David Shipley and Will Schwalbe seem to be the It Boys of publishing this week (not to mention the talk of the town) as they and their new book SEND get written up in USA Today, New York and now the Observer. Not bad at all for a little book on the etiquette of sending and receiving email (one that’s an entertaining refresher on common sense) though the attention is probably magnified by the authors’ respective day jobs: Shipley is the New York Times’ Op-Ed editor while Schwalbe is Hyperion‘s editor-in-chief.
So how did they write the book? Not in the way you think. “We wrote it side by side, his place and my place,” Shipley explained to the Observer’s Spencer Morgan. “Maybe because we’re both editors, there was less of a sense of ownership in terms of how you write, and maybe the speechwriting was helpful for me in that regard-because I wrote speeches for Clinton, and that’s more of a collaborative process than going off somewhere in the woods and writing. But it really was just weekends, early in the morning, late at night, just sitting side by side writing.”
And the media bubble is only beginning: SEND and its authors are slated to appear on Good Morning America, NPR, Amazon’s Fishbowl and much, much more. “We’ve arrived at a juncture in our civilization where there is a clear need for this book,” said Paul Bogaards, executive director of publicity at Knopf. “So people either need to master [e-mail], or they become its slave.”