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From a German manuscript, circa 1300

Next Saturday, September 29, is the feast of Michaelmas. The day commemorates the archangels Michael, Gabriel and Raphael and their victory in casting the dragon (that is, the Devil) out of Heaven. Some universities in the United Kingdom use Michaelmas as the name of the first school term, too.

Lucia's school holds a Michaelmas festival every year to welcome the arrival of Autumn. Grownups and older children press fresh apple cider, bake bread and cook hearty root vegetable soups. Outside, the school-yard hosts a number of different games with the theme of "defeating the dragon." Unless the weather is absolutely miserable, families and friends share picnic blankets and eat dinner together. Lucia is looking forward to wearing the new apple-print dress for Michaelmas that I made at her request.


The old apple dress (now too small in the bodice)

Lucia's teacher sent out an email this morning with a description of the Michaelmas festival in the Waldorf school tradition:

Michaelmas is an old European harvest festival that is celebrated in Waldorf schools around the Western World. The story behind the festival is, briefly, that a dragon wanders the earth, devastating life on earth. St. George, with the help of the Archangel Michael, defeats the dragon, bringing peace to the earth and its inhabitants. The dragon can be seen in the process of the earth (in most places including Seattle in most years) at this time of year when the crops are ripe and mostly harvested, the rains have not fallen for months, the earth is dried and scorched and it seems as though the rains and winter will never come again. In the past people had to wonder at this time if the crops still growing would be brought in before the rains fell, if what they harvested would last through the long winter- who would survive? Who would not? In addition to this, autumn is often the time when our own inner dragons, who have been slumbering away during the lazy and fun days of summer, rear their ugly heads again. It is with the courage and might of Michael that we conquer our own inner dragons that we may go into the solitude and slumber of the winter in tact and with a certain amount of inner peace.

I looked online for various ways in which to celebrate Michaelmas with food, and decided that while we wouldn't cook a goose this year, I could make something with blackberries (tradition has it that the Devil landed on blackberry brambles after he was kicked out of Heaven, thereby rendering the fruit inedible) and something akin to a St. Michael's bannock. I appreciate Michaelmas as the festival to mark the beginning of Autumn. I can tell that people are itching for some sort of celebration by the proliferation of Halloween candy that appeared right after Labor Day. If you are so inclined, I encourage you to create a Michaelmas party of your own. And yes, all you Oktoberfest fans, I'm sure beer as well as hard cider will be fitting beverages for the grownups.


Aster novi-belgii, a.k.a. Michaelmas daisies

This post was updated at 8:00 am.

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The Shock Doctrine, is a huge huge deal for us at Penguin Press, so whilst thinking of ways to get the message out as widely as possible in an interesting way, we had the idea of filming a web trailer - like a film trailer that we could put out online to offer people an intriguing glimpse into the book and (hopefully) inspire them to read it (we'd seen the More4 ads for The Bloody Circus series and were inspired to do something even better - check it out, it's amazing!).

So we thought we'd get some young hipster with a couple of music promos to their name, looking for something a bit more serious to put on their cv. Then a contact with big ideas suggested we go after some major league directors. It seemed like a crazy idea but we were feeling cocky. So we got ourselves a shortlist of people whose agents we could reach - Spike Jonze, Fernando Meirelles, Alfredo Inarritu, Michel Gondry and Alfonso Cuaron (award winning director of Y tu mama tambien, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and Children of Men).

To cut a very long and complicated story short, after much persuasion one of them agreed... It's been a demanding and exhausting five months (who knew the film world was even trickier to negotiate than the book world!) but we now have the most amazing film for the most amazing book. From today the film will be available online at the Guardian online, Penguin, and the Shock Doctrine.com site. Take a look, hope you like it.

So in April I met Naomi Klein. Five months later Alfonso Cuaron's new short film is premiering at the Venice and Toronto Film Festivals - a film that I commissioned. How on earth!?! P.S. Don't tell anyone that when I unexpectedly met Alfonso I squealed and blushed a fine shade of beetroot. Talented and cute!

Gina Luck, Penguin Press Senior Marketing Manager

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Beautiful weather last weekend provided the perfect backdrop to the innocent Village Fete at Regents Park. Both Penguin and Puffin were hosting tents, and Penguin's was merrily bedecked with the finest handmade bunting money can't buy, fashioned entirely by our own Jessie Price. Beanbags were positioned and deck-chairs carefully unfolded for the approaching masses, while Puffin parked up the Cathy Cassidy Friendship Festival campervan, complete with friendship bracelets and face-painting galore.

The MyPenguins went down a treat with visitors to the Penguin Classics Lounging Library, as cellophane wrappers were torn off in a frenzy and coloured pencils flew - keep them peeled for any submissions to the MyPenguin gallery from the weekend. A personal favourite was the vampire-flavoured be-caped Penguin, for Dracula. Festive.

A blagged ticket to the VNP area (Very Nice People) meant a delicious free feast - including paper cones of jelly and fresh cream, which even Gatsby never had at any of his bashes. Poor unfortunate ditched friends outside the highly-secure perimeter meanwhile had to suffer with only fresh pies, homemade juices and chunky chorizo rolls in the sunshine of the park.

The raffle at the end of Sunday's fete was pretty active - local library Reading Corner meets Supermarket Sweep. Feverish punters heaved fistfuls of novels and Penguin crockery into handbags and hessian village sacks, while nervous Penguin staff stood back and called out the occasional, "Enjoy the book!" While such pleasant weather continues - and even into our too-soon winter - I pass on the same message.

Sam the Junior Copywriter

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The rain in London was biblical. It bounced off the road in a desperate attempt to get back home. Outside Reading, where the traffic stretched past overflowing ditches, we considered the grim questions that accompanied a journey to this year’s Port Eliot festival. How much mud does it take to cover an entire human body? Can a human being drown in a tent? Is there a way to simulate ‘fun’ while soaked to the bone, chattering, and listening to performance poetry? But weather moves differently through the skies of Cornwall and the patterns that wracked the rest of the country inverted themselves over Eliot. Torrential downpour became sunlight. Global warming became warmth.

Year after year Port Eliot has provided valuable lessons to us and not just from the readings of assembled authors. This year we found that sometimes dancing on a sloping earth floor actually improves our moves, particularly ones needed for old, scratchy rock and roll vinyl. Sometimes being able to half-listen to a reading while getting drunk on cider actually improves our ability to grasp the message. Sometimes it’s fine to close your eyes while listening to an author. It’s fine to fall asleep, and fine, as was the case with one elderly man, to slowly slide off the chair until caught at the last moment and brought back to consciousness, sputtering and wild-eyed, grasping the Port Eliot programme tightly in one hand. At Port Eliot one can muck about with words. One can subsist solely on mushroom burgers. One can roll down hills without getting too many grass stains, although it’s hard to get up afterwards without looking stoned or childish or both. When the sun was shining at Port Eliot even drumming circles make sense. For the first forty-five minutes.

Nights were the best. The skies were clear and star-lit. Down by the estuary sat a line of gnomish huts called Pod-Pads. If you were lucky enough to stay in one you could swing open the gnome-sized door and get a view of Brunel’s viaduct stretching across the water, ashen and grey and imposing in the moonlight, occasionally rattled by a train. On Saturday, in front of one of these huts, a Port Eliot musician lay flat on his back all night, snoring softly, unafraid of anything worse than the prospect of morning dew. There was rain one morning, but its heart wasn’t in it.

There were author cancellations, of course, and stories from London of rising water levels, looting, zombies, and Hanif Kureishi lost at Paddington Station. At the festival, a statue of a giant rat’s head watched over the proceedings from the hill overlooking the great house. In one tent an earnest Canadian retold the Canterbury Tales over a loping hip-hop beat. Later, signing copies in the bookshop, he fended off questions from an anoraked crowd of Chaucerians who took exception to his use of the word ‘Bee-yach’. Author Andrew Davis drew tattoos on the biceps and thighs of the crowd in his tattoo parlour, although it looked like he might just be colouring in what his partner Alexander Masters had sketched out. Everywhere ukuleles were strummed. Why are writers drawn to the uke? Is it the halfway point from non-musicianship to professional? Is it a novelty instrument? An overgrown stringed pencil? It seemed suited to the surroundings – sunny and unexpected – but we also wanted writers playing tubas and French horns. We wanted Rosie Boycott on trombone and Richard Milward on piccolo.

On the ride home our car passed six hundred and twenty Little Chef restaurants on the B roads. We decided against the family size box of Cornish fudge at the service stations. We were suffering from cider fatigue, dancing fatigue, tent peg fatigue but none of that nastier type brought on by days of dampness. Our boots weren’t muddy. Our tents weren’t muddy. And then, back in London, a return to the welcoming grey skies.

Craig Taylor, Hamish Hamilton Editorial Assistant

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I had first learned about Shelf Awareness and Author Buzz when a reader brought it to my attention in early 2006. I’d already been a fan of MJ Rose’s blog Buzz, Balls & Hype (even guest blogging on it in early March the same year) for some time, but had not put together the very obvious clues that she was also responsible for Author Buzz and other marketing tools to help authors reach a wide selection of booksellers, librarians and book clubs.

Around September, Ms. Rose asked if I would like to be part of an informal focus group of booksellers for her novel The Reincarnationist. Due to time constraints I was unable to follow up on the project, but the idea of book focus groups seemed so perfect for the publishing world that it stayed in the back of mind. Last month I contacted Ms. Rose to find out how the focus groups had gone, only to discover that she was now involved with putting together Thrillerfest as well as marketing class for authors to be taught at the event. Never one to miss an opportunity to pester someone about marketing, I shot off an email full of questions on all things Thrillerfest, marketing, focus groups, and why authors need to get their names out there in an efficient manner.

The following interview resulted from that email exchange.

Linsey (aka Bookseller Chick): You're involved with the Thrillerfest (July 12th-15th in Manhattan) along with James Patterson, Lisa Gardner, Clive Cussler, James Rollins and others, which is billed as "a four-day annual celebration of the fiction world's most popular genre." How are you involved?

MJ Rose: I'm on the board of ITW as well as being a founding member. I became involved after the first meeting in the fall of 2004 --excited at the idea of an organization whose goals including building readership. Strangely enough, we're the only writer's organization that has that goal.

Linsey: What makes it fictions most popular genre? What is it about the Thriller that appeals to readers world wide?

MJ: Since the beginning of storytelling, "then what happens" has been what’s kept people transfixed and that's the essence of our genre.

Linsey: What opportunities does Thrillerfest offer readers? Writers?

MJ: We're not an organization that helps writers get published , find agents or get legal advice. Those orgs already existed.

We are here to celebrate the genre. To get more attention via innovative and creative ways for our authors and their books with the press and with readers.

We're the first writers' organization that has a reader's newsletter. And we set up our convention, ThrillerFest, to bring readers and writers together with more than 85% of the panels aimed at readers. Our anthology, Thriller, is one of the best selling anthologies ever published and had met its goal of getting an enormous amount of attention for our authors. Our big name authors wind up introducing readers to our not yet big name authors. Its a great example of the generosity of our membership. And there's lots more to come.

Linsey: Your class at Craftfest (the writer orientated portion of Thrillerfest) is a bonus session focused on creating book buzz--your area of expertise--will you be focusing on internet buzz, reaching booksellers, reaching readers or all of the above?

MJ: All of the above.

Linsey: How can one go about defining the audience they are trying to reach with their book and then reaching them?

MJ: This is really complicated and part of the problem our industry is facing since publishers don’t do much research and don’t know a lot about our users – in other words - readers. It’s not an industry that spends as much time innovating as it does producing and in this overcrowded marketplace, that’s a problem for everyone, including every one of us.

I think if you are a writer you need to read a lot - both in your category and out of it and evaluate your work in light of what you read. That will help you get a sense of how to identify your own work.

Then your main goal should to identify the niche markets your book can reach, find them, and then connect to them, get to know them and help them to get to know you.

You can sell a lot of books by starting with identifiable groups and working outwards.

It doesn't help to say my book is for all readers everywhere. There's no way to reach them with a limited budget. But if you can say my book is for women who love mysteries and like to knit ... then we're getting somewhere. Or my book is for athletic men who like to scuba dive.

Knowing the niches you can start searching out listservs, blogs, sites, newspapers, magazines, venues where your target audience lives.

Linsey: How does Author Buzz--your marketing service--help simplify this process?

MJ: It's enormously time intensive to market your own book. It can take months and months of work. I found that I was teaching authors how to do it in my online class only to discover they'd come up with great ideas of how to market their books but when it came time to do the work, they didn't want to execute their plans.

And rightly so, we're writers. We want to write the next book! If we wanted to be marketers we'd be in advertising. (I know since I left advertising to be a novelist only to discover I had to stay in advertising to stay alive as a writer.)

I saw so much of this problem, and lived it myself, that I though up the idea of a one stop marketing solution for authors. Buy the program and reach readers and leaders of 7500 bookclubs, over 350,000 readers, 10,000 librarians and 3000 booksellers. Add another one of the programs and do a book blog tour or run ads on the top 1o blogs that cater to your audience.

It's four hours at the most of the author's time instead of four moths. So we can do what we wanted to do all along - write.

Linsey: For your book, The Reincarnationist, you used a focus group of booksellers. Why? What information did that group provide and would you do it in the future?

MJ: Back when I was in advertising I did a lot of focus groups and found that if used correctly the information was invaluable.

Objectivity is hard to come by for authors, editors, agents. Yes, there's expertise and it counts for a lot, but my agent and editor and I had all read my book three or four times each and I wanted to know what booksellers were going to say. What the overall impression of the book was going to be. I wanted to know early on, if the book met the goals I set for it.

I didn't do formal focus groups-though I would have loved to - the cost would have been prohibitive. But I did manage to get enough booksellers to read the book that I was able to get an early read on the manuscript that did provide the information I was hoping it would.

Not only would I do it again, I'd do it bigger.

I don't why people in our industry are so afraid of the words marketing or focus groups or research.

I wouldn't ask a group to tell me how to end a book or to judge a concept before it was written, but to take a finished book or a finished cover to a group of readers and/or booksellers and find out it the book meets your expectations -- why not? After all, you don't have to listen to what the group says.

Linsey: And since this is a bookselling blog, what thriller novels should readers check out right now?


MJ: I'm going on vacation and taking Lee Child's Bad Luck and Trouble & Barry Eisler's Requiem for an Assassin.

Thank you so much, MJ, for taking the time out of your busy schedule to talk with us today.

For your enjoyment--and because I'm strangely addicted to book trailers--here's the festival trailer for Thrillerfest. If you have any questions for MJ that you would like for me to follow up with her, please leave them in the comments section below or email them to me at the Bookseller Chick email address in the side bar.

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This weekend, Meghan McCarron and I went to the Juniper Festival in Amherst, Massachusetts to see Alan DeNiro read, and to hang out with him, Gavin Grant and Kelly Link of Small Beer Press, and Holly and Theo Black. Alan read from "Home of The" from Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead, and the audience was amused and enthusiastic, as was only proper.

There was even cotton candy. More readings need cotton candy.

The Juniper Festival is not something I was aware of before we visited, but it's a great event, and next year if I'm in the area, I hope to attend more of the readings and panel discussions, because Amherst is fun town and the mix of writers and readers is eclectic. (And Amherst Books is a marvelous bookstore!)

Lucy Corin particularly grabbed my attention with her reading from Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls, a novel I now hope to read very soon. (Yes, I know I say that about a lot of books. And I mean it. I'm full of hope. Especially after being in Amherst, the hometown of Emily Dickinson, who knew that hope is a thing with feathers. Which means it flies around and squawks a lot.)

Among the poets, Timothy Donnelly was, I thought, a standout. He read with a nervous energy that gave his poems a vibrancy some others lacked. (Or so it seemed to me. But I'm slowly coming to realize that I don't like most poetry readings. Or fiction readings, for that matter. I'm too attached to the page, to the shape of words as visual objects -- a strange fact, since I have almost no visual imagination. I tend to lose track of stories when I hear them read, and so fix on the author's voice or tone, their rhythm, their tics. I liked hearing "Home of The" because the story works well in Alan's speaking voice, and I liked both Lucy Corin and Timothy Donnelly because their reading styles were lively and seemed appropriate to what they read. I've often gone to readings by writers whose work I admire and have ended up deeply disappointed, even disillusioned, because how they read seemed to remove all the life and music and marvels from their words. Conversely, I've encountered writers whose work I don't really like very much on the page, but whose reading style is so engaging I would happily listen to them for hours -- I am as grateful to them as I am to great actors in plays whose scripts I don't care for, because a reading is a kind of performance, and in performance what matters most is what is present, not the architecture bringing the present into existence [that is for a different sort of consideration].)

Paul Fattaruso was at the festival, but I didn't get a chance to meet him, which was a shame, because I like his first novel, Travel in the Mouth of the Wolf, quite a bit.

Some of the most fun we had was not at the festival, though, but rather involved just sitting around, eating fine barbecued food prepared by Theo and Holly, talking about various and sundry things, searching in vain for a goth-pop song from the '80s Kelly was trying to identify, touring the magnificent Black homestead, and making a film about Alan DeNiro. Yes, a film. (Be grateful that I declined the role of the naked person running around in the background. That role has yet to be cast. For details, contact Gavin.)

And now for a quick couple of recommendations that have nothing to do with anything in particular: If you like literature in translation, don't miss the Reading the World festival. Also, if you like weird and whimsical wonders, be sure to check out Gionale Nuovo's post about Xul Solar before you end your internet peregrinations for the day.

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The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books is this weekend, April 28-29, 2007. I look forward to this festival every year and usually go both days. It's a great place to meet up with old friends, meet authors, get your books signed, buy books, hang out and just have fun.

This year I'll be there all day Saturday and am really excited about it. Sunday I'll be there from opening till about 3pm and I'll have the grandkids along so I'm betting I'll be in the storytelling area a lot with the exception of swinging by to meet one of my literary idols Paco Taibo III and buy his new book on Pancho Villa.

If any of you authors, publishers, publicity people are interested in saying hello, shoot me an email and I'll make the time to swing by your booth, panels or maybe we can grab a coffee. Hope to see you all there!

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