Lit up

Rachel Kramer Bussel, whose interviews on Mediabistro with publishing figures have been mostly junior personnel up to now, scores today with an Harcourt's Editor in Chief Becky Saletan.

Writers, agents and others are madly emailing each other the humor piece from Sunday's NYT Book Review, "Publish and Perish," which follows the emotional ups and downs of a newly published author.

The tour concludes, the sugar high ends, and the author begins to enter withdrawal. He calls the publicist several times a day. "I call this stage infantile narcissism," said Lynn Goldberg of Goldberg McDuffie Communications, a public relations company that deals with many big-name authors. "They're completely self-absorbed, and they can't understand why they're not selling more books or getting on TV."

Todd Oppenheimer, the author of "The Flickering Mind: Saving Education From the False Promise of Technology," recalled: "I wrote long memos and pitches and lists of contacts to the in-house publicist. I left no stone unturned." And the publicist? "She'd say, 'I'm on it, Todd. Every hour I talk to you is an hour I'm not publicizing your book.' "

Read the Galleycat blog entry on it and today's followup.

Meanwhile, the Buzz your Book class is being offered again. Seems expensive, but if I had a book coming out next year, I would go for it.

Then again, this whole trend toward authors taking the reins of their own publicity in their hands -- it reminds me so much of how we're all supposed to take part in "volunteerism" because the government has abdicated its responsibility to administer social service.

Finally, this NYT article about a staged reading of a lost Kerouac work is entertaining. Kudos to Thunder's Mouth Press for publishing it.

Rachel Kramer Bussel, Publish and Perish, Becky Saletan, publishing, writing