The judges said: ""Eudora Welty, who believes all good writing must have it, speaks of the sound of a voice. And what a voice here! Resonant with images and descriptions, detailed observation and reporting, it soars — from a coot recipe to church suppers. Paula Young Lee saw a lot of the latter because her father, who came to this country from Korea with her mother after the war, served as a Methodist minister in various small town churches in Maine. Growing up there instilled in her a love of hunting, a match for her interest in cooking."
Paula has complimented me by agreeing to do an intro for the new, third edition of my book of essays On The Edge of the Wild. As she is the only one doing an intro that I have not met, I was a mix of eager and scared. Suffice it to say I need not have worried! With Vadim Gorbatov on the cover, with its third Goshawk portrait (in this one the Gos catches a Pied crow in the snow outside Vadim's Moscow apartment building), it will be an attractive package.
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I have recently been persuaded that if I am going to write books I must sell them, and I haven't been; people of my age and background have a horror of calling explicit attention to themselves; somebody else should do it. But there is no budget for promoting books that are not expected to have a shot at the NYT Best Seller List.
I am not sure if I even want to show you the figures for my "book of books", the so- called Sportsman's Library; enough for now to say its sale numbers are a LOT lower than the number of hits I get every day on this blog. I assume nobody but old friends knows exactly what I write, even if they read the blog. How would they? Apparently, I have to add my new editions to my Amazon page!
I had decided already that the five backlist titles would be graced with new covers by artists I knew and liked (well, and one with a photo by me), and intros by people younger, smarter, and more famous than I, not to mention generous...
So far so good, and much more to come! Expect backstories, excerpts, tales about artists and publishers good and bad; even guest appearances, to convince you not only to buy all my books for yourselves and for birthdays, but to buy ten of each for Christmas. You are warned!
5 comments:
"I have recently been persuaded that if I am going to write books I must sell them, and I haven't been"
- Steve ; recognising The Issue, is the first step to sorting it out!. I am sure that refreshing your "stable", with some canny marketing, will do the trick- The material is unique, and deserves an audience - and the proposed solution it is less arduous for you ....sounds like a good call to me!
Good Luck
JohnnyUK
The hell with sellin' them, just get them out there for posterity and the archaeologists is what I say! So long as you can at least feed yourself(and yer critters) with other means..... No REAL artist makes any money until they've croaked, is what seems to be the case. And OF COURSE you should promote yours and others' books on yer blog, for goodness sakes! That's what blogs are for, I thought? B L O G is an acronym for "Books and Library Oglers Gratuity" right?....A. L. B.
Well, they may not be selling, in today's dumbshit culture, as well as you'd like, but look on the bright side: at least you've written them. I can't even seem to to garner the energy to attempt that, or at least to see it through to completion. My sense of self-promotion and self-marketing and self-branding can best be described as "Eeyore-esque"...
It is damn hard to write unless you think someone is going to read it. For ANYONE.
Hey, you know all of us blog-o-phytes will be reading them! And the future archaeologists will be THRILLED when they dig one up! When "civilization" eventually collapses, what of the computer era will be preserved for our descendants actually adhering to a Paleo diet? Nada.....L. B.
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