Amateurs

Courtesy GalleyCat, here's an interesting piece by a first-time novelist on how he promoted his book -- what worked and what didn't. Good idea: create your own website with original content related to the book. Bad idea: try to organize reading groups. Or maybe not such a bad idea, but it didn't work for him. My theory, which I'm pulling out of my ass, is that reading groups generally work only for women-oriented fiction -- Oprah stuff. Because how many men are in reading groups, you know?

And speaking of book promotion, I clicked on a banner ad on GalleyCat and wound up at this page for a Random House book, Blind Submission, which suggests you read an excerpt from the book (which has to do with a literary agent) and answer a few questions; you could "win a consultation with a top New York literary agent!"

The interesting thing about the promotion is that it took me a second to realize it was a promotion for a book; initially I thought it was just a contest. But it's a promotional contest.

By the way, if you weren't in SF on Sunday, or were coming back from Txg someplace, you might have missed the big feature on Savannah Knoop, the young artist/designer-turned-JT LeRoy doppelganger. She impersonated the non-existent author for two years. It isn't a very interesting article, and frankly she doesn't seem like a very interesting person. She echoes the "We never meant to hurt anybody" line from the LeRoy writer, Laura Albert, and that really seems to be the beginning and end of her take on the matter.

A more substantial, talented or just mature person might have taken the experience and made tremendous art from it; she's making non-descript clothing the reporter went out of her way to call "cute, well-made, somewhat androgynous clothes that play with proportion and comfort versus structure." I think that's another way of saying they're boxy and poorly cut.