Suze Orman didn’t start out a TV star and author so rich that she could afford to give away her books on Oprah.

In fact, Orman is very much a by-the-bootstraps success story who long ago confessed that she did not know how to write, even as bids were piling in for her second book. Lucky for her, her message was more important than her literary talent.

Portfolio.com tells the tale:
“The bidding was going up and up and up,” says Orman, “I said, ‘Stop the bidding, Binky (Urban, her agent). I can’t take it anymore. Somebody’s going to pay me $800,000 to write a book. I can’t write. I’m a finance person.’” She continues: “I told Chip Gibson [then the head of Crown Publishing], ‘Sir, before I sign this contract I have two things to tell you. No. 1: I don’t know how to write. So I don’t want you giving me $800,000 to write. And No. 2: Are you aware that I’m a lesbian?’

“As it happens, neither turned out to be roadblocks. For one, Orman was a personal finance expert, not a movie star. And for another, Gibson says, ‘We weren’t hiring Suze to win the Nobel Prize in literature.’

“Urban seconds that.  ‘I just thought, ‘Great. Finally an author who knows she can’t write.’

“Orman’s book was called The Nine Steps to Financial Freedom; it drew heavily on her New Age sensibility and sold over 3 million copies. From there, shows like Today and Oprah came calling and money began to pour in.”

Geoff Dyer is probably best known for But Beautiful, a book about jazz and jazz musicians first published in 1991. It won the praise of critics and jazz musicians including pianist Keith Jarrett.

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, as the title might suggest, is a two-part novel featuring what may or may not be different protagonists (the narrator in Death in Varanasi goes unnamed). Venice features a journalist in midlife crisis who has an affair with a young woman there during the city’s biannual art fair. For added flavor, it is set in 2003 as the U.S.- and British-led war in Iraq has met the “mission accomplished” phase.
Very Short List suggests that Dyer’s (he’s British) style recalls American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald – Gatsby Goes to India, if you will. It’s receiving generally high praise, although at least one Amazon contributor found it lacking.

An excerpt (download PDF) from part one:

“A woman pushing an all-terrain pram glanced quickly at him
and looked away even more quickly. He must have been doing
that thing, not talking aloud to himself but forming words
with his mouth, unconsciously lip-synching the torrent of
grievances that tumbled constantly through his head. He held
his mouth firmly shut. He had to stop doing that. Of all the
things he had to stop doing or start doing, that was right at
the top of the list. But how do you stop doing something
when you are completely unaware that you’re doing it?
Charlotte was the one who pointed it out to him, when they
were still together, but he’d probably been doing it for years
before that. Towards the end that’s how she would refer to
this habit of muted karaoke. ‘That thing,’ she would say.
‘You’re doing that thing again.’ At first it had been a joke
between them. Then, like everything else in a marriage, it
stopped being a joke and became a bone of contention, an
issue, a source of resentment, one of the many things that
rendered life on Planet Jeff – as she termed the uninhabitable
wasteland of their marriage – intolerable. What she never
understood, he claimed, was that life on Planet Jeff was intolerable
for him too, more so, in fact, than for anyone else. That,
she claimed, was precisely her point.”

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi: A Novel by Geoff Dyer  is scheduled for release April 7.

More at Powells.

Former presidential candidate U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich is suing his publisher, saying the company failed to fulfill its obligations in printing and distributing his book and damaging his candidacy (it couldn’t have been his unique liberal brand of politics).

No stranger to litigation or controversy, the Northeast Ohio congressman filed suit this week in Los Angeles Superior Court, reports FishBowlDC and repeated here and elsewhere. This suit claims Phoenix Books and Audio Inc. failed to adequately support Kucinich’s autobiography, The Courage to Survive.

“Kucinich appeared on a number of television shows, including The Tonight Show with Jay Leno to promote his book, only to later discover that Phoenix was not prepared to distribute the book for sale,” the suit claims.

FishBowlDC went so far as to label the publisher a “deadbeat.”

Kucinich has launched several Quixotic campaigns for the White House, which wins him a small but ardent core of supporters and polite tolerance from his Democratic brethren.

Before he created Watchmen and V for Vendetta, Alan Moore revived the minor comic book character Swamp Thing, making a hit graphic novel in the 1980s, which led to a couple of movies and a TV series.

Writes Laurel Maury for NPR: “Although he’s a red-eyed, gorilla-shaped mass of dripping lichen, our hero is inherently compassionate, logical and just. Swamp Thing is a horror comic, but it’s also a late-century incarnation of the idea of the noble savage, straight out of Dryden or Rousseau — only made of roots, twigs and swamp muck.”

The character underwent various incarnations, but never gave up his tree-hugging ways completely.

Maury continues: “Moore, a famous lefty, mixed his penchant for plumbing the psyche’s unholy depths with concepts from the nascent environmental movement, making his revamped Swamp Thing a sensation.”

An illustrated excerpt (CLICK HERE):

Lil lives an unassuming life in New York City, working in an old bookstore in Manhattan and keeping an old secret: She was the fairy godmother responsible for matching Cinderella and Prince Charming. But there’s more to this tale.

Carolyn Turgeon is the author of Godmother, The Secret Cinderella Story, about the redemption of the fairy godmother who committed an unthinkable crime: She fell in love with Prince Charming and went to the ball in place of Cinderella. OK, we haven’t read how Turgeon deals with the “Happily Ever After” business – we leave that to you.

Meanwhile, Lil, with her wings tucked out of sight, discovers Veronica, a young East Village beauty in need of, well, a fairy godmother’s guidance in love and princes and so forth. And so Lil takes her shot at redemption.

See the Random House page.

And for a slightly more traditional telling of Cinderella by Cynthia Rylant with Disney-inspired artwork, CLICK HERE.

By Diane Evans

Cuts in the publishing industry continue, whether it’s a round of layoffs at National Geographic, or the University of Michigan Press abandoning print to go digital.

The pattern is clear: As a society, we’re opting for digital reading formats. And that’s been hell on local booksellers.

It’s the cost of progress. Progress brings change, and change disrupts old ways of doing business.

But there is a solution, and that’s to change with the times.

In short, evolve or die.

That’s why it’s getting old to hear local, independent booksellers cry about hard times. Yes, we’re talking about many great places. But as digital formats continue to grow in popularity, and broadband infrastructure opens up previously unimagined possibilities, merchants need to change how they do business and find ways to remain relevant and profitable in an economic environment reliant on technology.

In a recent blog posting, Arsen Kashkashian, head buyer of the Boulder Bookstore in Boulder, Colo., unwittingly told why clinging to old ways won’t work. In a blog post titled “Hachette Gets Cheap, Real Cheap,” Kashkashian lamented Hachette Book Group’s decision to eliminate a program that benefited independent booksellers.

The program allowed booksellers to receive credit for promoting Hachette titles. Kashkashian estimated the loss would “cost many independent stores $3,000 in the upcoming year.”

“In most businesses, $3,000 might be a fairly insignificant amount,” he wrote. “In the bookselling world where a profit of 2 percent is considered stellar, it is a critical sum.”

He went on, saying a bookseller makes so little that $3,000 is enough to pay for one hour of work every Monday through Saturday all year long. He also added that some booksellers are already trying to recoup by buying cheaper toilet paper and paper towels.

Dear Mr. Kashkashian: Saving on toilet paper won’t help you. Neither will some of the tips you’ll find on the Web site of the American Booksellers Association, a trade group for independent booksellers since 1900. The ABA site offers tips such as, “Give your customers something to think about: Ten reasons why shopping local and independent is so important.”

As times change, the appeal of a local bookseller must go beyond emotional, altruistic reasons. The appeal must relate to new approaches, made possible through 21st century technological advances.

One example: Improved literacy is a goal of broadband network expansion. How can local booksellers work with schools and other civic organizations to collaborate on new solutions to meet community literacy needs? Are there ways for these booksellers to become leaders in offering online literacy programs for adults?

The answers are far less clear than the questions. However, to survive, local booksellers need to get in the game. Becoming part of the discussion is a first step toward becoming part of 21st century solutions that can keep more local merchants in business and contributing to the vitality and fabric of their local communities.

Diane Evans is a former Knight Ridder columnist and is president of DelMio.com.

The University of Michigan Press says it will publish most of its scholarly works in digital form within two years, making the digital monograph the norm for at least 50 of its 60-some titles.

Users will continue to be able to print on demand. Inside Higher Ed said the University of Michigan’s announcement is probably the “most dramatic step to date by a major university press.”

Monographs, which junior professors often need to publish to gain tenure – “publish or perish,” is the old saying – have been problematic with the struggling economy of late. Yes, even academia is feeling the pinch.

It’s a story of Adam and Eve in the garden of hurricanes and rising swamp water, not quite Southern Gothic but reminiscent of that genre. It’s Mary Robison’s One D.O.A., One on the Way.

Writes Daniel Handler (known to some readers as Lemony Snicket) in the New York Times:   “One D.O.A., One on the Way has all the razored style and zigzag tone one expects, but also a new connection to a bigger world, in which all of our circumstances are as desperate and hilarious as her characters’. The key is the setting, which is New Orleans after Katrina; not only is everyone up a creek without a paddle, but the creek is flooded beyond repair. “This is a work of fiction,” Robison says in a note, citing a number of government sources. “Nonetheless, the author has not knowingly made statements about New Orleans that are incorrect.” Interspersed with the narrative scenes are lists that form a quality-of-life report, and the quality of life leaves everything to be desired. “The State Legislature has now barred lawsuits by individuals kept in prison beyond their release dates,” one note reads. “For broken bones,” reads another, “the recommended treatment spot is Houston.”

This is what you call a loss leader.

When Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father was published in 1995, the book didn’t sell enough copies to pay back his $30,000 advance, says the New York Times. At least not right away.

Along comes the 2004 Democratic National Convention, and this kid from Chicago makes a splash (a more positive impact than a certain former president-to-be made in a similar setting in 1988). Sales skyrocket, Obama follows with The Audacity of Hope and now he’s a millionaire. So he packs up his things … and you know how it goes from there.

Now the president has an agreement to publish a slimmed-down version of Dreams From My Father for young readers. He apparently has a deal to produce a third nonfiction work, to be published after he leaves office because, well, he’s kind of busy right now.

On another presidential front, George W. Bush has inked a book deal worth $7 million, according to Lynn Sherr, a former ABC News correspondent. Tentatively title Decision Points, the book will focus on important life decisions, Bush told The Associated Press.

Still more to read on the subject HERE.

Captain Freedom is an archetypal superhero, a man’s man with unearthly superpowers, a conflicted girlfriend and sidekick of slightly less spectacularly superhero status.

And he’s about to be downsized.

Writer G. Xavier Robillard tells the tales of superhero exploits, corporate intrigue and the personal journey of one celebrity-obsessed pop culture hero in Captain Freedom: A Superhero’s Quest for Truth, Justice, and the Celebrity He So Richly Deserves.

NPR provides this excerpt, courtesy of Harper Paperbacks:

“Genghis Kong, the giant Barbarian, has escaped from his unusually large prison off the coast, its powerful electromagnetic fencing disrupted by offshore oil exploration, and he’s back in Los Angeles for a weekend of rest, relaxation, and wanton destruction. I fly back up into his face.

” ‘Your furlough ends now,’ I shout at him. Genghis came looking for freedom, but Freedom found him.

“I’m sure he can barely hear me. The sound of rotors from military choppers is deafening. Not sure what they think they can do, and the Pentagon’s highly touted Barbarian Defense Shield has been a total failure.

“Genghis was part of the Monsanto giant laborer breeding program. The agriculture company had created an entire line of genetically altered superfoods, like twenty-foot rutabagas. Realizing they hadn’t thought of a way to harvest the humongous produce, the company quickly bred giant farm workers to do the job. Unfortunately, the giants proved harder to control than the average migrant worker and escaped out into the world, seeking better-paying jobs and, in some instances, a life of crime.”

He goes on to do battle with credit card telemarketers, that “French triumvirate of terror, Les Miserables,” and the dread Upper Management.

Superheroes have been satirized in everything from college writing classes to TV cartoons (The Tick)
Hear it at NPR.

By Diane Evans

When former president Bill Clinton spoke recently before the Association of American Publishers in New York City, he focused on the economy and the new stimulus plan approved by Congress.

For publishers, nothing is more important – especially given industry consolidation as a result of economic pressure and new technologies that threaten the market for printed books.

Clinton’s very speech – about the complexities of the economy – reinforced why we need books. His point: That books are as important as ever in our age of blogs and Tweets, because facts alone aren’t enough; we also need “perspective and linear argument.”

“You ought to feel that you are in a noble profession,” Clinton told publishers. “You ought to pollute it as a little as you can and make some money. … I don’t care what will happen with technology, we’ll all still need to read.”

___

Is Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s statesmanship so great, that despite the mark of scandals in Chappaquiddick and Palm Beach, his legacy will be on par with that of Daniel Webster?

So says Peter S. Canellos, the Boston Globe Washington bureau chief and editor of a new biography on Kennedy. The book, Last Lion: The Fall and Rise of Ted Kennedy, is by a team of Boston Globe writers who covered Kennedy over the years. It includes previously unpublished family letters and interviews.

Speaking of Kennedy’s nearly five-decade legislative career, Canellos told The New York Times via e-mail: “There’s no question in my mind that he’s the greatest legislator in American history. That sounds like a glib superlative. But when you do all the research – and we did – there’s really no other conclusion.”

Kennedy’s quip to a family member, when told about the Webster comparison: “What did Webster do?”

The book suggests that after Chappaquiddick, Kennedy spent the rest of his life soul searching, as he also took on the role of father figure to 13 nieces and nephews who had no fathers.

Meanwhile, Kennedy’s own memoir is scheduled for release this fall, sooner than originally planned. The book, titled “True Compass,” reportedly fetched an $8 million advance for the Massachusetts Democrat. Part of the proceeds will go to charity.

___

A note on novelist James Purdy, who died in New Jersey last week at age 94:

In a 2005 New York Times essay, American novelist and playwright Gore Vidal commented on why Purdy received limited success and acclaim for his dark and sometimes comic fiction, with subjects ranging from ghosts to gays.

“The walls of Jericho remained standing and still stand to this day despite a unique and varied body of work,” wrote Vidal. “But then certain writers are simply not allowed to pass because, at some level, they genuinely disturb, causing the Confederacy of Dunces to cart away their most vivid works like so many pillars of salt to be set up in that deadly desert that separates our Oz from the real world.”

Purdy once offered this explanation: “Reputations are made here, as in Russia, on political respectability or commercial acceptability. The worse the author, the more he is known.”

___

Diane Evans is a former Knight Ridder columnist and is now president of SunLit Communications and DelMio.com, an interactive online magazine on books for writers and readers.

Pat Conroy has been busy. The author of The Great Santini and The Prince of Tides has a book coming out in September (South of Broad) and just signed a deal for a memoir: The Death of Santini.
The Great Santini caused a huge rift in Conroy’s family, which believed the thinly disguised autobiography betrayed private family matters, but eventually father and son grew close enough that the author eulogized his father at his 1998 funeral.
This memoir, reports Publishers Lunch, is “about his often abusive and complicated father’s final days, and Pat’s coming to terms with him (a Marine fighter pilot who inspired the novel The Great Santini, remembered by many for Robert Duvall’s Oscar-nominated film portrayal of him).”

Pat Conroy’s home page (under construction – probably posting book news!)

One writer’s complicated issues with dad in his last days.

Former President Bill Clinton made an appearance Wednesday at the Association of American Publishers in New York City, talking at length about many of his favorite topics and occasionally throwing in something about books.

Publishers Lunch was late, but the meal’s delay was blamed on the former Commander in Chief:

“Appearing 30 minutes late (which is basically on time, but explains the delay in serving today’s Lunch), former President Clinton noted that due to midtown gridlock, ‘I got to walk and virtually run the last five blocks’ to get to the Yale Club. To the applause of the group Clinton noted in his introduction, ‘I’m the last of a dying breed; I’m still trying to keep our independent bookstore in Chappaqua, N.Y., alive.’ When he got around to mentioning books again about 15 minutes later, Clinton said ‘I would argue that books are more important in the age of blog sites and Tweets and whatever. … We need perspective and linear argument. That’s why I think books are important.’ ”

The Publishers Lunch posted, then added this postscript:

“Clinton at the end of his 45-minute talk at the AAP annual meeting returned to the primacy of books: ‘We need them for persepctive; facts are not enough. … You ought to feel that you are in a noble profession. You ought to pollute it as a little as you can and make some money. … I don’t care what will happen with technology, we’ll all still need to read.’ ”

Sorry, no free LUNCH (subscription required)

Edward Kennedy at one time was a name synonymous with “scandal.”  Often regarded as a pampered playboy, Teddy languished in the shadows of his brothers, John and Bobby, whose shadows seemed to have been made longer by their deaths in the 1960s.

But over the decades in the Senate, Kennedy accumulated a substantial body of work. Now, as the senator faces his own mortality with the diagnosis of a brain tumor, the staff of the Boston Globe has crafted Last Lion: The Fall and Rise of Ted Kennedy.

In his review, Minneapolis Star Tribune writer Tim O’Brien rattles off a list of scandals, enough scandals to keep the tabloids in business for years. The drinking and carousing, the academic misdeeds, and more:

“Last Lion explores all of these incidents, and it doesn’t give Kennedy a hometown discount. Chappaquiddick (the one-word incident that revolved around the death of Mary Jo Kopechne), the writers say, was ‘a failure of princely indulgence, assuming he could do anything and have others clean up, or something closer to the opposite — the faltering of a grief-stricken and damaged psyche, unable to confront his responsibilities.’ ”

The Globe staff, which probably knows Kennedy better than anyone else could, provides a unique view of the Massachusetts senator, the liberal’s liberal who has forged unlikely alliances and deep friendships with the likes of conservative Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah.

No doubt political junkies will love it.

Read more HERE.

The man who asked the question Who Moved My Cheese? has written another book that could be telling of the times: Peaks and Valleys: Making Good And Bad Times Work For You–At Work And In Life.

Author Spencer Johnson follows the story of a dissatisfied young valley dweller who seeks enlightenment, or at least some satisfaction, in the peak above.

He meets an old man who lives on a peak and, as the story goes, it changes his outlook on life, work, etc.

Johnson won millions of fans (and probably annoyed a few cynics) a decade ago with his simple message of learning to roll with life in Who Moved My Cheese?

Peaks and Valleys has been percolating with Johnson for 20 years. It was initially scheduled for release next fall but the recent economic upheavals (see: Valley) put those plans into fast-forward.

“I knew this book would come out when we were in a valley,” he tells the Associated Press. “People pay more attention when they’re in the valley.”

An excerpt

Chapter One: Feeling Low in a Valley

Once there was a bright young man who lived unhappily in a valley, until he went to see an old man who lived on a peak. When he was younger, he had been happy in his valley. He played in its meadows and swam in its river.

The valley was all he had ever known, and he thought he would spend his whole life there.

Some days in his valley were cloudy and some were sunny, but there was a sameness to his daily routine that he found comforting.

However, as he grew older, he began to see what was wrong more often than he noticed what was right. He wondered why he had not noticed before how many things were wrong in the valley.

As time went on, the young man became increasingly unhappy, although he wasn’t sure why.

Read more at Simon & Schuster.

After graduating from Princeton, Donovan Campbell opted for a rifle instead of a laptop and found himself leading Marines in Ramadi, a Sunni-dominated city in the Anbar province of Iraq, in the wake of the 2003 U.S. invasion.
His memories of that experience resulted in Joker One, the name his Infantry platoon was known by. But there was nothing funny about the events in Ramadi.

From the Random House Web site: “Ramadi …  was an explosion just waiting to happen. And when it did happen–with the chilling cries of “Jihad, Jihad, Jihad!” echoing from minaret to minaret–Campbell and company were there to protect the innocent, battle the insurgents, and pick up the pieces. After seven months of day-to-day, house-to-house combat, nearly half of Campbell’s platoon had been wounded, a casualty rate that went beyond that of any Marine or Army unit since Vietnam. Yet unlike Fallujah, Ramadi never fell to the enemy.”

An excerpt from Joker One:

“On May 27, I woke up to a horrible feeling of dread. I can’t really properly put that heavy sense of impending doom into words, but the feeling meant that, for the first time, I was so scared about what the day held that I didn’t want to leave my sleeping bag. I had been scared before other missions, of course, but never before had I felt such a deep certainty that something bad would happen to my men if they left the Outpost that day. I didn’t want us to leave, but what I wanted was irrelevant. We had a mission, and, with or without me, my Marines were going to go out into the city and get it done. I forced myself out of bed and headed downstairs.”

Later on patrol:

“I waited with my door open until the last of the Marines started mounting. The little kids stood in a tight knot on the sidewalk right next to our third vehicle, waving at us as we hopped in the Humvees, pleading for us to hand out more gifts. I smiled a bit—it was nice to be appreciated—and threw my left leg through the door as Noriel, Bowen, and Leza called out almost in unison that all squads were mounted and ready to head out.

“Then a few things happened simultaneously, or maybe there was a timeline, but everything sort of runs together in my head as I try to remember it. A boom tore open the silence and an RPG hissed by, maybe a few feet over the top of my closing door. Small-arms fire rang out from our south, and from the .50-cal turret right above me, Brown started firing back with his heavy gun. My platoon sergeant flung himself out of the way of the rocket, twisting in the air, wrenching his back. Another explosion rang out, and the crowd of small children disintegrated into flame and smoke. From somewhere behind me, Marines started screaming out the worst words a platoon commander can hear: “Doc up! Doc up! Someone get a corpsman! Doc up!”

Read more HERE.

Read more HERE.

Read more HERE.

By Diane Evans

Sometimes girls just wanna have fun.

Take the case of the women who snookered The New York Times, which wrote a serious story about a supposed support group called Dating a Banker Anonymous, DABA, based on a fictionalized blog.

Blog co-founder Laney Crowell, and her cohort, lawyer Megan Petrus, concoct stories that mix their own experiences with stories of people who e-mail the site at  http://dabagirls.com. Reports Newsweek: “They don’t fact check the e-mails, or the gossip, and the posts are embellished and exaggerated for added laughs. At times, details are plucked from thin air to give the stories a satirical edge.”

The blog could lead to bigger and better things for Crowell and Petrus, who are now signed with well-heeled agencies in Hollywood and New York publishing.  Speculation is there will be a book, movie or possibly even a TV series based on the blog. (But not a documentary.)

In a story in January, the Times reported on women who “shared their sad stories . . . at an informal gathering of Dating a Banker Anonymous, a support group founded in November to help women cope with the inevitable relationship fallout from, say the collapse of Lehman Brothers, or the Dow’s shedding 777 points in a single day.”

The article further noted that “theirs is not the typical 12-step program,” and that Step 1 for DABA is Slip into a Dress and Heels.

The Times interviewed and photographed a real group of women. But they were friends sitting around a cocktail table with drinks.

At its Web site, the Times has two corrections accompanying the original version of the story.  One notes a misspelling of “the surname of a prominent Wall Street investor.’’  It’s Warren E. Buffett, not Buffet.

The other correction, carefully worded, says that one of the creators of DABA since described the blog “as a satire that embellishes true experiences for effect. Had the nature of the blog been made clear at the outset, the article would have described it accordingly, not as a support group.”

Publishers Lunch, an online publication for the book industry, couldn’t help but say nyah, nyah. Its headline read, The Next Time the NYT Whines About Fact-Checking in Books.

“If published in a book the Times would call it a hoax,’’ wrote Publishers Lunch.  “As
published in their pages, it is a satire that embellishes true experiences for effect.’’

The true effect of the Internet for anyone in publishing is that mistakes that may never have come to light before will come to light in cyberland. That means public humiliation may overtake the dreaded lawsuit as the new No. 1 fear.

Or as Newsweek said in tweaking the paper, did the Times get punk’d?

Would you sing it to a fox?

The Dr. is no longer with us, but fans of Ted Geisel – aka Dr. Seuss – are celebrating his birthday today.

If you were out and about over the weekend you might have spotted tall red-and-white-striped hats bobbing about in libraries or stores in an homage to the good doctor.

Theodore Seuss Geisel was born March 2, 1904. He died in 1991.

http://www.seussville.com/

http://www.catinthehat.org/

http://www.drseussart.com/