author lands book deal with Y&R

Can't get a deal for that novel manuscript? Try ad agencies. Young & Rubicam commissioned Booker award-nominated novelist William Boyd to tell any story he wanted as long as it featured a Land Rover vehicle. Not surprisingly, the commission prompted Boyd to "realize how prominently Land Rover has featured in my life" and write THE VANISHING GAME, a novella published by Land Rover in print and e-version and advertised in display ads and paid posts on Vox, Quartz and NYTimes.com. The story can also be accessed on Tumblr where it's a multi-sensory experience including images, video, animation, sound, music and narration.

The novel-commissioned-by-client isn't unprecedented. In 2001, Bulgari hired novelist Fay Weldon to write any story she wanted, as long as it mentioned the name of the jeweler 12 times. Perhaps because she was a former copywriter (Ogilvy), Weldon exceeded that count, including 34 mentions. That product placement deal, a first in publishing, created quite a kerfuffle, as reported in in the New York Times and Salon. It's not known whether the commission helped Bulgari sell jewelry, but to Weldon's credit, the book still isn't out of print.

Thanks to Shareen Pathak of Digiday for letting us know. 

madison avenue blues

The demise of Advertising as We Knew It, to the tune of American Pie. Could have been edited down a bit, but good for a laugh or two. Which heaven knows you need.

world without books

It's Sunday morning in August and I don't feel like writing. I feel like reading. Something offline. The Times, in its original, crinkly version. Then something bigger. Bookier. Something literary. Which makes me part of a dwindling crowd. According to Amy Stolls, Program Officer at the NEA, fewer than half of American adults now read literature.

Seems books are becoming an endangered species. (Hard to go to a party in NYC these days without a downsized publishing exec ranting about this.) I love my Kindle, sure, but it doesn't replace a book in the hand: the pleasurable heft, the solid page dense with vivid black marks by which you are channelled into an alternate universe--no power source required. (During daylight, anyway.) I use my Kindle to read in transit--on the subway or trains or planes when I am travelling and trying to minimize luggage. I load it with various newspapers from around the world (they update automatically!) and books which if I like them enough, I find myself buying in hardcopy to finish, parallel-reading them the old-fashioned way, because somehow, curling up with a Kindle in bed just doesn't provide the same satisfaction.

But do enough others feel about books as I do, enough to keep the enterprise going?

Sadly, Amy, in a POV from her perch at NEA, doesn't think so:

It's 2025 and you want a book⎯you being a senior who still fondly remembers books and a book being a non-voice-activated, tangible, artfully designed, paper and in-scented collection of human-generated original prose. Tmes are rough. An MP3 of the SparkNotes for "The DaVinci Code" has replaced the Bible in every hotel in America and Harry Potter is a middle-aged couch potato on welfare. You know this about Harry because you put him there in the videogame "Write the Next Harry Potter Sequel." Paper, pens, rubber eraser⎯they no longer exist. The last of the book critics wrote the last book review of a Post-it note from Pynchon while Pynchon was in the other room surfing YouTube.

It's 2025, and in the latest census, 87% of the population claimed "writer" as an occupation. The universal library of all human verbiage shows 1.4 million genres, with 230,000 subcategories labeled "For Dummies."

[You search for a book to read online] and subliminal ads pop up and whisper breathy directives while massaging your neck and temples, all from the sole remaining New York-based, foreign-owned publishing conglomerate in America, which paid the author an advance equal to the national debt. The book, which the author claims is nonfiction, is about an ogre who writes a book. The author's already sold the rights for his next book, "What I Would Have Written Had I Written a Book," which he claims is fiction. You don't care; your neck feels good. You're sure you're going to love it. [Complete premonition in Creative Nonfiction, Issue 31]

While this vision portends interesting briefs for digital agencies in the future, it's sad to contemplate a world without books, which would also be a world without bookstores and libraries, one where stalwart lions on Fifth Avenue might preside over a marble Pinkberry instead.

there goes the cookbook, another publishing casualty

When our daughter volunteered to make dinner, I reminded her where the cookbooks are. Cookbooks? she said, incredulous at me and my luddite ways.

Which is how I discovered SmittenKitchen, a food-porn site favorited by foodies everywhere, recipes from a writer/photographer who chronicles culinary adventures in the 80 sq. ft kitchen of her NYC tenement walkup. Even if you hate to cook, you'll be seized with sudden desire fling yourself at a stove.