FishbowlNY FishbowlDC LostRemote InsideMobileApps InsideSocialGames 10,000 Words TVNewser TVSpy AgencySpy PRNewser MediaJobsDaily UnBeige

Posts Tagged ‘Free Press’

Andrew McCarthy Inks Deal for Travel Memoir

Pretty in Pink actor Andrew McCarthy (pictured, via) has landed a deal with Simon & Schuster’s Free Press imprint to write a memoir on “the transformative power of travel.”

According to the release, the book will discuss McCarthy’s journeys to seven exotic locations from the Amazon to Kilimanjaro. Senior editor Alessandra Bastagli negotiated the deal with Kuhn Projects literary agent David Kuhn.

McCarthy had this statement: “Simply put, travel has changed the chemistry of who I am. It has rewritten the internal map of my life and consequently, altered the lens through which I see the world. In my experience, the power of travel to liberate and transform knows no limits.”

Mediabistro Course

Personal Essay Writing

Personal Essay WritingStarting October 28, work with a published journalist to draft, edit, and sell your first-person essays! Jessica Olien will help you to workshop your writing so that it's ready to pitch to editors. You'll learn how to tell your personal story, self-edit you work to assess voice, style, and tone, and sell your essays for publication. Register now!

The Olympic Memoir We’d Like to See

While most of the publishing industry was getting ready for the penultimate early weekend of the summer, Free Press announced that it had signed a deal with Olympic swimming sensation Michael Phelps to publish Built to Succeed, a memoir offering “the secrets of his success and… his approach to training, competition, and winning,” according to the announcement in Publishers Marketplace.

Considering this deal, and the news from across the Atlantic about possible book deals for British medalists, another potentially attractive possibility presented itself: What about a memoir by American marathoner Ryan Hall?

Hall had already gotten significant attention from the media, including Peter Hessler‘s New Yorker profile and Michael Perry‘s Runner’s World cover story. Enough of the runner’s personality comes through in both articles to suggest that he could tell his own story in an equally compelling manner if he chose to do so, and his pre-Olympic blog offers further evidence. The more you learn about Hall’s strong Christian faith and his participation in Team World Vision, an organization that helps poverty-stricken communities raise themselves to self-sustainability, it’s easy to see him writing a book that combines the best elements of Tony Dungy‘s Quiet Strength and John Woods‘s Leaving Microsoft to Change the World. Hall’s home page already had the perfect title, one with extra poignancy following his tenth-place finish: More Precious Than Gold. If you want to understand how powerful this story could be, watch the following video.

Read more

Emily Gould Is Offering You the Red Pill

emily-gould-headshot.jpgFormer GalleyCat contributing editor Emily Gould has done more this summer than completing the essay collection she sold to Free Press. She’s also got a byline in the latest issue of Technology Review, discussing books about online culture. “Like an expatriate who reads every new novel that’s set in her homeland,” she writes, “I read books about the Internet to remember the time I spent working and living there, to contrast my memories with the authors’ impressions and see how well they hold up.”

Then she sets up a point/counterpoint between classic Walter Benjamin and cutting-edge Clay Shirky over whether today’s digital environment is really serving the good: “Maybe… social-media technologies are creating simulacra of social connection, facsimiles of friendship… moving heedlessly toward a future where the basic human social activities that these new technologies are modeled on—talking, being introduced to new people by friends—are threatened.” Finally, she encourages readers to experiment with dropping out of the social media scene until “until you start to see your world opening back up again.” Sounds tempting, doesn’t it?

More Promotions at Penguin, Trafalgar Square Adds Publishers

hodgman dutton.jpgBeth Parker has been promoted to Associate Publicity Director for both the Dutton and Gotham lists and has contributed to the campaigns for New York Times nonfiction bestsellers including Game of Shadows by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, Always By My Side by Jim Nantz, and How Starbucks Saved My Life by Michael Gates Gill. She also works with Harlan Coben, Eric Jerome Dickey, and John Lescroart.

Amanda Walker has been promoted to Publicity Manager for Gotham/Dutton having just joined in the spring of last year from the Free Press. She has spearheaded the success of Hill Harper’s books, Letters to a Young Sister and Letters to a Young Brother and is currently working on promoting John Hodgman’s upcoming book for Dutton, More Information than You Require.

Meanwhile, Trafalgar Square Publishing (from Independent Publishers Group)just announced it now esclusively distributes titles for nine new publishers including: Alma Books, Angry Penguin Ltd., Cadmos Books, Capuchin Classics, The History Press Ltd., OneWorld Classics/Calder Publications, Piatkus Books, Pushkin Press, and Spy Publishing. This will be the first time Angry Penguin Ltd., Cadmos Books, Capuchin Classics, and Spy Publishing will be distributed in North America.

The Daily Show Sells Books – Who’d Have Thunk?

The New York Times’ Julie Bosman adopts a sense of gee-whizness in this piece about how Comedy Central‘s flagship satirical show brings on serious authors – and how their books sell in massive quantities thereafter. Of course, let’s remember that if 1.5 million people watch the show, and if 1/10th of the audience (or less) buys books, voila! Instant bestseller (see, BOOK, AMERICA THE.) So the numbers for stardom don’t have to be all that high. Still, the number of serious authors talking to Jon Stewart (and Stephen Colbert on THE COLBERT REPORT) has gone up in the last few years as the number of venues for them dry up elsewhere. Publishers say that particularly for the last six months, both shows have become the most reliable venues for promoting weighty books whose authors would otherwise end up on THE EARLY SHOW on CBS looking like they showed up at the wrong party.

“It was almost an ‘oh my God’ moment,” said Lissa Warren, publicity director for Da Capo Press. “There aren’t that many television shows that will have on serious authors. And when they do have one, it’s almost startling.” Part of the surprise, publishers said, is that the Comedy Central audience is more serious than its reputation allows. They aren’t just YouTube obsessives but a much more diverse – and book-buying – audience. “It’s the television equivalent of NPR,” Martha Levin, publisher of Free Press, said. “You have a very savvy, interested audience who are book buyers, people who do go into bookstores, people who are actually interested in books.”
http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/tag/free-press
www.mediabistro.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2014-42
63558
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:MNB6R445XVMP3SQTDGHG4BGZ7B6CUELS
<urn:uuid:c6235d5a-4848-4165-b7e0-d655a60d0522>
2014-10-22T12:21:31Z
38.126.102.81
sha1:M4WK2CXY256BWNBF6JPAB7RVUFN6JX5O
<urn:uuid:3b6532c6-4b2f-493e-9f40-85704de6bfde>
http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/tag/free-press
length
response
<urn:uuid:b260c038-2f24-41f3-ba24-f322ee8cefec>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-16-133-185.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2014-42
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for October 2014
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf