It’s been a good summer for Liz Hartman: After years of working as a freelance editor for Publishers Weekly on projects like the daily BookExpo America newsletter (where, I should disclose, she assigned me three short articles last year), Hartman was hired by Black Dog & Leventhal as the marketing and publicity manager. And, three years after its initial publication, The Smart Girl’s Guide to Sports, a playful introduction to the fundamentals of several popular spectator sports, from football to soccer, is finally coming out in paperback. “I’m doing radio interviews from my desk in the morning,” she told me last week; at least the will he-won’t he speculation over Bret Favre’s future gave her something to talk about. (That and “the hostile woman in Boston who thought ‘smart girls’ was somehow derogatory.”)
“As crazy as it is, I love the publishing business,” Hartman added; in her first run at book publishing, she had risen to the role of publicity director at Pocket Books. “Working at PW the last few years made me miss it terribly, and I really wanted to come back… It’s like a giant dysfunctional family you love and hate at the same time. When you’re not with them, you miss them,” she smiled, then emphasized that she really was grateful to be back in an industry with ‘so many smart, quirky, interesting people.” And she’s excited about her upcoming BD&L projects, like November’s tribute to the front page of the New York Times. (The oversized 456-page illustrated book comes with a set of three DVDs with digital copies of every Times front page since 1851—linked to the paper’s online archives.)