Autumn Greetings,
The weather is cooling, days are getting shorter...it's the harvest season: time to can tomatoes, cook applesauce, and buy some big, thick books to read during the long cool nights to come. Visions of book lovers huddling around fireplaces reading reading reading, and browsing their local bookstores shopping shopping shopping...It's a wonderful time of year for publishers.
It's also the height of the college football season, so it's a great time to publish books about the game. Our lead article is by Lloyd Pye, a "redshirted" member of the Tulane Green Wave football team in the mid-1960's -- who began writing about his experiences in 1974 and published a novel, That Prosser Kid in 1977, getting encouragement and advice from Larry McMurtry along the way. Now he's revised the book with "thirty years of writing experience" and renamed it A Darker Shade of Red (Bell Lap Books, $20.00). In the new book's introduction he defines the "redshirt" on a college football team: "Redshirts were called by various upbeat euphemisms to make their lowly status sound less demeaning: Go Squad, Spirit Squad, Scout Squad, etc. But no euphemism could disguise their roles as living, moving dummies for blocking and tackling. Stars who read my book may well be perplexed by it because it bears little if any resemblance to the football experience they enjoyed. But that make the redshirt experience no less real, or painful, for those who did endure it."
Another college football book was released this month, It Never Rains in Tiger Stadium (ESPN Books, $24.95), by one of those "stars." John Ed Bradley was the all-conference center for the LSU Tigers in 1979 and then became a staff writer for The Washington Post. Both Bradley and Pye admit their football years were the best times of their lives, in spite of the pain and brutality. Anyone who witnessed Bradley's former team last Saturday night, ranked #1 and battling last year's National Champion Florida Gators, got a glimpse of what makes it all worthwhile.
* * * * *
In honor of this week's opening of the Frankfurt Book Fair, we present a synopsis and important links for taking part in the "virtual" Buchmesse from your desktop, plus the results of a survey Fair organizers recently conducted among 1,300 publishing professionals worldwide. One question asked respondents, "Who is actually steering the book industry today, making publishing successful and generating bestsellers?" 37 percent feel that publishers are still key to the success of the industry; 31 percent went with marketing professionals; 22 percent see the consumer as leading the demand for books; just 8 percent think authors drive the industry. When asked where the major areas of growth are for the industry in the coming years, 44 percent said the use of e-books, 41 percent identified audiobooks, 27 percent chose books in translation (much of the business of the Frankfurt Book Fair) as a growth area, and 27 percent identified educational publishing.
* * * * *
We also present an excerpt from a new book by "holistic PR" and "Spiritual Marketing" practitioner Andrea Adler, who says she had "an overnight revelation that took thirty years to materialize. I realized that many business owners had not journeyed inside themselves first. They had not asked those pertinent questions that would bring them more into alignment with the spiritual aspect of their nature and of their business..." Read more about how Andrea uses techniques like meditation, journaling, and visualization to integrate both spiritual and practical principles into our everyday lives, as well as into our marketing outreach. "As a result, we become the magnet for the people and opportunities we want to bring close to us."
Book Awards news: Semifinalist results of the Moonbeam Children's Book Awards are now listed online. Watch for a special bulletin with final results next week!
Check out our new Axiom Business Book Awards, designed to bring increased recognition to exemplary business books and their creators, with the understanding that business people are a very well-read and informed segment of the reading population. The awards will bring the year's most outstanding business books together with outstanding business people eager to read them. Enter by October 15 and save $20 per entry - final deadline is November 30th.
This makes four book awards contests now presented by Jenkins Group: the Independent Publisher Book Awards (since 1996) for indie-published books in 65 categories; the new Moonbeam Children's Book Awards launched earlier this year, the Nautilus Book Awards (presented along with Marilyn McGuire & Associates and recognizing the best in Mind/Body/Spirit titles since 2001), and now the Axiom Business Book Awards.
Thanks and Best of luck to all participants!
Happy Halloween,
Jim Barnes
jimb@bookpublishing.com |
