Publishing Talks: David Wilk Interviews Carl Lennertz about World Book Night 2012

In this series of interviews, called Publishing Talks, I talk to book industry professionals and other smart people about the future of publishing, books, and culture.  This is a period of disruption and change for all media businesses.  How will publishing evolve as our culture is affected by technology, climate change, population density, and the ebb and flow of civilization and  economics?

I hope these Publishing Talks conversations will help us better understand the outlines of what is happening in publishing, books and reading culture, and how we can ourselves both understand and influence the future of books and reading.

Carl Lennertz has got himself a dream job, as he was happy to tell me when we talked.  Carl is the Director of World Book Night in the United States.  World Book Night originated in the U.K. in 2011 and has quickly grabbed the imagination of book lovers there and in this country as well.  Thousands of people will go into their communities on April 23, 2012 to give specially printed books away to potential readers.  The idea is to enlist volunteers – many are needed – so if you are interested, go to the website (now!) to register.  Even if you miss the 2012 deadline, you will want to participate in the future.

World Book Night is a great idea, supported now by Ingram Book Company in the United States as well as a number of terrific publishers.  A total of thirty excellent books (see the list here) were selected and will be printed in special editions of 20,000 copies each.  Libraries are signing up to participate, along with booksellers, and writers themselves.  Carl is blogging about the whole thing on a regular basis too, visit regularly or subscribe to keep up with all the many events and doings around the country.  This is a great project – we need more book readers in America, where we have far too many non-readers for the good of the nation.

Carl is a terrific person to have this job.  His enthusiasm and dedication is just what this project needs.  Please listen to our conversation about World Book Night, and do what you can to support this effort.

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Georgia Lowe: The Bonus (a novel)

978-0615371450 – Lucky Dime Press – $18.95 – paperback (ebook editions available)

I confess to be particularly fond of Depression era novels and nonfiction.  The 1920s and 1930s were incredible periods in American history, so much like the present time it is sometimes strange and even eery.  I’m not sure how many readers coming to this novel will know its historical background.  In 1932, at the height of the Great Depression, while Hoover was still President, thousands of World War I veterans mobilized to lobby Congress to pass a bill to give them their war service bonuses immediately, to save them from utter poverty and starvation.  2o,000 of them ended up camped in and around Washington, D.C. at the end of their Bonus March.

The political elements of this story sound pretty familiar to anyone who is paying attention to modern political speech.  It’s impossible to not think about the Occupy movement as you read this novel, which of course was conceived and written long before that movement’s inception.

Georgia Lowe’s parents were bonus marchers.  She grew up hearing their stories about the hot summer of 1932 in Washington, D.C., when General MacArthur, himself also a World War I veteran, brutally dispersed the homeless and destitute marchers, including the families of the vets.  Those stories inspired her, but she did not even begin to write fiction until she was much older.  She started the novel more than 10 years ago, using elements of her own family’s stories to create the framework of her novel.

I found The Bonus to be a remarkably well written novel that flows beautifully and naturally.  I’d characterize it as a “naturalistic” novel, and it feels to me as if it could have been written in the 1930s, with a truly authentic sense of the period, the places and the people of that time.  The story focuses on Bonnie and Will, she a struggling actress and he a journalist (and veteran in denial of the pain of his wartime experience), both of them living reasonably well in Hollywood.  They each become connected to the Bonus March in different ways, and end up together in Washington, where their personal lives become entwined with the real events surrounding the marchers and their treatment in the capitol.  You’re not reading a novel to learn the history, but you will learn it and I think you will feel, as I did, that history is remarkably circular.

I think history has birthed a wonderful novelist.  The Lucky Dime website tells us that Georgia is hard at work on two new novels, a prequel to The Bonus entitled An Ordinary Kid and a sequel, The Old Ladies.  These are books I will want to read.  I can’t resist making a plug for another novel, one that was actually written in the 1930s by a now almost forgotten writer, Thomas Boyd, In Time of Peace, a book I think should be read together with The Bonus to create a really powerful understanding of our own period through the lens of another.

Talking with Georgia was alot of fun for me since I liked her book so much.  I hope you will enjoy it as well.  And I am not alone in liking this book alot – The Bonus won first place in the highly competitive Mainstream/Literary Fiction category of the Writer’s Digest Self Published Book Awards.

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Publishing Talks: David Wilk Interviews John Sundman

In this series of interviews, called Publishing Talks, I talk to book industry professionals and other smart people about the future of publishing, books, and culture.  This is a period of disruption and change for all media businesses.  How will publishing evolve as our culture is affected by technology, climate change, population density, and the ebb and flow of civilization and  economics?

I hope these Publishing Talks conversations will help us better understand the outlines of what is happening in publishing, books and reading culture, and how we can ourselves both understand and influence the future of books and reading.

I’ve had the pleasure of knowing John Sundman for only a brief period of time, but value my emerging friendship with him greatly.  He’s been a writer in a variety of forms, and a visionary thinker about many things I am interested in.  He’s been a self publisher for quite some time, and I thought his experience doing his own publishing would be a good starting point for a conversation about where publishing appears to be going.  Here’s his bio (from his Smashwords page):

John Sundman is a freelance technical writer, essayist, novelist, self-publisher, volunteer firefighter, food pantry co-director, former Peace Corps Volunteer, husband, father, and advocate for people with disabilities who resides on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, very near to Massachusetts, USA. He has spent more than 20 of the last 30 years somehow connected to the Silicon Valley/Boston high-tech/computer industry. He also has experience as a farmer, student of agricultural economics, and worker in rural African agricultural development. His books are more subtle than they appear.

John blogs with a number of other free thinking visionaries at Wetmachine (“we write about, mostly, the nexus of technology, science and social policy in the USA. We also write about software praxis, technoparanoia, the craft of writing, self-publishing, politics, and random bullshit. Sundman and Gray, in particular, are leaders in the “random bullshit” category.”)

John’s books are quite good and well worth reading (here’s a review of his first book, Acts of the Apostles, that more or less set him on a successful path of self-publishing, an early web story, which serves as precursor for so many other stories of discovery).  I could have interviewed him about one of his books, but I thought talking to him about publishing would give us a chance to talk more broadly.  Do take a look at his books (widely available in online retail stores).  And he’s finally doing a book with a publisher other than himself, an overhauled and rewritten Acts of the Apostles with the esteemed Underland Press.

John and I had a great talk.  I’ll be interested to hear from listeners what you think of some of his ideas.

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