"Conventional print publishing is a daunting business. No matter what an organization's size, it faces challenges unknown to wikians and bloggers. A printed book, as one production editor pointed out to me, is really a machine with a half-million parts, any one of which can go wrong."--Edward Tenner, in a thoughtful piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education about digital technology's mixed effect on readers and publishers.

 

Following the guilty verdicts yesterday in the case against Scooter Libby, former chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney, Union Square Press, the Sterling Publishing imprint founded earlier this year by Philip Turner, is publishing its first title, an instant book on the case to be written by investigative reporter Murray Waas. The United States v. I. Lewis Libby will appear next month in paperback and retail for $12.95. Waas has covered the Plame investigation and the Bush administration's use of pre-war intelligence for the National Journal. Jeff Lomonaco, a professor of political science at the University of Minnesota, will provide research assistance.

Turned commented: "Like the published reports from the 9/11 Commission and the Iraq Study Group, the CIA leak case warrants a definitive book based upon the Libby trial record."

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The Boston Globe checks out where teens hang out after school. Cafes and bookstores with wi-fi and tables are a big draw. One great image from the Atomic Café in Beverly, Mass.: "Near the window a young man is reading T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets. His laptop is open, his iPod is plugged in, and he uses a plastic CD case as a coaster for a large coffee."

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A hot read at investment bank Lazard is "photocopied galleys" of The Last Tycoons, an April Doubleday title by former Lazard executive William D. Cohan, today's Wall Street Journal reported. The book "delves considerably into the peccadilloes of the bank's senior executives, both past and present. It also moves to uncloak some of the business mystique of the bank." Much of the focus is on Lazard chairman and CEO Bruce Wasserstein, whom Cohan said has made more money from investment banking than any single man in the past 10 years "because he's a smart, opportunistic principal investor." 

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A different kind of Harry Potter excitement: today's New York Times reports on Daniel Radcliffe's current role in Equus in London, where he appears as Alan Strang, "a disturbed young man who, in a distinctly un-Harry-Potterish moment of frenzied psychosexual madness, blinds six horses with a hoof pick."

The young man who plays Harry Potter on screen also spends at least 10 minutes nude. One fan's opinion: "Wow. He must have been working out."

Reviews have been positive, and the consensus is that Radcliffe "is not a one-trick actor, fated to end his career playing elderly magicians in Harry Potter ripoffs." 

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Effective last month, Orange Avenue and its new teen imprint, Zest Books, are being distributed by Independent Publishers Group. The company was previously distributed by Publishers Group West.

In a statement, Hallie Warshaw, publisher of Orange Avenue, which has headquarters in San Francisco, Calif., said, "We think there is a strong market out there for fun, gifty, humorous, nonfiction teen books that are highly visual and address topics that are important to this age group. Our books--which are smart, well written and hip--offer something new and different."

Spring titles include Decoding Mom and Where's My Stuff? The Ultimate Teen Organizing Guide. Fall titles include 97 Things to Do Before You Finish High School and Uncool--A Girl's Guide to Misfitting In.

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Our friends at Unshelved, the daily comic strip set in a library, have hired Jim Demonakos to be senior business strategist. Most recently he was public relations and marketing coordinator for Image Comics, a comics and graphic novels publisher. He also is organizer of Emerald City ComiCon and owns the Comic Stop chain of comic bookstores in the Seattle area. In a statement, Demonakos said of the Unshelved strip, "The characters and the library setting have a very broad appeal, and I look forward to helping tap into its mainstream potential." 

 

It pays to check this out. Previous editions have been well-received.

The fourth annual Making Information Pay seminar, sponsored by the Book Industry Study Group, will take place May 10, 9 a.m.-12 p.m., in New York City and has the theme "using emerging technology to improve your bottom line."

Speakers are:

• Nicole Poindexter, v-p and director of strategic planning at Hachette Book Group USA, who, in an opening keynote, will focus on how her company is "using new tools to build its online presence for a new generation of readers."
• The very likeable John Rubin, founder and CEO of Above the Treeline, who will discuss improving inventory management using Web-based analytical tools such as his company's program that compares sales and inventory at a range of bookstores.
• Ted Treanor of Rosetta Solutions and the Seattle Book Company, who will speak to the subject "creating buzz and increasing ROI in pre-publication review, marketing, and sales."
• Mike Shatzkin, founder and CEO of the Idea Logical Company, who talks about DADs (digital asset distributors), companies that intend to be the main distributors of content--whether traditional books, e-books or page per view--in a digital world.
• Chris Hart, Random House technology services, who offers a case study of digital asset management--at Random House. The company's Digital Page Initiative has involved indexing, digitizing, discovering and distributing book content online and led to Insight, a service that gives search engines and online retailers access to digitized book content.
• Allen Noren, director of online marketing at O'Reilly Media, who gives the closing keynote address on the subject "thinking beyond the book: responding to a changing marketplace," in which he will share the experience of O'Reilly, which has been a digital pioneer for several decades.

For more information, go to BISG's Web site.

Directed and written by Zack Snyder and starring Gerard Butler, Lena Headey, David Wenham, Dominic West, Rodrigo Santoro and Vincent Regan, 300 opens this Friday, March 9. The movie, about the 480 B.C. Battle of Thermopylae, at which King Leonidas and 300 Spartans fought King Xerxes and his army of hundreds of thousands of Persians, is based on the 1999 graphic novel 300 by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley, which itself is based on the 1962 movie, The 300 Spartans.

Miller and director Snyder have collaborated on 300: The Art of the Film (Dark Horse, $24.95, 9781593077013/1593077017), which includes production photos, studio art and more.

Overlook Press reports that its recently released Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World by Paul Cartledge ($30, 9781585675661/1585675660), which covers the same hallowed ground, is the house's bestselling title at the moment and has gone back to press. Monday's USA Today ran a Q&A with Cartledge.

This morning on the Today Show: Father Andrew Greeley, whose new book is Jesus: A Meditation on His Stories and His Relationships with Women (Forge, $17.95, 9780765317766/0765317761). He'll also grant an audience to MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews today.

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This morning on the Early Show: hotelier Jonathan M. Tisch discusses his new book, Chocolates on the Pillow Aren't Enough: Reinventing the Customer Experience (Wiley, $26.95, 9780470043554/0470043555).

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This morning's Book Report, the weekly AM radio book-related show organized by Windows a bookshop, Monroe, La., interviews Mary Pope Osborne, author of Dragon of the Red Dawn/Magic Tree House #37 (Random House, $11.99, 9780375837272/0375837272) and of more than 80 books for children and teenagers.

The show airs at 8 a.m. Central Time and can be heard live at thebookreport.net; the archived edition will be posted this afternoon.

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Today on Live with Regis and Kelly: John Walsh, author of Tears of Rage (Pocket, $7.99, 9780671006693/067100669X). 

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Today on NPR's Fresh Air: Commander Richard Jadick, author of On Call in Hell: A Doctor's Iraq War Story (NAL Caliber, $24.95, 9780451220530/0451220536).

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Today the Oprah Winfrey re-airs a segment with Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, author of Shalom in the Home: Smart Advice for a Peaceful Life (Meredith, $14.95, 9780696235078/0696235072).

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Today the Diane Rehm Show lends airtime to James D. Scurlock, author of Maxed Out: Hard Times, Easy Credit and the Era of Predatory Lenders (Scribner, $24, 9781416532514/141653251X).

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Because of the Libby verdict yesterday the Charlie Rose Show bumped this author to tonight from last night: Martha Raddatz, chief White House correspondent for ABC News and author of The Long Road Home: A Story of War and Family (Putnam, $24.95, 9780399153822/0399153829).

 

Feiwel & Friends is one for one. The Holtzbrinck imprint's inaugural publication, On the Night You Were Born written and illustrated by Nancy Tillman, is #10 on the New York Times children's bestseller list for the week ending March 4. The picture book has appeared on the list several times since its publication in October, reaching as high as the #2 spot. There are a total of 150,000 copies of the book in print after five printings.

Jean Feiwel, the founder of the children's book imprint, acquired On the Night You Were Born shortly after she arrived at Holtzbrinck from Scholastic last year. "When you're building a list you want to take chances, but you also want to be smart," said Feiwel. "I was really concerned about doing something that I call 'shopping when you're hungry,' where you put things in your basket that you don't necessarily want. Then you get to the checkout and you're going, 'What was I thinking?' " On the Night You Were Born, though, "had something that really struck me," said Feiwel, and she made an immediate offer.

Feiwel was able to base her decision in part on the self-published version of On the Night You Were Born, which Tillman had sold mainly through gift distributors. Demand for the book was intense from the start, and it was a challenge for the author to keep up with orders. Signing on with a traditional publisher "has been a wonderful transition," remarked Tillman. "Self-publishing required me to be on top of marketing, publicity, shipping and printing, which is so time-consuming that I couldn't spend the creative time I wanted."

Tillman visited stores in Chicago, San Francisco and Seattle in early November to promote On the Night You Born. "Nancy is very effective," said Feiwel, who attended Tillman's signing at Anderson's Bookshop in Naperville, Ill. "She created a really nice feeling wherever she went."

The book continues to have gift appeal. At the Anderson's signing, she observed customers buying multiple copies. "It's a gift book that can function for many different kinds of occasions," Feiwel said. "Accounts have been very supportive, and they keep promoting the book and putting it in featured sections."

The book's "distinctive cover," which depicts two polar bears dancing under a full moon, has helped draw customers. "It makes you feel good from the moment you look at it," she said. Although the cover remains largely as it did for the self-published version, a few modifications were made. "We added a foil emboss and curved the type so that it felt a little 'giftier' and a little warmer," Feiwel noted.

The publication of On the Night You Were Born marked Feiwel & Friends's soft launch, and the official debut list is slated to appear this fall. Lead titles include the picture book Ballerina Dreams, the true story of a teacher who created a ballet program for children with cerebral palsy, and the young adult novel The Poison Apples about three girls who plot revenge on their evil stepmothers.

Tillman, meanwhile, is creating two more books. Forthcoming in 2008 are The Wonder of You, a companion journal to On the Night You Were Born, and a picture book featuring a frisky feline named Tumford "Tummy" Stoutt.--Shannon McKenna

Isabel "Izzy" Spellman is a private investigator who works for her parents' company, Spellman Investigations. It's often an exasperating job, since her family is more than a bit eccentric. They have absolutely no boundaries when it comes to snooping. They tail each other, wiretap each other, even blackmail each other. As children, older brother David cornered the market on perfection, so Izzy mined the depths of imperfection. When her parents asked why her life was a round of rides in squad cars, conferences in principals' offices, vandalism, grounding, illegal drugs and combat boots, she replied that balance was needed: "Added together and divided evenly, David and I would be two exceedingly normal children." Izzy began working for Spellman Investigations when she was 12; she thrived, since breaking the rules of society, not to mention invading others' privacy, was something she took to rather well. "For instance, when you're driving at night, it's easier to maintain a visual on a car with only one working taillight. I still remember the day Uncle Ray passed me a hammer and told me to smash out the taillight of Dr. Lieberman's Mercedes Benz. That was a perfect day." The birth of younger sister Rae upset the sibling balance, but she fit into the family perfectly. A snooping prodigy, Rae started surveilling at age six; now 14, she excels at it.

One of Izzy's many issues is her inability to maintain a relationship, and she keeps a file of ex-boyfriends, complete with hobbies, duration of liaison and last words ("You ran a credit check on my brother?"). Her mother keeps trying to set her up--"[She] had found another lawyer she wanted me to drink coffee with. I tried explaining to her that I was capable of drinking coffee without legal help."--and brother David is not above blackmailing her into blind dates. Working on a divorce case, she meets and begins dating a dishy dentist, Daniel Castillo, but keeps this a secret from her family, and keeps her family's profession a secret from Daniel, telling him they are teachers. This subterfuge lasts about as long as one would expect, and after her parents hire Rae to follow Izzy to find out who the new boyfriend is, Izzy decides to get out of the business. They agree, on the condition that she finish one last assignment: a missing persons case almost as old as her little sister.

The case is interesting, but not as interesting as the Spellmans. The parents, Albert and Olivia, have raised an absolutely insane family, whose children spend as much time spying on each as they do hiding pieces of themselves, while mom and dad meddle incessantly. Deranged and duplicitous, they are still as endearing as they are maddening, and certainly follow their own star: "I could have asked Rae what she was up to, but that is not our way. Instead, I followed her." The Spellman Files is a zany and hilarious debut for Lisa Lutz.--Marilyn Dahl