Cleary I Need a Better Publicist

I’ve had authors making guest star appearances on Beatrice since the fall of 2004, beginning with short book recommendations and building up to longer essays. And yet there’s no mention of this blog in Kara Jesella’s article for the NY Times style section about authors promoting their books on blogs. Oh well.

Most of it will be pretty familiar stuff if you’ve been online for any amount of time, but there was one detail that leapt out at me: “Some blog tour producers,” Jesella writes, “say they have, from time to time, paid bloggers to review an author’s book as part of a tour.” Gotta admit, that’s the first I’ve heard of it, but maybe that’s because “bloggers may or may not reveal this detail” and I’m just not reading the right blogs. Too bad the article didn’t identify any bloggers who took that cash—it’s an interesting ethical issue that deserves exposure and debate, particularly since it’s one of the few legitimate issues the self-appointed protectorate of book reviewing could use to smear its electronic competition.

(You know what was kinda fun, though? Pagan Kennedy’s back-page essay for the NYT Book Review on authors hanging out on MySpace. Again, not so new to those of us who’ve been online for a while, but fun nonetheless.)

2 September 2007 | uncategorized |

Anthology Honors Iraqi Murder Victim

Back in June, I did an item at GalleyCat about Nothing But Red, an anthology of essays and other artistic responses to the “honor killing” of Du’a Khalil Aswad, a teenage Iraqi girl whose stoning was recorded by members of the mob who had their cell phones running while she was murdered. The call for submissions is now open, and will be through November 1.

12 August 2007 | uncategorized |