–Delancey Place quotes Laurence Olivier on his stage fright: “Olivier wrote of his famous performance in ‘Othello,’ ‘I had to beg my Iago, Frank Finlay, not to leave the stage when I had to be left alone for a soliloquy, but to stay in the wings downstage where I could see him, since I feared I might not be able to stay there in front of the audience by myself.'”
Just when you think some guys have it all together.
Why do you hate Canadians?
My burning question for supporters of nationalized health care:
If the U.S. adopts a single-payer health care system, where are the Canadians going to go for surgery, if they don’t want to wait a decade for a bypass?
You hate Canadians, don’t you? Don’t you?
Swashbuckles and bows
Yeah, I know it’s “Talk Like a Pirate Day.” Why should I care? I talk like a Viking every day.
Somebody came out with a book a while back (I won’t bother to link to it) that claimed to document homosexual behavior as very common among pirates. I have no reason to doubt that. Men who stay at sea for long periods of time, with no access to women, very frequently turn to sodomy. This goes for men in prison and (formerly) boys in English public schools too. It would be ridiculous to maintain that all those guys (who generally turned back to heterosexuality as soon as women were available) were “born to be gay.”
Which brings us to this piece by S. T. Karnick about an article in (of all places) Mother Jones, questioning the idea that sexual identity is fixed. Cracks are beginning to appear in the homosexual ideological wall. So don’t give up the ship.
(Which is not pirate talk. It’s U.S. Navy talk.)
In which I preen just a bit
I got an e-mail today from Dr. Tim Furnish, author of Holiest Wars, an expert on Islam (particularly the messianic variety). He said some extremely flattering things about my article at The American Spectator Online yesterday. I checked out his web site and think it well worth sharing with you. (And he’s a Lutheran.)
Another Deathless Quotation from Lars Walker
I guess I’m required to say that I didn’t watch the Emmys. Why, I have no idea. Nobody watched the Emmys. I might as well say, “Last weekend, I didn’t play polo.”
Anyway, I’m informed that Sally Field expressed the hackneyed opinion (which was stupid back when I first heard it, in college) that there’d be no wars if women ran the world. Which prompted the following Deathless Quotation from me:
Stand by for a Deathless Quotation from Lars Walker.
If women ran the world, we’d have wars once a month.
This has been a Deathless Quotation from Lars Walker.
Full disclosure: the insight isn’t mine. I stole it from Katie McCollow at Yucky Salad With Bones (not the top post, but the next one down. Katie never posts two days in a row. I’m sure she did it this time just to mess up my link). I merely expressed it in a pithier fashion. Which is what I do, because I’m a trained professional.
Another American Spectator Online Column
Once again The American Spectator Online has fallen victim to my charm, and printed a column by me, just as if it came from a serious person.
This one is the the third, and probably the last, of the Pastoral Letters From the Future.