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.

Amazon's new Kindle has better margins than the company does

“There must be something in the water at Amazon.com, given its commitment to price-cutting whatever the short-term pain,” remarks Martin Peers in a Wall Street Journal report. He explains that “The retailer’s decision to introduce a new, cheaper Kindle, just weeks after slashing the price of the existing version of the device, confirms that once again Amazon is taking the long view in trying to boost its share of a market—this time, e-books.” But it could also explain why the company continues to post lower-than-expected numbers, making Wall Street still wary.

As Peers also notes, “At $139, the new device is about a third the price of the original Kindle and nearly half what the second iteration was selling for just five weeks ago.” However, “That doesn’t mean the Kindle will become ‘mass market,’ as Amazon suggests; an occasional book reader is arguably no more likely to pay $139 for an e-reader than $259 ….”

What’s more, as he continues, there’s the fact that “Amazon also faces intensifying competition. Foremost is Apple. Its iPad, while pricier, offers far more functions than simply e-reading, and some may find it more user-friendly than the Kindle. Through June of this year, 3.3 million iPads had been sold.”

There’s also the Barnes & Noble Nook, which, says a New York Times report, is about to undergo a massive promotion campaign. According to Julie Bosman,

the chain will begin an aggressive promotion of its Nook e-readers by building 1,000-square-foot boutiques in all of its stores, with sample Nooks, demonstration tables, video screens and employees who will give customers advice and operating instructions.

By devoting more floor space to promoting the Nook, Barnes & Noble is playing up what it calls a crucial advantage over Amazon in the e-reader war: its 720 bricks-and-mortar stores, where customers can test out the device before they commit to buying it.

And the coming price war, says Peers in the WSJ, might “damp investors’ appetites for companies. Amazon may be following the only path open to it, but it still risks scaring those who don’t trust the company’s commitment to the bottom line.”

Meanwhile, one player says it’s staying out of the price war: “Sony won’t sacrifice the quality and design we’re bringing book lovers to lay claim to the cheapest eReader,” says the company’s  “vice president of digital reading,” Phil Lubell, according to a Forbes report.

Nonetheless, most are predicted the $99 ereader is just a question of time.

Amazon head Jeff Bezos, meanwhile, in a USA Today report, says, “I predict we [Kindle] will surpass paperback sales sometime in the next nine to 12 months. Sometime after that, we’ll surpass the combination of paperback and hardcover.”

And I predict that he won’t show any proof whatsoever of that. And that everyone will believe him and print it as fact nonetheless.

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.

To charts the results of that effort, Melville House’s David Kinzer has been interviewing indie booksellers from across the country discussing what selling Every Man Dies Alone has been like for them, and what it represents about the brick and mortar bookselling scene today …. (You can read the entire series here.) …

Every Man Dies Alone on display in the Elliott Bay Book Co., with Peter Aaron's handwritten shelf-talker

For a self-proclaimed proponent of Every Man Dies Alone, Peter Aaron, the owner of Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle, is surprisingly sure about the negative selling points of the novel. “This is not easy reading,” says Allen. “The times, the plot, the characters, on the surface they are not very uplifting. If a customer is looking for a light romp, it’s not what I’ll recommend.”

And yet the book has been experiencing “amazing sales” at the store since its release, he says.

Aaron credits Fallada’s “great writing” for making it a hit, but like a lot of great books, it needs a champion to bring that to people’s attention. Thus, much of the book’s success story at Elliott Bay lies with the store itself and its close relationship with its customers, which saved the book from initial disinterest. “It just sat on the shelf,” recalls Aaron. “Then it was read by someone on the staff — incidentally, me — and put on the recommendation shelf. That’s where a lot of our customers find our books.”

Aaron himself wrote the shelf-talker:

I bow to Primo Levi: “The greatest book ever written about German resistance to the Nazis.” Based on a true story (with fascinating facsimiles of the Gestapo files in the afterword)– this is the saga of an unremarkable couple whose innate decency compels them to protest– hopelessly and courageously– against the insane brutality of the Reich. Triumphant, tragic, gripping– simply and beautifully narrated. The only book I’ve read that dares to take on the big question: not what created the monsters or the monstrosoties– that one is simple and gratuitous– but why the mass complicity? Dares– and succeeds.

Of course, enthusiastic handselling by the entire staff has also helped, but Aaron believes that some of the credit simply belongs to Elliot Bay’s status as an indie bookstore.

“It means being curious and wanting to see what’s out their on our own,” he explains. “And our customers are like that.”Aaron believes that indie booksellers are in a unique position of trust with consumers. “What is endorsed is there because there’s an individual in the store who has experienced it and loved it and wanted to bring it to the attentions of the customers, and the customers know that for no other reason is that there.”

So far, it seems that Elliot Bay’s customers have been rewarded for their trust. “Everybody’s loved it,” says Aaron. “I’ve heard nothing except inarticulate awe at having been moved by it.”

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.

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.”

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.