Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Managing Marketing

Red slide turtle in Liz Christy community garden on Bowery and Houston. Photo (c) Liza Bear 2001. My plot is at M'Finda Kalunga on Chrystie St. Despite good intentions I garden about as much as I blog.


Publisher pays lip service to book as joint venture with author (sic), but the reality is elsewhere. Literary chores and email pleadings take up all week. So I miss the Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol and Abel Ferrara screenings at NYFF. It's hard for DIY ers to give up freedom of choice. Marketing rules the roost! Still, I chip at the fortress. Production manager breaks silence and agrees to meet author half-way on use of sans serif for display type and sizing of photos. :)

I'll let the rain water my plot.

Of the bewildering array of people supposedly responsible for PR (here they call it "marketing product management") one is on maternity leave, another has broken her wrist, a third is on vacation. So the task of writing the copy for the website falls on my editor and me. We ping pong drafts furiously across the internet. By Friday at five, when it's a wrap for the corporate world, we've agreed on the wording, but now marketing says copy has to fit back cover of book as well .... I go to my bookshelf and study closely the Penguin edition of Gertrude Stein's Writings and Lectures.