Thursday, June 2, 2016

The Last Samurai reissue, news of the day

Over on LitHub, 7 booksellers talk about how to hand-sell The Last Samurai.  If you are not a bookseller you are probably not looking for tips on how to hand-sell The Last Samurai or, indeed, any other book, but -- what's appealing is to have something we so rarely see, a round-up of different responses to a book.  The convention of our review papers is that a book is handed over to a single reviewer; you might get different takes on a book if it is lucky enough to be reviewed in several papers, but for the most part we're invited to collude in the fiction of the magisterial assessment.  We all know, of course, that different readers may have radically different responses to a book, but we rarely see this on display in one place in the literary press.

Note: A big round of applause to Mieke Chew, the publicist at New Directions who came up with this brilliant idea.  

The whole thing here:

http://lithub.com/seven-ways-to-hand-sell-a-lost-modern-masterpiece/

2 comments:

Tom o' Bedlam said...

My congratulations (and much to my relief). I remember trying to find it on several different booksellers' sites long about 2010 and thinking, surely, it couldn't be out of print. Strong medicine for a young man who'd previously thought publishers were there to keep worthy books in circulation.

I rather like the cover, too.

Unknown said...

"How to sell the Last Samurai"

How about, "If you liked The Curious Incident of the Dog In the Night-Time, you'll LOVE The Last Samurai!"