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:

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle does a sound check, then talks about how he came up with the idea for Sherlock Holmes, as well as a bit about some paranormal experiences he’s had in the amazing footage below …

Paul McCartney was recently awarded the Library of Congress’s Gershwin Prize for Popular Song at a star-studded ceremony at the White House hosted by the Obamas. A story at the Washington Post reveals a PBS broadcast of the event censored his below remarks:

Tuli Kupferberg

In 1993 I worked as the assistant manager of the Classic Bookshop on the concourse of the World Trade Center. Several weeks after the February 26^th bombing, after we had removed the billowy black ash that had settled on all the books and shelves, Classic reduced its stock in a fire sale. On an ordinary Friday, our best day of the week, the store would take in an average of $7,000. On the best day of the sale -– when prices had been cut fifty to seventy-five percent -– we took in over $30,000.

One quiet weekday morning shortly after the sale had begun I was called to the front of the store. One of the cashiers had been presented with a gift certificate and didn’t know whether it ought to be redeemed.

I had never seen him in the store –- but I recognized the customer with the gift certificate. And I had noticed him when he had come in. A slight man with a step that might have given an impression of frailty, his mask-like face emanated self-possession. As I now know, he would turn seventy that year, but his evident age -– more than twice mine -– drew my attention to his clothes. In the World Trade Center, our customers were bankers and traders or were drawn from the nearly 40,000 office workers in the towers above us whose costumes were mostly functional, and hard to tell apart. The store’s best-selling subjects — we had tables devoted solely to stacks of Frank Fabozzi’s Handbook of Mortgage Backed Securities -– were banking, investment, business, and computer manuals. “Poetry not sold here” (an inevitably disappointing shelf or two was tried out later). And although I did wait on Lawrence Joseph once (and Ray Sokolov, a poet of another kind, who refused to be flattered by my recognizing him from the photo on the jacket flap of his irreplaceable biography of A.J. Liebling, Wayward Reporter) we were not patronized by poets and we were not accustomed to waiting on elderly gentleman in clothes of many colors -– and textures. Not that this customer’s clothes were garish. Even the mauve scarf complemented his meadowy palette. And the clothes were clean and new, those of a natty bohemian.

The gift certificate was bright and crisp, a single fold in the middle. Its corners and edges were still sharp. It looked new, but I had never seen one like it. The color was lighter. There was the corporate logo -– but the font was different.

The amount: $7.50. It wasn’t even in the denomination of a gift certificate but was the balance or remainder of a partially used gift certificate. Who had given the gift and what its original value had been were not displayed.

The date of issue? I don’t remember the date. But I remember the year. The gift certificate, or what was left of it, had been issued in 1979. And the bearer was Tuli Kupferberg, the poet, singer, and self-described “world’s oldest rock star,” who died this Monday at age 86.

Like most people who didn’t know him, I knew Tuli first through the Fugs, introduced to me by an uncle in the form of their vinyl record album It Crawled Into My Hand, Honest and their song “Wide, Wide, River” which, since I rarely consulted album covers or notes, I have ever since referred to as “River of Shit,” after its chanting lyric.

In his biography of Paul McCartney, Barry Miles writes that Paul would sign his autograph “Tuli Kupferberg” “whenever pushy tourists called upon him to sign” one.

When I got to New York Tuli was still a presence – you could see him perform at St. Mark’s Church on the Bowery, or buy his drawings on St. Mark’s Place, or see them in the Voice – and I’ve never outgrown the sensibility enshrined in his collection Teach Yourself Fucking, which I bought for the title and the photos of Tuli on the cover hoisting his boner. (The two-star review on Amazon is titled “I didn’t learn anything from it” and pleads, “Please don’t mistake this for an instructional guide, as I did.” – There are two kinds of people in the world…)

I regret that I did not record his purchase. I do remember that he browsed the store for a length of time that indicated careful consideration. As the price of books rose, the relative value of the gift certificate declined – but the sale restored its original buying power. Having been given the gift in 1979, and having found little in the store to recommend it (I imagined), Tuli had waited for an opportunity that wouldn’t be bettered. Where had he kept that piece of paper all those years? How had he known where to put his hands on it when he needed it? (There’s something scrupulous about this that is at odds with Tuli’s anarchic persona.) What did he find among all that drek?

In 2007, I worked in an office across the street from Housing Works bookshop on Crosby Street. Every other day or so I would wander over to cull the dollar book carts that have supplied my library (or “hoard,” if you must) for the last 15 years. The competition between the carts sometimes gets a little huffy. The books are only a dollar, after all, and there are treasures in there. The space is tight. There’s only room for one. One day, rounding a cart, I found the space between two of the carts blocked by a man, down on his hands and knees, peering at the bottom row of the cart. It was Tuli. The last time I saw him. I joined him and his armful of books at the cash register. “Are you still buying books at your age?” I said, “You ought to be ashamed of yourself.” “I know,” he said, smiling, in his whispery croak, “ but I can’t help myself.”

Okay, so we’re about a year late on this … but glad we finally got hip to it.

Tonight begins a project that we here at Melville House find kind of mind-boggling: We’re beginning a three-week TV advertising campaign for one of our books, thanks to the magic of Google TV Ads. Much as we hate to shill for Google — ahem — we must admit that they’ve come up with a way for us to do something we never thought we could: advertise on television in the four digit range.

So we jumped at the chance to use TV — are we the first little indie to do so? — to support a book that’s become really special to us: Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone. It’s a book we’ve all come to feel is a once-in-a-lifetime event — a book that perfectly encapsulated the imperative of our nonfiction (to out fascism) and our fiction (to inspire perseverance), and was so moving it made us feel an immediate sense of its importance, as well as an impulse to pass it on.

But it’s not easy for little indies to pass it on — to get attention for anything in the mainstream. Plus, this book faces certain marketing issues beyond that: it’s old, it was written in a foreign language, and the author is dead. The common response: If it’s so good how come Penguin didn’t publish it for over 60 years?

But we exist to counter the mainstream. And we thought it might be interesting to document our attempt to do so here, on a daily basis, in an ongoing series giving a behind-the-scenes look at our marketing effort.

It all starts with the video below — our first-ever commercial, which we made ourselves on iMovie. (Our only production expense was a consultation with a sound engineer.) The core footage (the staircase) was shot by Benjamin Ditzen, Hans Fallada’s grandson, in an old building on Jablonskistrasse in Berlin, the same street where the protagonists of Every Man Dies Alone live. (The precise address cited in the novel, however, was bombed into smithereens during the war). The rest of the footage was made in-house, or lifted from Nazi propaganda footage.

That just left buying time on Google — true, way more expensive than anything we’ve ever spent before on marketing, but still, we couldn’t buy a single ad in the New York Times for what we’re paying for three weeks on the History Channel, BBC America, and elsewhere.

Worth it? Stay tuned.

In his New York Times column, Nicholas Kristof notes that an “ugly paradox of the 21st century is that some of our elegant symbols of modernity — smartphones, laptops and digital cameras” and yes, some ebook readers — “are built from minerals that seem to be fueling mass slaughter and rape in Congo.”

As he explains,

I’ve never reported on a war more barbaric than Congo’s, and it haunts me. In Congo, I’ve seen women who have been mutilated, children who have been forced to eat their parents’ flesh, girls who have been subjected to rapes that destroyed their insides. Warlords finance their predations in part through the sale of mineral ore containing tantalum, tungsten, tin and gold. For example, tantalum from Congo is used to make electrical capacitors that go into phones, computers and gaming devices.

Electronics manufacturers have tried to hush all this up. They want you to look at a gadget and think “sleek,” not “blood.”

However, he notes that “now there’s a grass-roots movement pressuring companies to keep these ‘conflict minerals’ out of high-tech supply chains. Using Facebook and YouTube, activists are harassing companies like Apple, Intel and Research in Motion (which makes the BlackBerry) to get them to lean on their suppliers and ensure the use of, say, Australian tantalum rather than tantalum peddled by a Congolese militia.”

Here’s part of the effort, below.

The sixth annual Library Book Cart Drill Team Championship was held Sunday afternoon in Washington, DC. It is just one of the many events held during American Library Association’s annual conference. According to this report in the Washington Post, “Drill teams made up of library workers will perform themed dance routines with costumes and decorated book carts. This year’s competitors are from Delaware; Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania; the University of Pittsburgh; Midlothian, Texas; and Roselle, N.J.”

The library association’s site claims, “You don’t have to perform to enjoy the fun as librarians from around the country strut their stuff in choreographed dance routines featuring book carts! The teams design creative costumes for themselves and their carts, so this Championship is always a sight to behold.”

For a taste of the sport, below is a video of the winners of the 2008 Championship competition—the “Well Stacked Sci-Brarians” from the Santa Monica Public Library performing “Thriller”.

Okay, so it’s in French. Okay, so he doesn’t have the hair thing going on yet. But it’s him, I’m telling you — check out the eyes!

Here is a new take on the traditional book launch, brought to you courtesy of the Geography Collective in the UK, in honor of their upcoming book for kids, Mission: Explore.