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Feb
02
Awesome Heroines Are Awesome!
2011 at 9am Posted by Rebecca Schinsky
Erin Blakemore’s book The Heroine’s Bookshelf was one of the reading highlights of 2010 (and her Bare Necessities post entitled “Classic Bitches I Have Loved” wasn’t too shabby, either), and I love what she’s doing to celebrate women in literature. Through the first couple weeks of February, Erin is running a series of Heroine Love guest posts at her blog, with each day featuring a different blogger writing about her own literary heroine (or two or three or four).
Eleanor Brown, author of the newly released novel The Weird Sisters, kicked off the fun yesterday with a post about Harriet the Spy, and I’m over there today with a post about the women whose books changed my life. It’s my own version of The Bare Necessities, and I had a blast writing it. Clickety-click and check it out, y’all.
And did I mention THE PRIZES?
Erin and the Heroine Love contributors have assembled a superfantastic prize pack. One winner will be chosen each day, and every entry will be pooled for a drawing on February 18 for the Grand Prize pack, which includes:
- An autographed print and audio edition of The Heroine’s Bookshelf…
- a copy of Blackstone Audio’s brand-new Pride and Prejudice narration…
- a spankin’-new silver 2g iPod Shuffle (for your audio pleasure), and
- …a $50 gift certificate to your local indie bookstore!
Who can say no to that kind of goodness? Head over to The Heroine’s Bookshelf to read my guest post and enter today’s giveaway, and check in daily through February 17th to stay on top of the Heroine Love and enter to win prizes from other great bloggers.
The Only Book Search Tool You’ll Ever Need
2011 at 5am Posted by Rebecca Schinsky
Ever thought about how awesome it would be if there were one centralized place where you could find out about all the new books coming out next week, next month, or next year, instead of visiting multiple websites for publishers, bookstores, and e-tailers and wading through their sometimes less-than-satisfying search tools?
Your wait is over! Edelweiss is a fantastic service that aggregates dozens of publishers’ catalogs and makes them easily searchable by title, subject, publication date, publisher, and more. And it’s free! The totally bookrageous Joe Foster gave me a tutorial to help me get more out of my Edelweiss usage recently, and he’s here today to give you the primer.
Up until this last September, I was the buyer at Maria’s Bookshop in Durango, Colorado. This was my mailbox, and this is what it looked like, pretty much every day. Most of those are catalogs; many are duplicates. The fun part was that every one of these catalogs was outdated before it was ever even placed in the mail. Print runs changed, covers were altered, titles we cancelled or postponed, whatever. Conversations with my sales reps were often spent listening to them correct the erroneous information on which I had based my buying decisions. It’s no surprise to me, really, that more and more publishers are looking at using digital catalogs, and that people who use those catalogs are digging it. I now work for the people who are trying to make this digital conversion of publisher catalogs as easy and usable for everyone as possible.
One of the foreseeable issues that will arise in the digital era is that some people will be better at it than others. What this means for people who rely on publisher catalogs for their business is that if there were not a single usable format to use, then there would be as many formats and processes as there are publishers. Some would be good and easy to use, while others would be, say, a pdf that does…well, nothing. It sits there until you print it out yourself, transferring the cost of printing from the publisher to you. Edelweiss sprang out of the need for there to be a single highly usable format, the best possible format, for people in the book business to learn. With Edelweiss, you have one format that actually enhances publisher catalogs: Keeps them up to date, makes them searchable, filterable, taggable, sendable, POS uploadable, tweetable, facebookable… Read more
Author Peter Geye Imagines “A Christmas Dinner of the Mind”
2010 at 5am Posted by Rebecca Schinsky
I’m telling you, the folks at Unbridled Books just get cooler and cooler. As if publishing some of the best books I’ve read in the last few years isn’t enough, they took time to ask several of their authors to write surprise guest posts so that several bloggers could have a taste of “Unbridled Holiday Cheer” and an extra day off! I’m thrilled to welcome Peter Geye, author of Safe from the Sea, back to The Book Lady’s Blog.
“A Christmas Dinner of the Mind”
It’s not that having dinner with ten kids under the age of six isn’t my idea of fun—what could be more fun?—but when asked, “What writer, alive or dead, would you most like to have dinner with this holiday season?” my mind fairly exploded. A better question might have been, “What writer wouldn’t you like to have dinner with?”
So I headed to my bookshelves and started culling. Here’s what I settled on: This Christmas-in-my-mind I’m having dinner with the Norwegians. Henrik, Knut, Per, and Tarjei. Just the five of us, in Tarjei Vesaas’ Telemark farmhouse. We’ll all sit there silently, sipping our coffee and eating our bread and cheese and soused herring (there’s no lutefisk at this feast). Once in a while one of us will grunt and the others will grunt back and maybe smirk. After our third cup of coffee Henrik Ibsen will open a bottle of Aquavit and pour us each a finger. He’ll talk about the long view. After three or four of Aquavits, Knut Hamsun will start talking about what it was like writing Hunger. When I tell Tarjei that The Birds is one of my very favorite books, he’ll only nod and smile thanks. He’s heard this before.
Eventually the ghosts will disappear and it’ll just be me and Per Petterson. It’ll be snowing outside, and the candles on the Christmas tree will cast crazy shadows and he’ll give me the inside scoop on how to write an international bestseller. We’ll finish the ‘Vit and call it a night.
Maybe in the morning we’ll go skiing through the forests around Vinje, way in the hell up north, out with the real Christmas trees.
Peter Geye is the author of Safe from the Sea published by Unbridled Books. He was born and raised in Minneapolis and continues to live there with his wife and three children.
Me, Somewhere That is not Here
2010 at 4am Posted by Rebecca Schinsky
The team at Reagan Arthur Books—which brought us such fabulous reads as The Unnamed, Day for Night, and Mr. Rosenblum Dreams in English—have started a fun new series on their blog called Book People.
I was thrilled when they asked me to be the first contributor, and you can check out the Q & A here.
While you’re over there, I hope you’ll take a look around and explore some of the wonderful titles they’ve published. I’ve said several times that if pantyworthy ever expands into an honor given to publishers, the very first one will go to Reagan Arthur. Honestly, I haven’t yet read a book she published that I didn’t absolutely love.
Thanks again, Reagan and team, for letting me kick off your new feature!
