The Selling of ASP (Volume 1)

Burger ’n Beer at Luke’s on Third Avenue with my brilliant and tireless agent Alexis Hurley of Inkwell Management. The Selling of ASP is turning easily into as complex and demanding a process as writing it in the first place. But that, apparently, is book publishing in America these days.

I arrive with a 22-point agenda. The timetable is daunting. Page proofs came yesterday and I show them to her. She agrees Wiley (and my production editor, Rachel Meyers) have done a fab job designing the book. It looks wonderful – typography, layout, photographs. (Only two days later did I discover they’d somehow managed to omit in the printed books the link to Chapter 9 /12 on the website that was supposed to appear between Chapters 9 and 10, causing a sleepless night and a bit of angst til we agreed finally that it can appear after Chapter 10! Rachel made it happen…thanks, Rachel!!)

So with page proofs out of the way (finished them last night…now they’re off to Wiley), next up are the bound galleys. I’m getting 50 (yes, FIFTY, I feel like Molly Shannon on Saturday Night Live!) copies to send to media and other folks to start getting the WORD out on ASP. We have First Serial Rights, so I need to tell Alexis a) Where we should try to place them (Atlantic, Harper’s, Foreign Affairs, The Nation, Commentary, Reader’s Digest?) and what excerpts would work best.

What next? The campaign for book reviews (targeting, clearly The NYT, WashPost, WSJ, for instance). There’s the St. Pete Times book reviewer I met at BEA, for instance. (She seemed pretty enthusiastic?) Above all, there’s some kind of commitment from a “big” TV appearance (CBS Early Show? The Daily Show? The Factor?) That could jump-start Wiley’s sales operation and mean a really HEALTHY first printing – taking it from a firm mid-list to best-seller material (which ASP CERTAINLY is!). Then again, how do you get a daily TV show to commit to an appearance four months in advance? Four WEEKS maybe, but four MONTHS? Listen, I worked for a network for seven years, and I KNOW what booking a morning show is like! Gotta pull a rabbit outa that hat, though.

Still, the BIG peg is General Petraeus’s report on the surge. That has been expected in September (ugh – too early…bound books won’t ship til October 5!). But Sunday morning talk shows yesterday were suggesting that could slide a bit – WHOA, how cool would THAT be. This book puts the whole surge and our Iraqi involvement into total perspective.

Then there are appearances. First galley will go to Steve Forbes. (We’d LOVE him to host the book party in the Forbes Gallery. It would be great for Forbes – just look at my blurbs, for instance and the folks I could bring in there.) Then there are other appearances. Three so far:

October 29 Harvard Club of New York City: evening reading/signing
November 1 National Press Club (Washington) 30th Annual Book Fair
November 5 The Harvard Coop (Cambridge): 7 pm reading/signing

Still pending: The Grolier Club (NYC), Politics & Prose (Washington), Aspen Institute (Washington), Barnes & Noble (Union Square, NYC).

Alexis and I move on: OK, what about web blasts (I already have more than 2,000 e-mail addresses and by August will be likely to have catalogued 5,000 or more). Yes, she says, by all means – one in August, another in October for the media.

How about a Speaker’s Bureau. Alexis can help. I just need to get her speech talking points. I can do THAT. I speak all the time for Forbes.com and can talk for a half hour on any topic under the sun! And I do q&a’s well too!

How about foreign rights? Manuscripts are out – especially France where I can do TV all sorts of other promotion! Now we just sit back and wait. Ditto for Audio books (me as the narrator? Hell, I was a network TV correspondent. I can READ!).

Finally, there’s the NEXT book. We talk about it. Alexis loves the idea (so does Hana, my brilliant Wiley editor who will get first crack at it, contractually if nothing else!). More on that later. The next book, though, we’ll look for foundation help too. Then I won’t have to blow through the whole advance just on research!

Lots to chew over. A big six months ahead. Then THE LAUNCH! I’m ready !!