ZapTown

Apologies to the five of you who missed me – it has been a few weeks, hasn’t it? After my last couple of columns, back in July, talking about how summer was a good time for vacations and catching up on reading at the beach, I, err, took a bit of a vacation. I even was able to squeeze in a fair bit of reading during my time away from the net – some science fiction, some mysteries, some cultural studies, and a couple of the classics. Hopefully, I’ll be able to share my mostly-positive thoughts about these books over the next few weeks. Summer is traditionally movie season, anyway—it’s when the big blockbusters are playing, the weather’s at its most humid and oppressive, and the relief of a dark, air-conditioned chamber is a wonderful escape hatch. Although the summer’s big blockbusters haven’t been very inspiring to me personally, looking at the box-office receipts, it does seem to have been a fairly crowd-pleasing few months, with a lot of people having a good time escaping to the multiplex, even as millions of dollars got blown up on screen after screen. But as we turn away from summer, and the nights start to get longer (and colder), the publishers are ramping up their big fall titles with the hopes that, even in this difficult climate, people will want to put Dan Brown’s new book, the new novel in the Dune series, or the Winnie the Pooh sequel into their loved one’s stocking this holiday season. At the same time, e-books appear to be gathering popularity (the Kindle in particular), and there are a lot of questions and uncertainties floating around out there as to what the future holds for publishing.

One thing that’s always been frustrating for me is the lack of attention given to previews of upcoming books, when compared to movies. Films, for instance, often get big seasonal ‘coming attraction’ sections in newspapers, on websites, and in magazines such as Entertainment Weekly. Books, on the other hand, get some ads in the back of the newspaper’s weekly book section, if they’re lucky. Or at least, that’s been the case historically. If you want to look for upcoming titles, you have to root around a little deeper for books than you do with movies. And granted, here the internet can be a big help. There certainly is a lot of information out there, but it’s much more diffuse. I didn’t know, for instance, until I looked just now that both E.L. Doctorow and Sue Monk Kidd apparently had books coming out next week, and I found that information on the websites of individual bookstores!  Another interesting development, as publishers and chains put more of the pressure of marketing books onto individual authors, is the development of the ‘video trailer’ for a book. I’ve only just become aware of these things in the past couple of weeks, during vacation, and there are a couple of very striking ones on youtube. I imagine there are other trailers floating around to be discovered. In some ways, it feels surprising that it’s taken this long for book promotion to borrow some of the techniques of the film industry.

As the economy continues to recover very slowly, the question of whether people will buy books, and if so, what books they’re going to buy, seems to be weighing on publisher’s minds more than ever before. Now, if I could only figure out which books I’m excited about picking up and reading when they come out. If this winter is anything like the last one, there will be lots of opportunities to sit inside, trying to keep out the cold with a book, and it would be nice to have some good titles to look forward to, in addition to re-reading old favorites.