If you’re thinking of getting copies of my books, it couldn’t be easier. I’ve got you covered, even for autographed books!
I’ve been recommending this essay for years to every writer I know. And it’s free to read online…
I compiled a list of fun facts about this brilliant mathematician after reading two biographies. The oddest little things stayed with me, and here they are…
Change of plans: My wife Denise Kiernan will be on the MSNBC program “Morning Joe” Thursday AM talking about her book, The Girls of Atomic City.
This is a three-hour morning talk show and it looks like Denise will show up in the last hour.
I’ll post a clip later if one is available.
We’re still a go for The Daily Show Thursday night as well.
The PBS airing really boosted sales, if the Amazon ranking is any indication. It took the book from the mid-600s to #46 when we woke this AM.
Meet Hugh Howie.
He’s a friend of Denise’s from way back. Just moved to the area.
Note the spelling of his name. He’s an artist and graphic designer. He is not, for instance, Hugh Howey, author of Wool, the sci-fi phenom all the kids are crowing about these days.
And yet, because people in general are a) inattentive spellers, b) stupid and/or c) lazy, Hugh Howie spends a lot of time in his day sifting through e-mails sent via his website intended for the eyes of the other Mr. H.
He finds it hilarious—and annoying.
What do people write about?
"Plot points, what they think of his stories, suggestions for future books. He appears to do pretty well with the ladies. A lot of ladies write.”
That’s the quasi-humorous part. The annoying part is that if you type Hugh Howie’s name correctly into Google, the world’s great search engine automatically returns Hugh Howey’s website at the top of your search. Hugh Howie’s site is about five links further down. So those who type in H-O-W-I-E are actually promoted to write Howey, but still somehow manage to annoy Mr. Howie.
Basically, if you’re actually looking for Mr. Howie, Google assumes you have typed the name incorrectly. “The guy’s screwing up my SEO!” Howie says.
Let’s set the record straight going forward, shall we? You can follow my Asheville neighbor, Mr. Howie, on Twitter @aHugeProduction
Video: Denise’s lecture in New York!
This is a one-hour video of Denise talking about her book, The Girls of Atomic City, as part of the Speaker on the Square series at New York University.
The talk was attended by 300 people.
Video: Denise on PBS
Late Friday, The PBS NewsHour postponed airing their interview with my wife, Denise Kiernan, talking about her new book, The Girls of Atomic City due to late-breaking news. But they did upload the video, shown here.
You can read the article they posted here.
The clip will mostly likely air late next week.
We’re still on for The Daily Show Thursday, and Morning Joe Friday morning. I’ll keep you apprised of any details or changes.
The Daily Show posted Denise’s pic/bio here. The show airs March 28 at 11 pm and then re-airs Mar 29 at 7 pm.
Denise on TV!
We’re back home for a few days. Denise’s talk and book signing in Oak Ridge, the city where The Girls of Atomic City is based, went exactly as you might expect. Heavily attended at the local Museum of Science and Energy. After her talk, people waited an hour-and-a-half in line to get their books autographed. The little museum bookshop sold out their stock of 100 books and some ladies drove 30 miles round-trip to the B&N in nearby Knoxville to get more copies.
The unexpected thing was seeing people leaving Denise’s table once getting their books signed, and then asking the 80- to 90-year-old “girls” — the real-life protags of Denise’s book — to sign their books as well.
All well and good. This was the book’s hometown, and I expected as much. I did not expect the following:
Denise on The PBS NewsHour: Watch tomorrow, March 22.
Denise on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart: Watch March 28.
Denise on Morning Joe on MSNBC: Watch March 29.
This is unprecedented in our experience, believe me. I’ve resisted sharing the deets until they were confirmed. Even so, the nature of TV programming forces me to add the caveat that one or all three of these could easily be cancelled at the last minute. But this is what’s on the books right now. I’ll post the clips if/when they become available.
Yes, we’re excited. And sleepy.
Oak Ridge photo courtesy of D. Ray Smith.
I have a new short story up at the crime ‘zine, Plots With Guns. This story was inspired by the sound of a woman’s voice. It’s an Appalachian story. Real Cackalacky.
What else?
Spent the last two days chasing around DC. Denise did some meetings yesterday, a signing at the Smithsonian’s American History Museum today, and a TV interview with The PBS Newshour this afternoon. That clip will probably run next week. Awesome to hear people come up to her saying they had heard of the book on NPR, or were already reading it. Tomorrow she’ll be signing at the International Spy Museum starting at 2 pm in DC, if you’re around.
The New York Times has posted the Bestseller List containing Denise’s book online at this link. The post says it’ll be printed in the March 24 issue of the book review, but they probably will only do the Top 15. So if you’re Denise’s mom, please hold off buying that issue.
Still kind of shocked by David B. Silva’s death. I located posts talking about him here, here, here, and here.
That’s about it. Really beat. Still trying to shake this head cold. Beginning to hate these trips. More tomorrow, maybe, on our last day in DC. Head to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, on Sunday.
The Girls of Atomic City a NYT Bestseller!
This is surreal: We found out today that Denise’s book The Girls of Atomic City had hit The New York Times Bestseller list at #33 for the week ending March 24, 2013. 9, 2013.
Yes, the publisher has been unwavering in its support of the book, Yes, the book’s gotten great press, such as the NPR interview the Sunday before it pubbed. And yes, it seems to have been eagerly awaited by legions of Americans who had some connection to the facility in Tennessee profiled in the book.
But was that enough to send it to the extended list?
We’re still trying to make sense of it.
While we were hopeful this might happen someday, we certainly didn’t think it would happen like, now. Like, so fast.
Denise is blown away. She did a lunchtime talk today at the National Archives in DC. The Archives has been nice to us in the past with our Quirk history books, and Denise used a lot of Archives resources researching her book. So doing a signing there was a natural. Eighty-three people attended. Not an earth-shattering number, but nice to see familiar faces in the audience who have stopped by the Archives bookstore in the past to have us sign our previous books, such as the U.S.’s "Collector-in-Chief."
Later, we went out with one of Denise’s “girls,” who came into the district with her husband and grown children. We enjoyed a nice lunch. And then, as Denise and I were hanging out at a bar on the way back to our hotel, she got the call from her editor.
What does it mean? How does it change things? Will it change things? We frankly don’t know. It’s a lot to take in. But for now, Denise is just trying to relax and calm the eff down.
***
I was sad to hear of the death of horror writer David B. Silva, a true master of the genre. I’d only started reading his work in the last two years, and I’ve never read anything so fine and so chilling. Robert Swartwood has a nice tribute on his blog about Silva. Truly sad.
Girls of Atomic City - Book Tour Report
It’s been going well. Really well. About 150 people showed at our hometown bookstore Malaprop’s Saturday to hear Denise talk. I assumed this would be heavily attended because we live in town, but only about 10% of the crowd were friends and neighbors. Quite a few were former residents of the Atomic City who had come out to hear about the book. One woman made a point of saying in the Q&A portion that she’d brought all her kids so they could hear the story of their heritage. A few other listeners thanked Denise for telling their town’s story.
I did not expect a bigger crowd in New York, since both writers and publishers have told me that book signings are just not a draw these days in the big town. But the official head count at NYU, Denise’s alma mater, was 300 people. Again, I thought many of these would be my or Denise’s pals, but the majority were NYU alums. Again, as she signed books, Denise heard a lot of them share stories of their connections to the story: one guy had clients in Oak Ridge, another was born there, another woman was the last surviving woman air pilot from WWII, and so on. Yes, the stories got increasingly tenuous, I suppose, but I chalk up the success of this talk to the alum association’s efficiency at getting the word out and people still being fascinated by the lingering secrets of that war.
After, we went with friends to one of our old hangouts. Great to see so many people after all these years. So thanks, Jack, for putting the word out. Thanks Matt and Elisa for coming to the talk. Thanks Karen, Satellite, Jill, Tracey, and everyone else for coming out. Thanks, Drevmo, for the hilarious RSVP’d regrets.
Lunch talk at the National Archives in DC tomorrow.
Inherited Books, Part II
My dad bought the Great Books of the Western World from a door-to-door salesman back in the 1960s. He says he had to haggle mightily to get the entire 50+ book set for about $300. Dad never went to college, but he fancied himself a lover of the classics. I don’t know that he ever really touched the series, which was dreamed up in the early 1950s by Encyclopedia Brittannica. I grew up staring at these books; they occupied several shelves in our home, next to other relics of my dad’s bachelor days, like his hi-fi stereo.
I remember checking the books out when I was in high school and needing to read some of the books contained in the set, like Moby-Dick, Gulliver’s Travels, or the complete works of Shakespeare in two slim volumes. The paper was like onionskin, the type minuscule, and the books astoundingly footnote-free. They were too fancy to take back and forth to school on the bus so back on the shelves they went and I made do with paperback editions I could highlight.
Depending on where you look online, these books were either the greatest thing ever or utterly ridiculous, the brainchild of dead white men to celebrate the legacies of dead white men.
Dad’s downsizing so he palmed the books off on me. I may not ever get around to reading them, but I do plan to read A GREAT IDEA AT THE TIME: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books, by Alex Beam, a book about the making of the “great books” series, which sputtered to an end in 1998. (NY Times review of Baum’s book here. Amazon link here. Cover in lower right.)
I need to find room for this set now in my basement. Wish me luck.
An advertisement for The Girls of Atomic City appears in this week’s issue of The New Yorker.
This blew us away. The media hits on Denise’s book have been pretty good. Every day seems to bring a new one. By far, I think, the NPR interview (which you can hear here) did the most to announce the book, but there have been good reviews in Shelf Awareness, Book Page, Geekadelphia, USA Today, and um, a few others that escape me at the moment. In the last couple of days there have also been: invites to do an Irish radio talk show, more US radio show interest, three TV appearance invites, not to mention creepy notes from freaky dudes checking out my wife online. (We reported you, a-hole). And there will be a few other media things happening in the cities she’s visiting this month (DC, NYC, Oak Ridge).
On the marketing side, this ad, and the ones running on Salon.com, are obviously the publisher’s doing.
Neither Denise nor I have ever gotten this much pub week press for a title of ours, so it’s really educational. I’m actually impressed by the impact that blogs can have on this. A lot of the enthusiastic bloggers turn out to be librarians or freelancers who go on to file their reviews with larger outlets, such the book trade press. And then they of course post those same reviews on Goodreads. It’s interesting also to see a lot of Atomic City “extended alumni”—people whose parents or grandparents worked at the site featured in the book are turning up as well.
So it’s been cool.
More later as I digest this all.
***
Still cranking on my latest book. Going well. Not much else to report.
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