THE GIRLS OF ATOMIC CITY book tour report

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

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.

THE GIRLS OF ATOMIC CITY ad in The New Yorker. Yes, The New Yorker

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.

Denise Kiernan. That's me.: Happy Pub Day

A post from my wife, Denise Kiernan, whose book, The Girls of Atomic City, is out today.

denisekiernan:

Happy Pub Day

It’s here—that day all authors wait for which, when it finally dawns, is one of the most anticlimactic career events ever, no matter how many times you go through it. Pub day.

Books are a long haul. You get a kernel of an idea, do a little digging and try to decide whether this is a topic you want to live with for years. Then of course there’s the business end of the entire endeavor which, if you’re like me, can’t be ignored if you want to make a living: Can I sell this to a publisher and can that publisher sell it to readers? 

So the kernel sprouts and you decide that you do want to live with the idea until you don’t and then until you can’t live without the idea again. Then there are the proposals and the meetings and all the while you’re trying to keep researching and come up with a clear vision for this project that you’ve already told major publishing corporations you really do have a vision for. Then you get the deal. Relief. Deadlines. A schedule. Sort of. An end date? In a sense, sure. 

You write. You rewrite. You keep researching. You turn in the first draft, which is maybe the most anticlimactic of all the anticlimatices. (New word! It’s one of those vertices you think you’ve reached but feel underwhelmed when you actually do.) You’re still so far from done and you know it. You wait for your editor. You already want to make changes the minute you hit “send” and your manuscript went out into the ether on its way to your editor. That’s fine. Changes are coming.

Your changes. The editor’s changes. Changes from those trusted colleagues you allowed to see your ugly, ugly first draft. Revisions and more drafts follow. The end is so much closer and you know now that the time to really whip things into shape is shrinking fast.

A first look at your cover blows a little wind up your skirt and you get excited again. A cover! It’s real!Do you like it? they ask. You do! You really do! You’re not just saying that to avoid sounding like a moody, picky writer with no design experience. Everyone weighs in. Then polite “suggestions” from the real power-wielders at any publishing house: sales. They don’t like the cover. Am I OK with that? Absolutely. After all, there are bigger fish in this fry-daddy.

First pass pages! Am I done? No. The copy editor has seen it, maybe a proofer.Only make necessary changes…Necessary. Never do writers have more trouble defining such a two-cent word than when they are instructed to make only “necessary” changes.

Pencil marks. Post-its. Use this pencil, not that one. You finish…sort of. You mail it in. You’re done!

No, you’re not.

Promotional materials. Second pass pages and galleys. The book is in print…sort of.Ugh..I could invent a drinking game based on the number of times I used the word (insert favorite adjective here)…I can’t believe I….Can I still change…? Your editor is about to hop on a plane and pry the pages from your cold dead hands. Promotional materials again. Web sites. Meetings. Lists of people you hope will give this book a second look. Finally, there are no more changes to be made. The book is off to the printer.

But you’re still not done. Wrangling for press, emailing, tweeting. Yay! I got a piece in yadda-yadda magazine! Boo! Whozeewhatsit doesn’t want to have me on their show! Yay! Boo! Wine.

Then, finally, on a rainy Tuesday, the book is officially out in the world. Sort of. Actually there has already been press. People have already been tweeting pics of the book after purchasing it BEFORE the pub date from stores that ignore those sort of contractual restrictions. Emails from friends and people I haven’t heard from in a while are, by far, the best part of this day, and I will answer every single one.

However, I’m still not done. I have talks to give, traveling to do, presentations to prepare (clothes to buy…) I open my laptop and try to get back to work. The inter-web sink hole drags me down into the neuro-pacification that is KenKen and I wander over to…

Hang on. What’s that a picture of…? Who isthat? She looks fascinating. She didwhat? When? Huh. You know what would be a great story…

And another kernel sprouts in the dark. Happy pub day.

***

I’ve been watching Denise’s march through the trad pub world with interest, comparing it to my own experiences in self-publishing. I’ll do a post on this shortly. I just want to collect my thoughts on it all.

Bookstore hopping in Asheville, North Carolina » MobyLives

The blog Moby Lives has a nice post today about indie bookstores in my town of Asheville, NC. They profile four such shops, but I recently counted as many as eight in the city, and up to a dozen in the outlying areas.

They are a huge mix: two B&Ns, several used bookstores, a dedicated children’s bookstore (Spellbound), a revered rare/antiquarian (The Captain’s Bookshelf), a bookstore/wine bar (Battery Park Book Exchange) and a couple of indies selling new books, the most famous of which is Malaprop’s. The stores have interesting personalities. Accent on Books was in the book news a few years ago because they had logged numerous orders for the luxury edition of Carl Jung’s $195 Red Book when it was released in 2010. (Must have something to do with the fact that the city has a Jung center.)

I can’t really offer an explanation for the profusion of book haunts, but we do have a university and we’re the state’s leftiest city.

That does not mean these stores are not endangered. And it’s not a given that they are patronized particularly well. There’s a weird split in attitude between downtown and outside-the-city shoppers who don’t like to come downtown and pay for parking. When I recently mentored a high schooler who was writing her own children’s book, she suggested we meet at the B&N at the mall.

"What about Malaprop’s?" I said.

"What’s that?"

Adults have told me the same thing.

Link to the NPR interview with my wife

You can hear my wife Denise Kiernan talking about her new book The Girls of Atomic City via this link from this interview which aired this morning on National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition Sunday.

Denise was interviewed along with two of the women she profiles in the book.

The article accompanying the audio link also includes a free chapter of the book.

* * *

Geez, I hope this post comes through okay. Been having problems. More stuff has been going on, too. Will post about it soon.

Please refresh your daggyland feed.

Some of you — and me — have been having problems reading my RSS feed.

I’m told you need to refresh the feed and see if this improves.

Delete your daggyland feed from your current reader, and reload the RSS feed, choosing it from the top of the blog’s home page. When I did it, it worked for me.

The feed that comes up should look like this: feed://daggyland.com/rss

Sorry for this…

Denise says...

denisekiernan:

Love that one of my atomic “girls” made this promo for NPR’s Weekend Edition: Colleen Black, 88 years young. Tune in this Sunday, March 3, from 8 to 10 AM to hear more from Colleen, Celia Klemski, and me as we talk about the Manhattan Project and “The Girls of Atomic City.”

The Girls of Atomic City makes editors' lists on Amazon

I have no idea how significant this is, but my wife’s The Girls of Atomic City was chosen for two three nice lists on Amazon:

Editors’ Picks for Best Books of the Month (History)

Editors’ Picks for Best Books of the Month (Nonfiction)

Big Spring Books 2013: History

Photo: Cubicle operators — aka “Calutron Girls” — unwittingly enriching uranium for the first atomic bomb. Photo by Ed Westcott courtesy National Archives.

Denise on NPR this weekend!

Some quick news before I’m out the door:

Please listen to National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition this Sunday, March 3, to hear my wife Denise Kiernan talk about her new book, The Girls of Atomic City. The book pubs next Tuesday, and it’s pretty much all this house is thinking about right now. Denise will be talking with two of the ladies in the book, still spry at about 90 years old for each of them.

I’ll post a link to the interview as soon as NPR puts one up.

In other news:

* It was a good week writing-wise for me. Managed to place two more short stories, which were sent out deep in the heart of 2012. I’ll let you know when they’re out. Maybe I am getting the hang of this fiction business after all. I’m happy with the progress on my current book, though my last (The Marshal of the Borgo) has been delayed because I’ve been busy with client work and doing some promo for Denise’s book.

* At least three of the ghostwriting projects I’ve been involved with this year and last are all coming out this spring. Two in late April, one in mid-May. That’s three excited authors we’re teaching one of two things about promotion. (“The links to your book should be on your website.” “You don’t think it’s a bit much?”)