Another Great Failures Mention

The American Association of School Administrators mentioned Great Failures of the Extremely Successful in their February 8, 2004 newsletter. One of the book's contributors, Joe Batory, was a superintendent of schools in the Philadelphia area. His entry is quite an inspiration to anyone in involved in education, but no, I'm not going to tell you why. Buy the book!

As you can probably guess, today is my Gathering Our Internet Press Tidbits Day. There are a lot of stray mentions of our books that we'd never know about if we didn't take the time to do this. Eventually I'll link to them all in the sidebar.

"Great Failures" Gets Mentioned in the Chicago Sun-Times!

It's not a review, but it's a nice little mention, anyway. Dated October 8.

Friedl Exhibit Gets a New Yorker Writeup

From the 10/25/04 issue, Goings on in Art:

JEWISH MUSEUM
Fifth Ave. at 92nd St. (212-423-3200)—Amid the terrors and deprivations of the Terezin concentration camp, children were given lessons in art, where they were taught to draw with bold, expressive shapes and synesthetic color choices. The teacher was their fellow-prisoner Friedl Dicker-Brandeis: a student of Johannes Itten and Paul Klee at the Bauhaus, then a designer and painter in Vienna and Berlin, she produced textiles, furniture, costumes, and stage sets, as well as tender, incisive portraits of her intimates. Examples of all are on view, as are some of the five thousand children’s drawings Dicker-Brandeis hid in her suitcases, discovered after she was killed, in 1944. Reflecting intensive original research, “Innovator, Activist, Healer: The Art of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis” is crushingly sad, of course. But you walk out with colors singing in your head. Through Jan. 16. (Open Sundays through Wednesdays, 11 to 5:45; Thursdays, 11 to 8; and Fridays, 11 to 3.)

Here's the link.

I don't know if a blurb like this will sell books, but it certainly makes me wish I were living in New York. There's always something interesting going on!

A site called Yoga Oasis agreed to do a reciprocal link to Painted Prayers in exchange for a link on our site, so I'm adding a Links section to the sidebar.

Here's a description of their retreat center:

Yoga Oasis, in Hawaii:  We offer accommodations,  yoga retreats, daily yoga classes, eco adventure tours, massage, lomi-lomi massage courses, vegetarian cooking classes, raw food retreats, watsu workshops, group rates, and more.

Hal's talk at Vidiots went really well, in spite of the AIDS walk, the Red Sox/Yankees playoff game and the light drizzle that so intimidates 95% of Angelenos. About 30 people showed up, and we old 8 books, which is about a 30% sales rate. His guests, screenwriters Scott Kosar and Dave Johnson, were articulate, funny speakers who had a slew of positive things to say about the UCLA writers program in general and Hal in particular. And I learned some new things myself -- always the mark of a good event.

Claudia took some video, and if we can figure out how to upload it, it'll make its way on here eventually.

Reminders

Tonight is the book party for 10 Minutes to the Audition. In addition, I want to remind folks that Sunday at 5:00, Hal Ackerman will be at Vidiots, talking about screenwriting with screenwriter Scott Kosar, a former student and a master of the macabre. (He writes other things, but is having a pretty stunning run in the horror genre these days.)

So if you're looking for an intellectually stimulating event to get you ready for Halloween, this is it! Come in costume if you wish.

Friedl Dicker-Brandeis and the Challenges of Book Publicity

Hi folks.

One of the things I've been working on lately is trying to get more art historians, women's studies professors and museum book shops to know about our book FRIEDL, about a Bauhaus artist and teacher who died in a concentration camp during the Holocaust. The book is beautiful, and beyond that, it's the only one of its kind on the subject -- so once people know about it, it should sell like crazy, at least in the academic world.

What I didn't know about was that Chapman University, earlier this year, ran a Holocaust essay contest in which FRIEDL was offered as one of the topics.

If I can find the time, I'd like to get more schools to do the same. This will require either a ton of phone calls or a very wide mailing. This is the great challenge of book publicity for a small press: lots of great ideas, but a very small budget, and a lot of questions, primarily "how"?

One good place to start, I've found, is trade or web publications. What you need to do is say:

a) What is my intended audience?

and then

b) What is their common denominator? What do they all read?

If you can get an article or advertisement in a publication that 1,000 high school teachers read, then you don't have to send a blind mailing to $1,000 high school teachers. Not to mention the fact that your audience respects its trusty publication or information source. If it sees your product mentioned there, it will take notice.

I've tried this approach a couple times, but it's too early to see if it's worked.

A variation on this line of thinking is to buy an affordable ad in a special issue that will be heavily marketed. We recently excerpted material in a timely publication that sent press releases to national media. The banner ad cost us very little, but time it would have taken us to publicize a back list book on a national scale would have cost us at least three times as much. The idea is to think of clever ways to get the same exposure while minimizing the financial risk. At the end of the day, for a small amount of money we became part of someone else's P.R. blitz, saving ourselves a lot of time and money.

I try to think this way about every book. I think right now, FRIEDL is the one best positioned to succeed, especially since the Jewish Museum of New York has devoted an exhibit to her. It's my opinion that the next step in Friedl's travels should be a woman's college like Smith or Wellesley, or an art college with a program in art therapy. Hopefully a web savvy curator will stumble upon this post while I'm working on something else, and the wheels will be set in motion. That's the great thing about the internet. Say something, forget about it, and reap the rewards months down the line.

To order FRIEDL books or to discuss ideas on how to publicize the book, call (310) 203-3837.

Pedestal Magazine's Political Issue

Hey folks -- please check out Pedestal Magazine's Political Issue. It's a non-partisan anthology of over 750 political cartoons, non-fiction essays, short stories and poems centering on politics and related issues.

Our book We'll Never Be Young Again plays a major role. We've taken out a banner ad and excerpted John Kerry's letter, a remembrance of how Kennedy's emphasis on the Peace Corps and other forms of public service influenced him to become a volunteer.

We're really excited about this and hope it gets the attention it deserves. The editor has assembled a massive amount of material that I look forward to reading myself.