Publishing

Industry news and celebration of the book as an object.

Speaking of Book Clubs

/ Mandy / 1 Comment

img_1580

Yesterday I was talking with my boss/mentor about my discouragement regarding the book club incident, and she handed me this book: The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson. She said she’d found it in the New Yorker and wanted to know what I thought. We recently attended a Safe Space training that got us talking about gender fluidity within linguistics, and this book touches on those topics in the context of a relationship that, at first glance, reminds me of Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe in Just Kids.

Funnily enough, later that night I saw a post about Emma Watson’s book club, Our Shared Shelf, selecting The Argonauts as their May book. I was hesitant to get caught up in Hermione’s book club when it started because I’m a bit fatigued with the Harry Potter franchise, and I admit that there was a moment, around the time of the Burberry ads and the theatrical release of The Perks of Being a Wallflower, when I was all, “Stop trying to make Emma Watson happen.” But she has turned into the best kind of feminist starlet, and her book club is better than my book club, so I just joined the group on Goodreads.

I read a bit of The Argonauts last night, but it is not the sort of book you read while falling asleep, and I read a little more closely over cereal this morning. My boyfriend immediately asked if it had to do with Jason and the Argonauts, but the title comes from Roland Barthes’ writing about love being like a structural object that is in a constant state of renewal, and the image he uses is the Argo.

Just as the Argo’s parts may be replaced over time but the boat is still called the Argo, whenever the lover utters the phrase “I love you,” its meaning must be renewed by each use, as “the very task of love and of language is to give to one and the same phrase inflections which will be forever new.” (Nelson, page 5)

Without getting to deep into linguistics, which I’ve never formally studied, my starting point for this book is that romantic mantra for grammar geeks: Love is a verb.

Book Club Politics

/ Mandy / Leave a comment

My book club staged a coup last night, effectively ousting me as facilitator. It was horrifying. There is nothing more violent than a book club in upheaval. Blood spilled like so much ink, and many a paperback was rent in two.

In reality, I am taking a month off from the group. There are two reasons for this: 1) I really need to take a step back and consider whether our book club democracy would be better without me, and 2) I don’t want to be associated in any way with what they have planned. Continue reading →

Yellow Flowers

/ Mandy / Leave a comment

21708076250_6ba85336f3_z

At a social media breakfast I once attended, the owner of the local yoga studio shared some insight into her social media strategy. “If I post an inspirational quote — ‘Yoga is the journey of the self… to the self… through the self’ — I get a lot more engagement.” She got progressively funnier, confessing her own twisted “rock star yoga” sense of humor, the type that belongs to the “namaste, bitches” school of thought. We can be authentic on social media, she explained as the 10 attendees munched on scones from a local bakery, but we should also curate which sides of ourselves we choose to represent our business and our brand.

Her number one rule of social media read: listen to your audience. Your customers will tell you what they want by engaging, liking, commenting, sharing, or ignoring. Facebook, happily, gives you tools to track that behavior. “If I see that my photo of yellow flowers got more likes than any other photos of flowers, I know that people prefer yellow flowers,” she said, quickly adding: “That’s not true, I’m just using that as an example.” The point is not to treat your Facebook page as a billboard, screaming at your audience without engaging them as customers, she said.

The breakfast was a semi-regular event. The organizer, a force of nature unto herself, brought together business leaders and aspiring entrepreneurs — including many, it seemed on this particular morning, in the nonprofit field. When filling out the requisite event survey, one answers questions about contact information and the existence of a business plan, then:

“Your reason for attending?”
“Curiosity.”

Standing outside before the early morning event and aiming her phone toward the east, the organizer commented that she will never get over how big the sky is in Texas. It was a particularly beautiful sunrise, and lingering outside to admire it also allowed one time to notice the exquisite landscaping outside the yoga studio. An otherwise indistinguishable strip mall was adorned with [forgive me, I did not inherit the green thumb] flowers that looked like giant dandelions gone to seed, the ones that I always call bird of paradise but are actually something else, and what I’m fairly certain are yellow cannas.

On to work and bureaucracy and TPS reports (not really) and idiocracy. One of the more interesting aspects of the morning: some publicity for Elizabeth Gilbert’s new book, in which she discussed the connection between creativity and curiosity that she discovered when writing her previous book on “that action-adventure subject: gardening.”

And also this: A Stong Towns article entitled “Beautiful Ditches,” bemoaning the “nature band-aid” and decked with a header image of yellow flowers. “Yes, after spending billions destroying the economies of small towns and inducing a financial train wreck in our suburbs, we’ll now pretend that somehow we are making a difference by planting some trees.”

Finally, the annual chamber of commerce banquet, where the tables inside the convention center were decorated with yellow flowers. When the event was over, they told us to take home the bouquets.

12033145_10102861535402295_4660056362141916131_n

Liberal Guilt vs. Amazon Prime

/ Mandy / Leave a comment

I read this article about the impact of university presses on their local communities today. It combines my longtime interest in publishing with my new interest in urban planning, the creative class, and third spaces. Near the end, there is a paragraph that lists ways we can support university presses:

Buy books from UPs, for yourself and as gifts, ideally directly from the publisher’s website to give them the greatest share of revenue.

Here’s the thing:

We chose a university press title for book club this month. I was really proud of that. After looking for the book in a bunch of local stores, I went to the publisher’s website and ordered a brand new hardback copy. And I waited.

I waited 10 days.

A week before our book club meeting, I sent an email to customer service, asking to track the package. No response.

The next day, I sent the same email. No response. I didn’t get a response until the following Monday, the day before our book club meeting, after I’d already gotten the ebook with some Amazon credit and read it on my Kindle. I was told the UP’s warehouse was backed up on orders. Later that day, I received confirmation for two-day delivery.

Two-day delivery. The day before book club.

For book club publicity purposes, we like to take group photos with the book cover on display. Luckily, one of the members had a hard copy, so we didn’t have to take a photo with the book cover on my iPad screen.

Of course, she got her copy through Amazon Prime. Two-day delivery. A nice used copy.

When I got home from work today, my brand new, full-priced copy was waiting for me.

The Gay Place

/ Mandy / Leave a comment

It was such a good day! I got my ass chewed at work this morning and had just gotten back to my office where I was literally staring at job postings when my closest work friend stuck his head in the door and asked, “Did you hear about the Supreme Court ruling?”

I was still in a funk, but had the presence of mind to ask, “Gay marriage?”

“About an hour ago.” He nodded. “Look it up.”

I googled, then went to Facebook. I shed a few tears and changed my profile picture. I celebrated with a soy latte. When I finally got to sit down around 2:30, I went through my entire newsfeed and gave props to all of us on the right side of this historic day.

Then late this afternoon, during my volunteer shift at the library, I popped into the reading room where all the old books are for sale. Billy Lee Brammer’s The Gay Place jumped off the shelf and into my arms. I hugged it to my chest as I walked back to the circulation desk, the tears welling up again.

The Gay Place, of course, is not about The Gays, but rather a reference to the F. Scott Fitzgerald poem that serves as its epigraph:

Say: “I know a gay place 
Nobody knows.”

It was published in 1961 and set a few years before that, so the title had a different conotation. Nowadays, it’s the title of the gay column in the Austin Chronicle. I still think it’s the best book about Texas politics ever written.

This particular edition was published by Texas Monthly Press in 1978, the year Billy Lee Brammer died at the age of 48. The flap copy mentions that it won a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award in 1960. And best of all, this particular copy was removed from circulation at the Oakalla Library. I didn’t even know Oakalla had a library!

I’m just so grateful for this day and the joy that pulled me out of a place of hate and fear. I hope we all get to experience such salvation.

Happy 4/20!

/ Mandy / Leave a comment

Here’s a link roundup for your distracted wandering through the interwebs today:

Willie Nelson’s new book is now available for pre-order and comes with a download of a song based on the book, “It’s a Long Story.”

Literary Hub has a listicle of books about drugs in honor of the unofficial holiday.

All the Light We Cannot See just won the Pulitzer.

Speaking of pulitzers, the Daphne Awards are up and running again.

Mary Helen Specht is reading from Migratory Animals at Southwestern University at 4pm.

Toni Morrison’s new book will be released tomorrow.

Austin Film Festival and Texas Book Festival are hosting a free advance screening of Far From the Madding Crowd tomorrow at 7:30pm

Geoff Dyer will be at BookPeople on Thursday at 7pm to talk about Another Great Day at Sea.

You can get your home movies digitized for free at Killeen Public Library through Saturday…but you have to allow the archive to keep a copy of your footage.

Friends of the Harker Heights Library are holding a book sale on Saturday from 8am to 2pm. Killeen will be holding theirs on May 2.

Our book club made yesterday’s paper! The meeting is Tuesday, April 28, 6:30-8pm at So Natural in Harker Heights.

Random House rushed the publication of John Krakauer’s Missoula after the Rolling Stone debacle. Listen here.

Ciarán Og Arnold’s book of photographs set in County Galway, I Went to the Worst of Bars, will be published by Mack Books in May.

The Folio Society has a 50th anniversary edition of Dune.

Hello Giggles is looking for paid content writers.

La TaKorea is hiring a sous chef.

Dr. Ed Burger says students only flourish on campuses where they feel comfortable.

I need to read more from both sides about H&M’s Conscious Commerce Initiative.

Cafe Clover is my new favorite place I’ve never been.

The CTC Kinesiology Department is holding a workout selfie contest through Monday.

Southwestern University is considering cutting funding for the student newspaper.

Stevie Ray Vaughan was finally inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

I’m not in the mood.

Your dog is manipulating you.

This moonlight illuminated “Mandy Jo and her magical sea horse” last night.

Baby Mira arrived yesterday!