Who will be the first book publisher to take advantage of the Katrina tragedy to beef up this year’s budget with a quickie title? We’d bet someone out there already is.** (“But we’re donating a portion of the proceeds to the Red Cross!” we can almost see you sputtering.)
Any tips? Send to galleycatATmediabistroDOTcom.
** Years of practiced misanthropy have conditioned us to think the worst.
UPDATE: Simon & Schuster gets the prize! Sort of. Halfway.
From the Guardian:
NEW YORK (AP) – A book about a deadly 1927 flood along the Mississippi River has become an online best-seller since Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast…”Rising Tide” was published by Simon & Schuster in hardcover in 1997 and in paperback in 1998. The publisher began to see increased demand for the title on Tuesday and Wednesday, said Simon & Schuster spokesman Adam Rothberg. “Rising Tide,” which had 150,000 copies in circulation, is going back to press to print an additional 10,000 paperback copies, Rothberg said.
UPDATE TO THE UPDATE: Soft Skull’s Richard Nash writes in:
This is something Soft Skull is going to try to do really quickly, making it a “quickie,” but it’s just a benefit. I don’t know if you saw a big feature in PW about two months ago about a New Orleans book/writing project called the Neighborhood Story Project. A guy named Abram Himelstein taught writing in an inner-city school in New Orleans, of which came several students who wrote 80-120pp book-length stories about their block.
He had already done a 1K print run of each of the five books, which were selling really well down in NOLA.
Their entire inventory has been destroyed in the hurricane. We are working on reprinting the books and crashing them into the trade market as a benefit for the Project as well as to provide Americans with the direct voices of the young poor black kids of New Orleans. We’re in the middle of finding a printer to reprint for free, and then we’re going to crash all five books into stores immediately. As quickly as the system will let us.
Check out [this] for a story about the books, the authors, etc… Also, If you go to NeighborhoodStoryProject.org you’ll see some info, and there’s more here:
http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA530138.html
http://www.bookslut.com/features/2004_05_002066.php
http://blogs.chron.com/exile/
This latter item is because the co-director of the project is blogging on on the Houston Chronicle website:
Here’s what he knows so far from the writers of the books:
“On Thursday we finally heard from students. Arlet and Sam Wylie, the teenage authors of Between Piety and Desire (named for Ninth Ward streets)—they’re in Shreveport. Ashley Nelson, author of The Combination, finally got through to our mostly dysfunctional cell phones. She’s in Baton Rouge, in shock: “I can’t even tell you what happened to us in that water.”
Also, the money raised will be used as follows: “The NSP will spend the next 4 months working with refugee high school students to document the stories of people living in the Astrodome.”