Rachael Ray Moves to Atria;

Gets Imprint (and QR Codes)

Following Reader's Digest's sale of the magazine "Every Day With Rachael Ray" to Meredith last October, the cooking personality is moving publishing houses as well, signing with Atria after nine books with Clarkson Potter. (Ray was originally published by Lake Isle Press.)

Ray tells the WSJ she wants to make her new cookbooks "exciting for people using their Nooks or iPads" and says she was attracted by a Tom Watson golf book Atria published last year that used QR codes editorially to link to instructional videos. (Yes, this is the first known example of QR codes actually benefiting a publisher.) Atria says they will use QR codes in Ray's THE BOOK OF BURGER, due in June, to link to instructional videos as well.

Following the dealmaking model-of-the-moment, Ray will have an imprint at Rachael Ray Presents, covering "titles on an array of topics." Among those authors promised imprints in the last year or so are:

Anthony Bourdain (Ecco)

Dennis Lehane (William Morrow)

Glenn Beck/Mercury Ink (Simon & Schuster)

Deepak Chopra (Harmony)

Chelsea Handler/Borderline Amazing (Grand Central)

WSJ

Independent Bookstores

Not Doomed

Here’s how they can fight back against Amazon.

by Farhad Manjoo

I didn’t make a lot of friends in the retail and publishing industries last week when I suggested that independent bookstores were the spawn of Satan. I argued that by making it cheap and easy for people to buy a lot of books, Amazon has been a boon for the book industry and “literary culture” in a way that many bookstores can’t match.

Many defenders of bookstores countered that by focusing on dollars and cents, I’d missed the whole point of these establishments. Bookstores, it turns out, don’t primarily exist to sell books—instead, they’re more like bars for readers. “Bookstores provide a space to meet friends, cruise for a date, and hide out when you have nothing to do on a Saturday night,” Will Doig wrote at Salon. I suspect that many bookstore lovers agree with Doig, which is exactly why many of these shops are going out of business. Bars can survive because alcohol is an extremely profitable good. Books aren’t—so if you think of your favorite bookstore as a comfortable spot to find well-read potential mates rather than as a place for commerce, you’re not helping its owner.

If you want bookstores to stick around, you should root for them to improve the way they sell stuff. Booksellers won’t survive the Amazon onslaught by merely wagging their fingers at the retail giant. Their only hope is to match the commercial innovations Jeff Bezos has brought to shopping. Indeed, this applies to all retailers, not just bookstores. The Internet has revolutionized how we buy stuff, but the main beneficiaries of this revolution have been warehouse companies like Amazon rather than firms that maintain a physical presence in your neighborhood. But it doesn’t have to be this way. This month, Amazon offered customers a discount to purchase stuff online while they were shopping at local establishments. It’s time neighborhood retailers fought Kindle Fire with Kindle Fire. Indeed, tablets and smartphones could be store owners’ best weapons against Jeff Bezos—if only they’d embrace them.

Advertisement

Take reviews and recommendations. Pretty much everyone uses the Web to research products before they purchase them. Amazon has turned this fact into a competitive advantage; by collecting and curating reviews for more than a decade—and by creating an efficient recommendations engine based on millions of purchase decisions—the firm has become the first place many people look for product information. This database, which Bezos’ firm spent a huge amount of time and money to build, can just as easily be harvested by local retailers who invested nothing in its creation. If I ran a hardware store, I’d put up a sign encouraging in-store research: “Looking for a drill? People on Amazon love the Black & Decker 9099KC. We offer free Wi-Fi, so feel free to pull out your phone and browse online reviews!” Bookstores could do the same thing: “Confused about which baby sleep-training book is best? The No-Cry Sleep Solution gets nearly 5 stars on Amazon.”

Slate.com

Bronco Quarterback

Sets More Records

Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow's memoir THROUGH MY EYES was HarperOne's top-selling title (as opposed to "top religion author of 2011" per USA Today's misleading headline) with more than 220,000 copies sold since its June publication and an increasing sales clip through the fall (25,000 copies of the book sold the week of December 18.)

Readership "is beyond the evangelical world and NFL fans now," said HarperOne president and publisher Mark Tauber. "There's just sort of a general intrigue about what drives this guy."

"To write what is worth publishing, to find honest people to

publish it, and get sensible people to read it, are the three great

difficulties in being an author." - Charles Caleb Colton

What Literature

Owes the Bible

by Marilynne Robinson

The Bible is the model for and subject of more art and thought than those of us who live within its influence, consciously or unconsciously, will ever know.

Literatures are self-referential by nature, and even when references to Scripture in contemporary fiction and poetry are no more than ornamental or rhetorical — indeed, even when they are unintentional — they are still a natural consequence of the persistence of a powerful literary tradition. Biblical allusions can suggest a degree of seriousness or significance their context in a modern fiction does not always support. This is no cause for alarm. Every fiction is a leap in the dark, and a failed grasp at seriousness is to be respected for what it attempts. In any case, these references demonstrate that in the culture there is a well of special meaning to be drawn upon that can make an obscure death a martyrdom and a gesture of forgiveness an act of grace. Whatever the state of belief of a writer or reader, such resonances have meaning that is more than ornamental, since they acknowledge complexity of experience of a kind that is the substance of fiction.

Old Jonathan Edwards wrote, “It has all along been God’s manner to open new scenes, and to bring forth to view things new and wonderful.” These scenes are the narrative method of the Bible, which assumes a steady march of history, the continuous unfolding of significant event, from the primordial quarrel of two brothers in a field to supper with a stranger at Emmaus. There is a cosmic irony in the veil of insignificance that obscures the new and wonderful. Moments of the highest import pass among people who are so marginal that conventional history would not have noticed them: aliens, the enslaved, people themselves utterly unaware that their lives would have consequence.

The great assumption of literary realism is that ordinary lives are invested with a kind of significance that justifies, or requires, its endless iterations of the commonplace, including, of course, crimes and passions and defeats, however minor these might seem in the world’s eyes. This assumption is by no means inevitable. Most cultures have written about demigods and kings and heroes. Whatever the deeper reasons for the realist fascination with the ordinary, it is generous even when it is cruel, simply in the fact of looking as directly as it can at people as they are and insisting that insensitivity or banality matters. The Old Testament prophets did this, too.

NYT

Their Noonday Demons,

And Ours

By John Plotz

By some miracle, you set aside a day to tackle that project you can’t seem to finish in the office. You close the door, boot up your laptop, open the right file and . . . five minutes later catch yourself thinking about dinner. By 10 a.m., you’re staring at the wall, even squinting at it between your fingertips. Is this day 50 hours long? Soon, you fall into a light, unsatisfying sleep and awake dizzy or with a pounding headache; all your limbs feel weighed down. At which point, most likely around noon, you commit a fatal error: leaving the room. I’ll just garden for a bit, you tell yourself, or do a little charity work. Hmmm, I wonder if my friend Gregory is around?

This probably strikes you as an extremely, even a uniquely, modern problem. Pick up an early medieval monastic text, however, and you will find extensive discussion of all the symptoms listed above, as well as a diagnosis. Acedia, also known as the “noonday demon,” appears again and again in the writings of the Desert Fathers from the fourth and fifth centuries. Wherever monks and nuns retreated into cells to labor and to meditate on matters spiritual, the illness struck.

These days, when we try to get a fix on our wasted time, we use labels that run from the psychological (distraction, “mind-wandering” or “top-down processing deficit”) to the medical (A.D.H.D., hypoglycemia) to the ethical (laziness, poor work habits). But perhaps “acedia” is the label we need. After all, it afflicted those whose pursuits prefigured the routines of many workers in the postindustrial economy. Acedia’s sufferers were engaged in solitary, sedentary, cerebral effort toward a clear final goal — but a goal that could be reached only by crossing an open, empty field with few signposts. The empty field is the monk’s day of spiritual contemplation in a cell besieged by the demon acedia — or your afternoon in a coffee shop with tiptop Wi-Fi.

In the later Middle Ages, monks performed fewer solitary tasks, and as the historian Andrew Crislip has shown, their vulnerability to the torments of acedia diminished. But for early medieval writers, acedia’s symptoms were so prolific as to be often contradictory.

For St. Benedict, the affliction took the shape of “a little black boy pulling the monk away by the hem of his garment,” while to the great fourth-century ascetic Evagrius it sometimes appeared as “demons that touch our bodies at night and like scorpions strike our limbs.” Gluttony and laziness can betoken acedia, one Desert Father, St. John Cassian, warns. However, “excesses meet” and “reluctance to eat and . . . lack of sleep put me in much greater danger.” The only real constant, during acedia’s heyday, was that it prevented monks and nuns from keeping their minds on their tasks, and their bodies in the right place. “Have you deserted your cell?” Basil the Great asks. “Then you have left continency behind you.”

If the diagnoses in medieval texts were so psychologically acute, it’s very likely because the most ferocious accusers and denouncers were themselves acedia sufferers. Today, too, it takes an acediac to know acedia. When I read Cassian on “disgust with the cell,” I look around my own office and sigh deeply; and I greet like an old friend the monk whose gaze “rests obsessively on the window” while “with his fantasy he imagines the image of someone who comes to visit him.” Cassian’s description of acedia as mental drift, meanwhile, perfectly encapsulates the pointless and random detours that stop me from bearing down on a particular page: “The mind is constantly whirling from psalm to psalm, . . . tossed about fickle and aimless through the whole body of Scripture.”

NYT

Finding My Religion

by Joshua Hammer

Books about God tend to fall into two categories: objective inquiries into the nature of belief and personal tales of spiritual awakening. One type explores history, creation myths and religious ritual. In the other, the author typically undergoes a crisis — a terminal illness, the death of a loved one, an onset of existential dread — that causes him to confront his life’s emptiness, coming to realize that there is something out there greater than himself.

Eric Weiner’s “Man Seeks God: My Flirtations With the Divine” nimbly and often hilariously straddles the fence between the two genres. A former war correspondent for National Public Radio, Weiner is also the author of “The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World.” In that best-selling romp, he ditched the hellhole beat for a year and wandered the globe, from Bhutan to Iceland to Switzerland, looking for countries with a high “happiness index.” His new ramble begins after doctors mistake a nasty bout of intestinal gas for something far more dire. Weiner gets the scare of his life, and after a nurse confronts him in his hospital room (“Have you found your God yet?”) this self-described “Confusionist” sets off on a journey through five countries and eight religions to figure out which faith fits him best.

As Weiner explains in his introduction, he was born into a family of “gastronomical Jews” whose sense of a divine presence began and ended in the kitchen: “If we could eat it then it was Jewish and, by extension, had something to do with God. As far as I was concerned, God resided not in Heaven or the Great Void but in the Frigidaire, somewhere between the cream cheese and the salad dressing. We believed in an edible deity, and that was about the extent of our spiritual life.”

But that period of apathy ends with Weiner’s fear-of-death experience. Each subsequent chapter begins with a ­Craigslist-style personal ad, a plea from a “CWM” (Confusionist White Male) looking for divine inspiration. “Craves sanity and peace of mind,” he writes before heading off to Katmandu to explore the concepts of karma, suffering and reincarnation with Buddhist scholars, including a mystic from Staten Island named Wayne.

NYT

How Many Self-Published Authors

Bestsellers in 2011?

Self-publishing success stories were another big, perhaps overplayed, theme in 2011, and the new year starts off with the transition of Amanda Hocking bestsellers to St. Martin's. The first in her Trylle Trilogy SWITCHED was reissued on January, with both the ebook and 336-page paperback priced at $8.99. TORN follows on February 28 and ASCEND will be rereleased on April 24. Here's a link for an NPR All Things Considered piece on Hocking.

Meanwhile, a user of Penguin start-up Book Country, Kerry Schafer, elicited interest from agent Deidre Knight for her fantasy novel BETWEEN, and made a two-book deal with Susan Allison at Penguin's Ace shortly thereafter. Allison also spotted Schafer's work on the web site and contact her directly as Knight was reading the manuscript. (Schafer's first novel posted on the site, about geriatric vampires in a nursing home, had not brought any publishing interest.)

To round out our 2011 lists and reviews, we've compiled an informal account of all of the self-published ebook authors to make the NYT bestseller lists last year with an original work (thus we are not including reissues or short-form pieces). Contrary to the popular impression, the total number is...11. The authors, along with the date of the first appearance on the list, are:

Nancy Johnson (2/20)

Victorine Lieske (3/6)

Stephanie McAfee (3/27)

Heather Killough-Walden (5/1)

John Locke (5/8)

Courtney Milan (7/10)

Darcie Chan (8/28)

Chris Culver (9/4)

Rick Murcer (9/4)

CJ Lyons (9/11)

Bits & Bytes

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FICTION

Debut

Margaret Wurtele's THE GOLDEN HOUR, set in war-torn Italy, and following the German army's invasion of her village, a young Italian woman risks her life to defy the injustice surrounding her, in this novel of forbidden love, to Claire Zion at NAL, by Marly Rusoff at Marly Rusoff & Associates (World English).

P. L. O'Sullivan's LACE CURTAIN IRISH, a family saga set in Chicago that encompasses the conflict between Irish immigrant parents and the first American born generation, to Cian O hAnnrachainn at Newcastlewest Books, in a nice deal, for publication in March 2012.

Inspirational

Lily George's CAPTURING THE LIEUTENANT, in which a beautiful but impoverished young seamstress must decide between true love wit ha wounded Waterloo veteran or a life of comfort as mistress to one of the richest lords in England, to Melissa Endlich at Harlelquin Steeple Hill, by Mary Sue Seymour at The Seymour Agency.

Mystery/Crime

Jay Stringer's OLD GOLD, pitched in the tradition of Ken Bruen and early Dennis Lehane, the hero is a half-Romani ex-cop who finds himself caught between two competing drug families in Britain's Black Country when he is framed for the murder of a mysterious young woman he met only the night before, to Andrew Bartlett at Thomas & Mercer, in a three-book deal, by Stacia Decker at the Donald Maass Literary Agency (World English plus Germany).

Women's/Romance

Joyce Geissinger's THE DAUGHTER, first in the new IKATI series, in which a young woman discovers she is heir to a dynasty of secretive, shape-shifting predators, and finds herself caught in a centuries-old battle between two enemies who will to stop at nothing to annihilate one another, to Eleni Caminis at Montlake Romance, in a two-book deal, for publication in 2012, by Marlene Stringer at Stringer Literary Agency (World).

stringerlit@comcast.net

Children's: Picture book

Dana Sullivan's OZZIE AND THE ART CONTEST, the story of a Blue Heeler named Ozzie, who is bursting with creativity and is sure he'll win the kindergarten art contest, to Barb McNally and Heather Hughes at Sleeping Bear Press, in a nice deal, for publication in spring 2013, by Anna Olswanger at Liza Dawson Associates (World).

aolswanger@lizadawsonassociates.com

NONFICTION

Advice/Relationships

Walter Riso's LOVE, DON'T SUFFER, offering advice for those who are suffering from being with the wrong person, from feeling a diminishing of desire, or simply from lack of affection, and a second book, LOVE OR DEPENDENCE?, to Jaime de Pablos at Vintage Espanol, in a nice deal, for publication in 2012, by Anna Soler-Pont at Pontas Literary & Film Agency (US Spanish).

anna@pontas-agency.com

Cooking

Peggy Sweeney-McDonald's MEANWHILE, BACK AT CAFE DU MONDE: THE LOUISIANA MONOLOGUES, stories and recipes of performers at the Meanwhile, Back at the Cafe Du Monde live shows in Baton Rouge, New Orleans and Shreveport, to Nina Kooij at Pelican, in a nice deal, for publication in spring 2012, by Anna Olswanger at Liza Dawson Associates (World).

aolswanger@lizadawsonassociates.com

Memoir

Journalist Sharron Kahn Luttrell's WEEKENDS WITH DAISY, about her year co-raising Daisy, a yellow lab puppy, to become a service dog, with a prisoner who'd already spent half of his life behind bars for a violent crime committed as a sixteen-year-old, to Abby Zidle at Gallery, for six figures, in a pre-empt, by Sorche Fairbank at Fairbank Literary Representation (world English).

Translation: Books Crossing Borders bc@bookscrossingborders.com

Sorche@fairbankliterary.com

Film rights sold to CBS Films, in a six-figure deal, in a pre-empt, by Luke Sandler of The Gotham Group.

luke@gotham-group.com

A collective group of anonymous US soldiers aka J. B. Walker's NIGHTCAP AT DAWN: American Soldiers' Counterinsurgency in Iraq, about their time serving on the front lines in Iraq -- which first appeared as a free ebook, to Jennifer McCartney at Skyhorse, for publication in Spring 2012.

jmccartney@skyhorsepublishing.com

Pop Culture

Leandra Medine's MAN REPELLER, a book of humorous essays inspired by the fashion blogger's realization that her style clashed with her romantic life, to Amanda Englander at Grand Central, by Michael Klein at Maxx Sports & Entertainment (World).

Reference

Alex Palmer's WEIRD-O-PEDIA: The Ultimate Book of Strange, Surprising, and Incredibly Odd Facts about (Supposedly) Ordinary Things, the next time someone tells you smugly that starfish have no brains, you can counter with any one of these 1,045 weird facts (do you know what "achoo" stands for?) and remain king or queen of the cocktail (or kegger) chatter, to Jennifer McCartney at Skyhorse, for publication in Spring 2012 (World).

jmccartney@skyhorsepublishing.com

General/Other

Andrea Polard, PsyD's A UNIFIED THEORY OF HAPPINESS: An East-Meets-West Approach to Fully Loving Your Life, an original and practical contribution to the literature on happiness, providing a clear model for integrating the Western psychological understanding of ambition, goal orientation, and healthy relationships with Eastern spiritual, contemplative and receptive approaches that leads the reader to develop a fully engaged life of joy and contentment, to Jennifer Brown at Sounds True, for publication in June 2012 (World).

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