MobyLives is now observing the book industry holiday known as August. We will be back in September with a whole new set of awesome super powers. Really. We’re not just going to be goofing off during August. We are going to be working hard for some truly amazing books in release this summer. See below, and do yourself a favor — check just one of them out. Just one. You won’t be sorry. You should also watch our Twitter feed for some give-aways, autographed copies, and other promotions yet to be concocted. We’re also making some other changes in the ole bloggerino that you’re going to like. Jesus, I’m exhausted already. But if you insist on thinking that we’ve gone fishing — well, fine. Check out the video below. For now, we’re outta here.

The cover for Lee Rourke's The Canal

Because new “discoveries” seem to us to be what publishing is all about, we take great pride at Melville House in the fact that some of our discoveries (Tao Lin, Hans Fallada) have really caught on.

Now, it appears our newest discovery — British writer Lee Rourke and his first novel The Canal — is catching fire as well.

And it’s not just us saying so. The Independent says it “has high ambitions and frequently – occasionally dazzlingly – reaches them,” making it “a refreshing, memorable and powerful novel.” GQ — yes, I said GQ — went way over the top, saying,

You have to salute Rourke - he has written a novel about boredom and how it saturates modernity, which is a ballsy thing to do. But The Canal also takes in urban renewal, technology and violence as it questions the manner in which we live our lives in the 21st century…. Authenticity may be in recession, but novels like this help us to recover our sense of it. If you fancy a cerebral summer read then make it The Canal. For a book about urban ennui it’s one hell of a page-turner.

Meanwhile, Rourke is the king of alternative media: 3AM calls it “one of the most achingly thought-provoking and beautiful books I’ve read recently … right-up-to-the-minute and urgent.” Largehearted Boy calls it “powerful” (and runs Rourke’s playlist), and HTML Giant calls it “a strange explosion of a book” (in addition to running an interview with Rourke). And Rourke has won the latest round of the Literary Death March in London, as the Guardian details here.

And that’s not the only contest Rourke is performing strongly in:  the book is tracking so hot in the UK that Amazon.co.uk has featured Rourke in its “Rising Stars” program. They offer a free read of the first chapter, an interview with Rourke, and more, and place it alongside four other debut novels. From there it’s a simple affair: The book that ends up with the most positive reader reviews goes on to be considered for Debut of the Year.

Exciting stuff. It’s not often readers can so influence a writer’s beginning like this, nor have a chance to be heard over the din usually underway for books touted by the usual sources in the echo chamber. Want to help make a career? Go here and tell Amazon what you think of The Canal. And watch our Twitter feed — we’ll be giving out signed copies throughout August.

The other amazing book we’re doing this summer is T Cooper’s The Beaufort Diaries, about a polar bear fleeing the melting arctic for Los Angeles, where he befriends Leonardo DiCaprio. You think I’m making this up? The word has been amazing: The “surrealistic satire,” as noted by the Los Angeles Times, is “singular and breathtaking,” says noted by the Austin Chronicle, which also called the book “original, humane, and deeply funny.” And — wait. You didn’t see the video? The one with David Duchovny doing the voice-over? Check it out, below. It tells you all you need to know, except that the book is even better than the video.

What Andrew Wylie looks like after he hears a Stuart Applebaum quote

Andrew “The Jackal” Wylie must be back from vacation — according to a Financial Times report he’s issued a new threat: “a broad expansion of his digital publishing business to include up to 2,000 titles if traditional publishers refuse to improve digital royalties.”

According to the FT, Wylie says he’s “failed to reach a satisfactory compromise after nine months of discussions with all large publishing houses.”  Now, he says, “If we do not reach an accord, Odyssey will grow. It will not publish 20 books, it will publish 2,000 and have outside investors and make itself available to other agents.”

But he’s only doing it for holistic reasons, he says: “I am only trying to make a point in order to underscore the importance of getting the right terms with a view to uniting the two [print and digital] revenue streams.”

But it doesn’t look as if the big houses are taking the bait: The FT says other publishers such as Penguin have told it “that Mr Wylie has limited bargaining power because rights to e-book publication have been written into authors’ contracts since the mid-1990s.”

Nor did Random House — which seems to be a particular target of Wylie, in that his Oddysey Editions is launching with mostly Random House authors — appear to be shaking in its books: “Our position is unchanged. Random House will not do new business deals with a literary agency which sets themselves up as a direct competitor of ours with our titles,” said company spokesman Stuart Applebaum.

The news seems bleaker than usual these days, observes Jessa Crispin a her newest column for PBS, “Bright Books for Dark Times.” Worse: “It’s not just that the news is bleak, it’s the powerlessness that everyone feels. When it’s a torrent of oil spilling into our oceans, deep underground, it’s not the kind of thing you can roll up your sleeves and solve yourself. It’s the same with most of the news: everything is just too big to do anything about yourself. And watching the politicians squabble is not exactly reassuring.”

If you’re a literary person like Crispin, you turn to your books on occasions of powerlessness — and from her library, she offers “a reading list, about humor in dark times, the strength of community, and people who, no matter how far gone things seemed, shook off apathy and got to work at tipping the scales back to something resembling balance.”

Among the books on her list:

“A Religious Orgy in Tennessee: A Reporter’s Account of the Scopes Monkey Trial”
By H. L. Mencken

The axis of religion and science has become so sadly polarized that each side seems to believe that if they admit middle ground exists all is lost. So the “New Atheists” continue to insist that all belief in the divine is simply delusional, and fundamentalists want to alter our textbooks to omit basic scientific fact.

And while everyone is probably familiar with “Inherit the Wind,” the staid and slightly dreary films (it was remade — a lot) about the original fight for the teaching students evolution, less known is H.L. Mencken’s original account of the same trial, “A Religious Orgy in Tennessee.” It’s a wild story, and told in the usual rabblerousing Mencken style. It may be a battle we are still fighting, but it started with one teacher and one incomparable Clarence Darrow.

Matthew Honan holds A.J. Jacobs responsible for the rise of “stunt books” — “like when you read the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica and wrote about it in your best-selling book The Know-It-All.” And then there was  Jacobs’ The Year of Living Biblically (”about your attempt to hew to every one of the Bible’s precepts”). And Jacobs is supposedly at work on a new one called The Healthiest Human Being in the World.

Now, says Honan, “everyone else is following your stunty lead: Dozens of scribes seem to have learned that writing about a wacky self-experiment is the key to a fat advance.”

Which gave Honan an idea. “I wanted to find out what this sudden rush of stunt books tells us about our country, our place in the world, the state of our humanity. And there was just one way to do so: with a stunt of my own. I would spend a week reading only this genre.”

In a hysterical column for Wired, he details his week’s reading:

Ed Dobson’s The Year of Living Like Jesus, an evangelical rip-off of Jacobs’ book. And Dobson isn’t the only copycat. Ammon Shea wrote Reading the OED after Jacobs’ Know-It-All was released. If anything, maybe I’m being too original. I resolve not to covet my neighbor’s donkey for the rest of the week. A few days later, I confront another stunt-book trope: burnout. It hits its apex when I read these sentences from Just Do It, Douglas Brown’s story of having sex with his wife every day for 101 days …

The kicker: Honan realizes that even his stunt isn’t original when he comes across a blog, “My Year of Everything, in which former MTV host Dave Holmes recounts his attempt to read a different stunt book every week for a year.”

How do you market a book written in a foreign language by an author who’s now dead, that was originally published 60 years ago, and has been overlooked by mainstream publishing ever since? This series takes an ongoing, insider’s look at the campaign to get Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone on the bestseller lists, by Melville House publisher Dennis Johnson ….

You have achieved some kind of zen level of marketing when you achieve meta-marketing, a place where things begin to feel a little out of control, but in a good way — i.e., our marketing campaign about our marketing campaign has achieved an unanticipated amount of attention. On Tuesday alone this week, it was featured on Publishers Lunch and the British equivalent, BookTradeInfo. We got a terrific shout-out on the great blog about international publishing, Publishing Perspectives (”the series should be mandatory reading for any small presses trying to get past what Johnson calls ‘the echo chamber’ of American publishing”). One of the country’s better literary journals, the Virginia Quarterly Review, wrote a lovely commentary about us. And that’s just some of the places I’ve heard of. Then there were all these aggregators I hadn’t heard of — such as BookNewsMatters. Meanwhile, one of my spies tells me that the same day, the publisher of Bloomsbury Press sent a link to the series to all employees.

Meanwhile blogs and twitter accounts were touting the series before and since — for example, there’s this post at the ever-great Bookslut, and at Geof Wisener’s wonderful A Natural Curiosity, and on the Chatter, the blog of the great Los Angeles indie bookstore Diesel, and this tweet from publisher Thomas Riggs & Co. in Montana.

Thanks one and all — getting attention from people we respect like that makes us feel danged lucky. And forgive us tooting our own horn, but the lesson here is twofold: 1. Marketing is about tooting your own horn, and 2. There’s a huge element of luck in all marketing campaigns.

Everyone seems to have shut up about the Andrew “The Jackal” Wylie - Odyssey Editions - Amazon brouhaha, but there was one new, eloquent statement about it all yesterday, from American Booksellers Association head Oren Teicher, posted at the ABA’s Bookselling This Week:

The issues sparked by evolving business models in the rapidly developing world of digital publishing are multifaceted and, at times, complex. However, from the perspective of independent booksellers one important reality is unchanged: Diminishing the availability of titles and narrowing the options for readers can only harm our society in the long run. That the Wylie agency has sought to distribute these works through a single retailer is bad for the book industry and bad for consumers. Books — in whatever format — are crucibles of ideas and unique expression, and we should be doing all that we can to expand, not constrict, readers’ access to them.

Blonde and Wet, the Complete Story was the top-ranked ebook on the iPad’s top-ten bestseller list Tuesday morning, reports Heidi Blake in a Telegraph story. Three other erotic novels were also on the list. By day’s end they’d all disappeared.

According to the Telegraph, “analysts said it was unlikely that all the erotic titles could have dropped out of the list at the same moment without being deliberately removed.”
Apple had no comment on the charges (although a Guardian report notes Steve Jobs is on the record about not wanting pornography on the iPad).

Meanwhile, “The most popular author among iPad users was, until yesterday, Carl East, a 55-year-old from Hull with more than 70 erotic books to his name. His titles, which are available for as little as 49p, were first, second and seventh in the chart before they disappeared.”

East was said to be “overwhelmed by his new found success,” and says, “I keep pinching myself to see if I am awake and sometimes I wonder, is this really happening to me.”

How do you market a book written in a foreign language by an author who’s now dead, that was originally published 60 years ago, and has been overlooked by mainstream publishing ever since? This series takes an ongoing, insider’s look at the campaign to get Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone on the bestseller lists, by Melville House publisher Dennis Johnson ….

The cover for the initial, hardcover release of Every Man Dies Alone

It’s almost impossible in modern book marketing to have a successful book without someone acting as a public spokesman for it, preferably the author. It’s something authors like to complain about in public (while hectoring their publishers behind the scenes to for god’s sake get them on Oprah!) but there you have it. The author’s role in the blurred land between marketing and publicity has become more essential then ever. For example, there’s the infinite world of outreach — speaking to book clubs, visiting booksellers — which can go on for years. Then there’s the fact that so-called “off-book” features — essentially, anything that isn’t a review, such as author profiles or interviews — are de rigeur nowadays, and have grown to the point where they usually have more of an impact than even a great review.

And yes that includes reviews in the New York Times — a review there, like almost no place else, can still have a big impact. But a feature there, in my opinion, trumps even that. (Getting both leads to what’s known in indie publishing as a “heart attack.”) Every Man Dies Alone got a wonderful review there that made the many booksellers who put stock in Times reviews take notice and put us on display. But I could never convince the Times features editors to take my call. (Let’s just say they don’t pay attention to indie publishers the way the Los Angeles Times does.)

Okay, so in the case of Every Man Dies Alone, we knew that we had the most amazing off-book author of all time: a fascinating ex-con who had substantial substance abuse issues, was involved in duels and embezzlement and wrote books in code while incarcerated in a Nazi insane asylum, who stood up to the Nazis and was blacklisted and helped sneak money to Jewish writers — what’s not to love? What’s more, by all accounts Hans Fallada was a warm, chatty, friendly guy, quick with a joke and a smile — perfect for speaking to reading groups. There was only the one hitch: He’s dead.

Combine this with the tendency of places like the Times to ignore indies and favor authors who are beautiful, young, blond and related to staffers and you’ve got a problem.

What to do?

Normally, a publisher in this situation would have called in the translator (think of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky out shilling for Tolstoy). But in this instance, we had a translator who wasn’t inclined or available.

But then we thought of something better when I saw that Hans Fallada’s oldest son, Ulrich Ditzen, had recently published a book about his relationship with his father. From there, we got lucky — it took me weeks to track him down, but when I finally got him on the phone, he gave me precisely the right answer to the question: “Do you speak English?” We brought him over for the launch.

It turned out to be one of our smarter moves. The 79-year-old Ditzen was deeply touched by our efforts to resusciatate his father’s work in English, and although not in the best of health he did a series of interviews on behalf of the project that, given how moved he was and the tragic nature of his father’s life, were truly stirring events.

Still, we weren’t able to generate as many interviews as you’d think — although we’d had a terrific Times review, as I say they don’t necessarily carry the weight they used to and we did not immediately generate all the great press we eventually got.

Which means we had a long effort in front of us with no ready spokesman.

It was time for some more improv. I was, at this point, probably the leading expert on Hans Fallada in the US. I was also more genuinely passionate about his work than perhaps the author himself was at the end. We took a page from Barney Rossett taking the stand on behalf of D.H. Lawrence and offered up Hans Fallada’s publisher — yours truly — as a spokesperson for the absent author. We decided to also try and broaden the appeal of that by pointing out there were interesting tangential story lines — for example, discussing what this story says about modern publishing or works in translation in the American or British market, say.

Surprisingly, there were some quick takers. For example, there was a great, in-depth interview with Kevin Sylvester for the CBC. More recently there was my talk with Leonard Lopate at New York’s local NPR affiliate, WNYC. There were interviews with newspapers — such as my recent talk with Julia Keller of the Chicago Tribune. And as time goes on, I’ve been speaking — both remotely and in person — with more and more book clubs and reader’s groups.

My favorite appearance, though, was when I appeared on a television show with an exhausted Ulrich Ditzen at the end of his American visit. Tired, not feeling well, and weary, too, I think, of speaking in English, it was a thrill to sit next to him as he held on to do a very difficult thing: speak in another language on TV. But I think his steely effort came across, and in the end, this was one of the most successful things we’ve done to support the book. Filmed the day after publication, but not aired until over a month later, it lifted us onto the Amazon bestseller list within hours of its broadcast. You can see it here: