| NEWSLETTERS
ENC
PRESS NEWSLETTER
FALL 2005
Welcome to the latest
news from ENC Press. As you’ll see below,
we’ve some new releases of the kind that leave
mainstream editors dumbfounded, one of which has
struck a chord with some fed-up parents. We’ve
also been growing the infrastructure for a readers’
and writers’ online community at the ENC
Forum, and expanding our presence in the wired
world in general. In this newsletter:
* THE
AMADEUS NET RELEASED, REVIEWED
* ExecTV
RELEASED
* JUNK RELEASED,
NAMED PARENTS ENDING PROHIBITION’S BOOK OF
THE MONTH
* ENC PRESS AT CHICAGO
BOOK FAIR AND HOBOKEN ARTS FESTIVAL
* OLGA GARDNER GALVIN,
CHRISTOPHER LARGEN PODCAST INTERVIEWS
* MAINSTREAM PUBLISHING
DIGS ITSELF A DEEPER HOLE
THE
AMADEUS NET RELEASED,
REVIEWED
“With an imagination reminiscent
of Philip K. Dick, a satirical bent a la Tom Robbins,
and a sense of humour derived equally from episodes
of ‘The Goon Show’ and the literature
of Neal Stephenson, ‘The Amadeus Net’
is an offbeat and wonderfully droll exercise in
sustained amusement,” writes reviewer Corey
Redekop. Not bad company to be in! Mark A. Rayner’s
satirical exploration of art, love, and identity
at the end of the world features an immortal Mozart
and the sentient city he helped found.
As can be expected, a few complications
mar life Mozart’s utopian future city of Ipolis.
Creating and selling “lost” Mozart works
makes for a good living, but the world’s greatest
reporter knows he’s still alive and will stop
at nothing to expose him. The stakes are higher
than Mozart knows, because if the reporter finds
him, so will the spy planning to sell Mozart’s
DNA to the highest bidder. Oh, and, by the way,
the world might end in seven days. His only allies
are a psychotic American artist, a bland Canadian
diplomat, and the city itself: a sapient, thinking
machine that is screwing up as only a sapient, thinking
machine can.
Does this sound like wacky, satire-laden
ENC Press fun? You bet it does! So much so that
we were contacted by the Philip K. Dick Award Committee
with a request to send review copies to its judges,
because, in the view of the committee, The Amadeus
Net might be just what they are looking for:
an original paperback that helps define today’s
science fiction.
And we’re offering not only
our usual direct-from-the-publisher discount, but
a 15% off package deal on The Amadeus Net
and We together. See http://www.encpress.com/AN.html.
The Amadeus Net is also available at Symposia
Bookstore in Hoboken, New Jersey, and The Bookstore
at Western University Community Center in London,
Ontario.
ExecTV
RELEASED
Take one serial killer, a lawyer
who believes said killer has a right to choose his
method of execution, a reality TV programming director
who’d love the ratings a live execution could
garner, and an unemployed documentary filmmaker
for whom creating such a show could mean exposing
the mediocrity of television addicts. Throw them
together, add pro- and anti-death penalty protestors
and opportunistic politicians (however redundant
that may be), and you’ve got David Brensilver’s
ExecTV, reality television taken to its
absurd extreme. Consistent with ENC Press practice,
activists of all persuasions with axes to grind
were indeed deeply hurt in the publishing of this
novel.
If the Vatican thought Harry
Potter was bad, wait till they get a load of
ExecTV (it has plot lines featuring a Catholic
priest and a former altar boy)! Compared to ExecTV,
Harry Potter series is just a bunch of
children’s books about magic.
Not only do we have our usual direct
discount on Exec TV, we have a lovely 15%
off discount package of Exec TV and Devil
Jazz; see http://www.encpress.com/TV.html.
ExecTV is available at Symposia Bookstore
in Hoboken, New Jersey, and The Turning Page bookstore
in Old Lyme, Connecticut.
JUNK
RELEASED, NAMED PARENTS ENDING PROHIBITION’S
BOOK OF THE MONTH
Tom Lehrer once said he stopped
writing satirical songs because of the difficulty
writing satire in a world in which Henry Kissinger
can win a Nobel Peace Prize. Here at ENC Press,
we’re managing to stay ahead of the satirical
reality curve, even if we stop now and then to get
within taunting distance with a novel like Christopher
Largen’s Junk.
Junk takes the all-too-real
concept of prohibitionists attempting to stamp out
fast food and other “bad for you” taste
treats and gives them the (fictional) power to wage
the equivalent of the War on Drugs. Military forces
are dispatched to Africa to destroy chocolate-producing
cocoa fields. To discourage street gangs, like the
Ice Cream Crew and the Hot Dog Homeboys, officials
post Neighborhood Weight-Watch signs in suburbs
across the nation. Legitimate bakers turn into black
marketeers, as “food abuse” counselors
take up guns on their “mission from God.”
We just hope Junk doesn’t give Rob
Reiner ideas.
As for keeping satire ahead of
reality ... Junk is peppered with poignant
“mockuments” from the War on Junk Food,
including court records, news articles, and letters
from prison — all culled from actual drug-war
headlines and documents.
Parents Ending Prohibition have
seen the connection, and have named Junk
their Book
of the Month for October 2005. Dr. James Quinn,
Professor of Addictions and Criminology, University
of North Texas, calls Junk a “tragicomedy
for thinking people. No partisan camp is immune
from Largen’s wit and wisdom, and he takes
no prisoners.” Junk has also won
praise from Brad Edmonds, author of There’s
a Government in Your Soup, and Joe Camp, writer,
producer, and director of the Benji films.
Christopher Largen lives in Denton,
Texas, and carries on at http://www.waronjunk.com/.
A 15% off discount package for
Junk? Of course! With our other nutrition-issues
satire, Mother’s Milk. See http://www.encpress.com/JUNK.html.
ENC PRESS
SIGHTINGS AT CHICAGO BOOK FAIR, HOBOKEN FESTIVAL
ENC Press’s Michael Antman
(Cherry Whip) was
one of the authors who took part in the Chicago’s
annual Printers Row Book Fair on the first weekend
in June, where he promptly got lost amidst the 80,000
people in attendance and some of the most prominent
and trendy authors of our time, such as Oprah’s
personal chef, Art Smith. Sheer probability theory
resulted in some people of an actual literary bent
stopping by his table and inquiring about ENC Press
books ... and also buying quite a few.
In late July, Michael received
a much warmer welcome — including questions
from someone who had already read Cherry Whip
and enjoyed it enough to show up and get some author’s
insights — at the new South Halsted location
of Barbara’s
Bookstor, the Chicago area’s (that’s
“Chicagoland” to the locals) largest
independent bookstore chain. Michael says, “Everyone
laughed in the right places” and stuck around
to discuss the book with him, even when his supply
of Cherry Whip chocolates ran out. Michael is planning
readings at Mitchells Books in Ft. Wayne and an
independent bookstore to be named later in New York
City.
On the last weekend of September,
four ENC Press authors — David Brensilver
(ExecTV), Justin
Bryant (Season of Ash),
Andrew Breslin (Mother’s
Milk), and Olga Gardner Galvin (The
Alphabet Challenge) — set up a table
at the Hoboken Fall Arts & Music Festival, right
next to that of our friends at Symposia Bookstore.
The gang sold and autographed a number of books.
Andy Breslin attributes some of the traffic to the
naked woman on the cover of Vodka
for Breakfast and the cow on Mother’s
Milk, because “people are drawn to women
and cows.” Whatever the dynamics, a number
of people with no prior awareness of ENC Press left
with copies of our various novels.
There’s a more detailed (but
decidedly tongue-in-cheek) report on the ENC Press
Events topic at the ENC
Forum page.
OLGA
GARDNER GALVIN, CHRISTOPHER LARGEN PODCAST INTERVIEWS
Leave it to the utterly cool Paula
Berinstein, Publishing Trends columnist for Searcher
magazine, to come up with weekly podcasts on aspects
of publishing, and the craft and business of writing.
Our Minister of Propaganda met her when Paula was
writing Making Space Happen, as Her Spinness
was then the communications poobah for a commercial
lunar mission start-up that had caught Paula’s
interest. “Paula B” is now the brains
behind The
Writing Show, and she has podcasts up of interviews
with two ENC Press people. There’s a two-part
interview with Publisher Olga Gardner Galvin,
as well as her article “A Few Lessons Learned
from Publishing in America,” and an
interview with Junk author Christopher
Largen, “Writing Satire.”
Even if The Writing Show is too
much on the “shop talk” side for you,
we think you’ll enjoy these two interviews.
MAINSTREAM
PUBLISHING DIGS ITSELF A DEEPER HOLE
It’s come to this: Publishers
and authors’ reps held a kind of summit meeting
at a secret location in London in September to strategize
on blocking a merger of the U.K.’s two largest
booksellers, and one of them actually said, “It
is inherently dangerous that so few people will
control so much power over what we read.”
As opposed to … those few
people being on the editorial boards of the big
publishing houses?
The threat is Waterstone’s,
with 17 percent of the market, buying Ottakar’s,
with 6 percent of the market, for 96.4 million pounds.
According to the Daily
Telegraph, this would keep Waterstone’s
shy of the tripwire for an investigation by the
“Competition Commission” (a bureaucracy
name that actually trips lightly off the tongue).
Nonetheless, Waterstone’s would have “a
dangerously high share in certain subject areas,
such as literary fiction.”
The chain plans to institute a
central buying scheme in which the head office rather
than individual stores choose titles for sale, having
already lost a reputation for “a marvelously
broad and deep range.” We at ENC Press wonder
what the publishers decrying the loss of that reputation
consider “marvelously broad and deep,”
because so many publishers have long ago assumed
the position, er, arranged their lists to be compatible
with mass marketing practices.
Waterstone’s head office
uses a computer program to “grade” books
as A, B or ungraded, with stores being required
to carry at least one copy of each “A graded”
book, while it’s hit or miss whether books
in other “grades” will be or can be
ordered. Publishers say they have been forced —
forced! — to cater to this system by narrowing
their manuscript selection practices in order to
please a small corps of best seller-oriented buyers.
A practice that would differ from
current standards … precisely how?
Moreover, Waterstone’s is
a pay-for-play operation that demands “payola”
and deep discounts for window or front-table placement.
Read it and weep.
This is what ENC Press is an alternative
to. Now, one would think there’s a wide-open
market niche for an indy bookstore to exploit by
creating a portal Web site not only for books it
sells but for publishers who, as we do, market online
(with arrangements for payment for clickthroughs
to sales). Powells Books in Portland comes closest,
but its site and newsletter are for its store alone
and are not a portal. Then there’s the problem
of all the indies that are owned by people with
a very narrow sociopolitical point of view …
one that gets in the way of their best capitalist
instincts.
Is this the darkness before the
dawn, or are we just convinced there has to be a
pony here somewhere?
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to top
ENC
PRESS NEWSLETTER
SPRING 2005
Welcome to the latest
news from ENC Press!
In this newsletter:
* MOTHER’S
MILK RELEASED
* MOON BEAVER READING/SIGNING
AT SYMPOSIA BOOKSTORE
* ENC PRESS REOPENS FOR SUBMISSIONS
* LIFE IMITATES ENC PRESS: RANDOM
HOUSE PONDERS DIRECT E-SALES
* THE AMADEUS NET UP NEXT
MOTHER’S
MILK RELEASED
First, it’s the Transamerica Pyramid affixed
with an Eye of Horus, on the cover of Don’t
Call It “Virtual”, now it’s
the Washington Monument sporting a (sacred?) cow,
on the cover of Mother’s
Milk. What’s with the ENC Press graphics
design department? Simple artistic appropriation
of tall pointy buildings, or something more Freudian?
Perhaps it’s just a matter of having been
put in an Illuminati Trilogy–type “moo’d”
by the premise of Andrew Thomas Breslin’s
Mother’s Milk: A secret global conspiracy
orchestrated by the dairy industry, itself a puppet
of alien masters from a distant planet orbiting
the star Vega, has been slipping us mind-controlling
substances in the milk we get from cows, which were
brought to Earth long ago by Vegans (the outer-space
type). They’re opposed by the radicals of
the True Foods Project. A lactose-loving skeptic
gets sucked into the resistance movement when a
colleague of hers, who figures out how to spill
the beans (soy or otherwise), is captured by the
“milk thugs.” To rescue him (and the
human race), our skeptic must ally with a diverse
crew of barking moonbats.
Were we into marketing individual books the Hollywood
way, as in “It’s X meets Y,” we
might say Mother’s Milk was Animal
Farm meets Mars Attacks. Instead,
we’ll point out its amazingly erudite slapstick—doubly
politically incorrect for Andrew’s pointing
out Latin and Greek roots for words relevant to
the plot, quoting the likes of Cervantes and Martin
Luther in chapter epigraphs, and committing other
antisocial acts of citing Dead White European Males.
Mother’s Milk certainly holds up
the “intelligent” end of ENC Press’s
meme of “intelligent alternative to limited
editorial decisions,” and it’s available
now at our online price of US$16.
Mother’s Milk author, Andrew Thomas
Breslin, has no beef (as it were) with veganism.
He can be a very persuasive advocate of swapping
out cow’s milk for soy milk . . . and is,
obviously, someone with an equal interest in slapping
down smarmy activists, Big Business, and the government.
(He’s equally disgusted with all sides, which
endeared him to us!) He never intended to become
a novelist. With his interest in math, medicine,
history, experimental neuropharmacology, biology,
physics, linguistics, mythology, chemistry, and
the like, he never imagined himself writing fiction.
Then he found out writing fiction didn’t take
hard-earned credentials, just the sacrifice of any
lingering traces of sanity, and by the time he figured
that out, there wasn’t much left anyway.
Read more about Mother’s Milk and
Andrew at http://www.encpress.com/MM.html
and links on that page.
MOON
BEAVER READING/SIGNING
AT SYMPOSIA
Sylvia Beach moved from New Jersey to Paris to open
Shakespeare and Company, the famous bookstore and
literary salon. Shakespeare and Company became the
favorite rendezvous of the Lost Generation: Hemingway,
Fitzgerald, and others. And Sylvia was just warming
up. She made further history by publishing James
Joyce’s Ulysses under her own store
imprint.
But today, there’s no need
to move to Paris to sit in on a hot literary scene.
ENC Press has teamed up with the
independent Symposia
Bookstore in Hoboken, New Jersey, to offer readings
and book signings by visiting ENC authors, and a
free monthly writers’ workshop taught by ENC
publisher Olga Gardner Galvin. Symposia carries
all ENC Press titles and manages to survive in a
town where Barnes & Noble has driven out two
small indie bookstores.
The ENC-Symposia readings series kicked off in February
with Moon Beaver, when author Andrew Hook visited,
and we
have pictures to prove it. It gathered an attentive
crowd, the Q&A session provoked many interesting
Qs and As, and so, in the spirit of Sylvia, we anticipate
many more evenings of good books and good company.
ENC PRESS REOPENS FOR
SUBMISSIONS
No longer able to contain our curiosity about what
other excellent, original works of maverick minds
may be out there, falling through the cracks of
the category-crazy big publishing acquisition machines,
we are, once again, open to submissions of witty,
perceptive, irreverent books that contain elements
of social and political satire or commentary, offer
unusual insights into foreign cultures, have a strong
element of humor, and tip a few sacred cows along
the way.
Please spread the word and refer to our Submissions
page for guidelines.
LIFE IMITATES
ENC PRESS
... a continuing series. Yet another major mainstream
publisher has announced it is exploring doing what
ENC Press does, namely sell its books directly to
consumers through its Web site. Well, Random House
didn’t mention us by name, though Barnes &
Noble is tempted to call Random House a number of
unsavory names, given that their partnership might
be turning into direct competition. Seeing as how
B&N has been trying to expand its own business
of publishing classics in public domain, and other
books, much to the chagrin of publishers, this could
get a little heated.
We’d sit back and mock but for the grim news
in reports of the exploratory plans, which appeared
in Random House CEO Peter Olson’s annual year-end
letter to North American employees. Both Random
House and B&N have had two years of flat growth.
Many of last year’s best sellers, including
The Da Vinci Code, The South Beach
Diet, and The Five People You Meet in Heaven,
were actually published in 2003. Meanwhile, the
average age of book “consumers” continues
to climb—suggesting reading for pleasure is
giving way to other leisure-time pursuits. And that’s
disturbing.
Of course, the traditional printing/marketing practices
may be contributing to this, as the selection of
reading material available commercially narrows
further and further. What we stand to gain at ENC
Press, of course, is a mainstreaming of the idea
that “real books,” as opposed to vanity
press–type offerings, are available directly
from publishers as a matter of course, and that
it doesn’t take the imprimatur of a big bookseller
for a book to be worth buying and reading. That’s
our idea of “diversity,” and we believe
it will popularize reading once again.
THE
AMADEUS NET UP NEXT
We’re now working on the spring release of
Mark A. Rayner’s Amadeus Net, in which Mozart
is alive and in love in the first sentient city,
Ipolis. More on this and other projects at our Coming
Soon page.
back
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ENC
PRESS NEWSLETTER
WINTER 2004
WELCOME TO OUR WINTER NEWSLETTER
Welcome to the latest
news from ENC Press. Since the last time we reported,
we’ve redesigned our Web site, made a couple
of new acquisitions, and released Exit
Only and Cherry
Whip! In this newsletter:
* REDESIGNED,
EASIER-TO-NAVIGATE WEB SITE
* FORUMS
* INTRODUCING MARKETING DIRECTOR GREG
ALEXANDER
* INTRODUCING EDITORIAL ADVISOR JUSTIN
BRYANT
* EXIT ONLY RELEASED
* CHERRY WHIP RELEASED
* NEW ACQUISITIONS: ExecTV
AND JUNK
* ZAMYATIN’S WE TAUGHT
AT BOWDOIN COLLEGE
* INDIE BOOKSTORE ALLIANCES
* BOOK CLUBS
* YOUR BLURB IN LIGHTS!
REDESIGNED, EASIER-TO-NAVIGATE
WEB SITE
Well, the graphics
were cute, but we’ve dumped our "splash
page" in favor of a navigation bar on the left-hand
side of the screen and graphic links to each of
our novels on the right-hand side. That means fewer
clicks to reach whatever you’re interested
in at the moment. And we do have some new things
of interest, as you can read below.
FORUMS
ENC Press welcomes
new members to its discussions of literature and
reading preferences, screen adaptations of novels,
and language-related pet peeves at www.encpress-forum.com.
INTRODUCING
MARKETING DIRECTOR GREG ALEXANDER
It will mostly be
ENC Press authors, as well as original ENC Press
partners in crime Olga and Beth, who interact with
our new marketing director, Greg Alexander, but
we want to give him props for his concepts for the
revamped Web site! Gregory is a veteran high-tech
marketing consultant and an avid reader of contemporary
American and British fiction. A graduate of the
University of Virginia where he majored in English
literature, he now makes his home in Wilmington,
Delaware, with his wife and two sons. When not consulting
clients or reading, Gregory enjoys ice skating and
amateur carpentry. Fun fact: in his early 20s, Greg
was named as an alternate for the U.S. Olympic track
and field team in the javelin throw!
INTRODUCING EDITORIAL ADVISOR
JUSTIN BRYANT
Since the day he submitted
his novel, Season
of Ash, for consideration, Justin Bryant
started volunteering opinions on how best to organize
the Web site, offering feedback on upcoming titles,
and, generally, handing out advice on an unpredictable
variety of subjects. This went on until his unsolicited
but absolutely sound contributions became indispensable,
and the publisher gradually accepted the fact that
nothing at ENC Press was going to get done without
Justin’s input. This finally earned him the
title of editorial advisor, because that’s
what he does anyway. He might as well do it in an
official capacity and get credit for it.
As the editorial advisor,
Justin Bryant will be helping to review new submissions
(when we resume accepting queries some time in 2005),
editing some of the new titles we acquire, managing
the forums, and advising, as usual, on life, the
universe, and everything.
EXIT
ONLY RELEASED
Liam Bracken’s
Exit Only is now
in print. Allegorical by nature and evolvement,
satiric and cynical by characterization, and rapid
by pacing, Exit Only is more than a suspense novel
set in an exotic locale of current interest. It’s
a brimming cauldron of humanity, stewing and bubbling
in the city of Osama Bin Laden’s education
in the decade of Al Qaeda’s rise to stardom.
This ex-pat’s eye view of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia,
weaves a suspenseful tale out of the ambitions and
frustrations of Westerners, Arabs, and Easterners,
all of them either on the make or struggling for
survival.
Here we have one of
the quandaries of the modern retail book <sigh>"industry"...</sigh>
What could be more timely than a novel providing
insight into actual Arab personalities and social
mores, written by someone who’s lived and
worked in Saudi Arabia with people from all over
the Muslim world? And yet (cue whiny, nasal editorial
voice here), "Nobody’s going to be interested
in a first novel set in Saudi Arabia." Just
intelligent independent thinkers with some curiosity
about the interesting times in which we live.
O tempora! O mores!
Oh, by the way ... list price is $21.50 ... but
for you, $18 via our Web site.
CHERRY
WHIP RELEASED
Michael Antman’s
Cherry Whip
has been released just in time for the Giftmas season.
This lovely, quirky, seriocomic literary novel about
the adventures and misadventures of a budding Japanese
jazz genius in New York City stands the concept
of "accidental tourist" on its head.
Densely populated with quirky characters, Cherry
Whip is a love letter to New York and to the
English language. It also shines a spotlight on
one fairly peculiar corner of the Japanese sensibility
embodied in its hyperconscious but absentminded,
sensual but abstracted, intelligent but terribly
innocent hero, a Japanese Lucky Jim, who comes to
terms with becoming an adult and respecting his
gifts against the dual backgrounds of a mysterious
pathway in Japan, which now exists only in his memory,
and what he lovingly describes as "the filthy
charm of New York City," in the only too-real
present day.
Cherry Whip —
a novel about disorientation that won’t make
you dizzy reading it —
is available from ENC Press for $15 (list price
$17.95).
NEW ACQUISITIONS
But wait! There’s more! If you surf on up
to encpress.com
now —
in particular, the Coming
Attractions page —
you can get check out the covers and summaries for
our two latest acquisitions:
David Brensilver’s
ExecTV fast-forwards
Reality TV to its logical extreme. In ExecTV,
an unemployed documentary filmmaker extraordinaire
arranges to have an execution broadcast live on
pay-per-view television, in as flamboyant a form
as his bizarre vision can conjure to amuse the masses.
Everyone is pushing a hidden agenda. The convicted
serial killer’s attorney wants to exploit
the public execution controversy to keep his client
alive. A pay-per-view mogul-wannabe sees ratings,
ratings, ratings! A perpetually unemployed filmmaker
sees a job —
but also the opportunity to trash the vast unwashed
television audience.
David Brensilver tips
sacred cows for a living, writing about a small
Connecticut town and its municipal government for
a weekly newspaper. You can click through to the
author page for a delightfully politically incorrect
bio and photo. Publication is scheduled for June
2005.
Christopher Largen’s
Junk
is a riotous exploration of prohibition policies,
told through the narrative lens of a future America
in which the government outlaws junk food in response
to widespread obesity. Naturally, gangs like the
Ice Cream Crew and the Hot Dog Homeboys step in
to provide outlawed foods. Lest anyone think that
it’s all a dark fantasy, Junk is
peppered with poignant "mockuments" from
the War on Junk Food, including court records, news
articles, and letters from prison —
all culled from actual drug-war headlines and documents.
Christopher Largen
is an internationally published writer whose works
have appeared in The Village Voice, High Times,
The Nashville Scene, Cannabis Culture, and
dozens of other publications. He currently lives
in Denton ("Home of Happiness"), Texas.
Publication is scheduled for August 2005.
And while we’re
not posting any details just yet, we’re working
on another new translation of a XX-century Russian
literary classic. This time, our great author is
Mikhail Bulgakov. In Bulgakov’s Theatrical
Novel: Journal of a Dead Man, a wretched novelist-turned-playwright
helplessly looks on as his play is mangled by a
prestigious theater. It’s a sad and viciously
funny 1937 satire of Konstantin Stanislavsky and
his world-famous Moscow Art Theater.
ANOTHER COLLEGE HEARD FROM
Another professor
of literature has chosen an ENC Press book for use
in a literature class! This time, it’s our
translation of Yevgheniy Zamyatin’s We.
Professor Jane Knox-Voina of Bowdoin College, Maine,
has assigned the ENC Press edition for her "Fantasy,
Satire, and Science Fiction: Making Sense of the
Absurd in a Totalitarian World" class. Dr.
Knox-Voina has done translations from Russian to
English herself, namely two volumes by Soviet psychologist
Lev Vygotsky. She’s a big film buff, and has
integrated film into such courses as "Russian
Culture Through the Visual Media: The Great Soviet
Experiment," "Women in Soviet Societies,"
and "The Novels of Dostoevsky." Her Web
page suggests that her tastes are as eclectic
as ours.
INDIE BOOKSTORE ALLIANCES
Despite our general
business practice of avoiding selling through brick-and-mortar
outlets, because the deep discounts distributors
take act as a brake on editorial risk-taking, we’re
fond of independent bookstores. Whenever we, or
our individual authors, can work out mutually beneficial
arrangements, we go for it. Because it’s easily
accessible and they’re interested in our books,
our entire line is available at Symposia
Bookstore in Hoboken,
NJ. It is the only independent bookstore left in
Hoboken, and it has become something of a community
center, a club where local writers, artists, and
book and art lovers get together for readings, screenings,
art exhibits, and even jam sessions.
The late and lamented
Boadecia’s Books in Kensington (North Berkeley
hills) carried Don’t
Call It "Virtual," but the slack
has been taken up by Berkeley’s Change
Makers For Women.
Season
of Ash is available at Regulator
Bookshop in Durham, NC,
and Island Books in Key West, FL (no Web site).
Moon
Beaver is carried by Kulture
Shock in Norwich, UK.
BOOK CLUBS
By popular demand
from book club members who are looking for fresh
and unpredictable novels to read and discuss, ENC
Press will offer a 10% discount off the Web site
price to book clubs that order 3 or more copies
of the same title. We’ve also started preparing
discussion guides specially for book-club use. We’ve
started with a guide for Cherry
Whip, and will be whipping others into
shape (specific requests will get expedited treatment).
For more information, see our book
clubs page.
YOUR BLURB IN LIGHTS!
... Or at least in
pixels! Mainstream publishers hadn’t had a
clue about the merits of the novels we’ve
happily snapped up for publication, and neither
do mainstream book reviewers. Especially as they
tend to be key contributors to the insularity of
the business at this point in time.
You, the readers,
though, are in a position to have, and do have,
(gasp!) original opinions. We’d love to hear
them! On each book page on our site, we now have
an e-mail link that reads "I’ve read
this book and I have a comment." Feel free
to click on those and weigh in. We’ll select
various ones for posting, in whole or in part. Obviously,
the compilations of comments/selections of reviews
we post will reflect our desire to give a very concise
picture of what makes each book appealing and what
deeper insights it has inspired. Nonetheless, we’re
interested in and will appreciate any and all comments
from our readers.
Think of it as an
Amazon.com-like review process, only moderated,
and with a more sophisticated reader base and better
spelling.
On that note ... thank you again for your interest
in ENC Press. We hope you’re having a wonderful
holiday season. We also hope you’ll keep us
in mind for your holiday gift lists.
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