Columbia University Press is currently featuring Voices of the New Arab Public on the main page of their catalog, alongside such luminaries as Julia Kristeva, Todd Gitlin, and Nick Lehmann.
Cool! I've also heard rumour of an excellent and well-placed ad in the new issue of Foreign Affairs, but haven't seen it yet.
Very happy with their publicity efforts thus far... what a contrast to my first book, which - as befits a specialist academic book - had no real publicity and sales to match. I'm hoping obviously that this book is different on both counts.
I've been making the case to the press that blogs and the internet are where the action is these days, and that a book becoming a topic of blog debate is worth more than, say, an ad in a political science journal (of course, a full bag from our Diaper Genie is probably worth more than an ad in a political science journal... whoops, did I really just say that?).
This isn't quite as crassly materialist as it sounds, though I'm not embarrassed about wanting to sell some copies of the book. It just strikes me that blogs are where a good deal of what passes for public discourse in this country now takes place. I've been really fascinated by some of the very high level 'book clubs' over at Josh Marshall's TPM Cafe (George Packer, for example) at Kevin Drum's Washington Monthly site (Paul Pierson and Jacob Hacker, for example), and at many other places - where the author of an academic but politically engaged book spends a week or so presenting the main arguments of the book, and responding to comments and intra-blog arguments. How much more direct, visceral, and downright useful than just another review in a newspaper, perhaps followed by a letter to the editor - not that authors or publishers can do without the published reviews, those are obviously essential, but blogs allow a book to enter into a national, or even global, conversation in genuinely new ways.
Which is a way of previewing perhaps, some forthcoming posts about the relationship between Voices and Abu Aardvark, and the ways in which Voices might be one of the first of what may well be many academic blog-books!
Why don't you email JMM and see if he'll give you a week? He doesn't seem booked up all the time, and I'm sure it'd be a good way to sell some books and get some good discussion gone. Starting a new blog like this from scratch is tough going, I think.
Posted by: praktike | January 02, 2006 at 10:47 PM
A new blog is impossible, I think.. I'm thinking about this as a companion to AA (with all the serious post linked over there) to keep AA from getting cluttered up with the book stuff. If it turns out nobody follows the links over here, then you're right, I'll probably have to move the content back over to AA for anyone to see it. Bu
Posted by: the aardvark | January 03, 2006 at 06:48 AM
It seems that devoting a whole blog to just one book might be way too narrow a focus to build up a large audience. Publishers themselves might have better success creating larger blogs devoted to certain genres or themes on which many similar books can be showcased and discussed in one place, sort of like a Slashdot or History News Network for new books. For instance, Yale University Press could create a blog for all of their history or Mideast or whatever publications.
A blog like this could even bring attention to older books as well as brand new ones. For example, say you wrote a book about civil strife in Jordan 5 years ago but now all of the sudden there are huge riots and the king is forced to flee the country. This is big news and people are going to want to know the context behind what is going on. That's the perfect time for a publisher to put your book on their blog so that it can get all the attention from the blog's regular visitors as well as from all the many many other blogs that will trackback to it and even the big metafilter sites such as Plastic, Arts & Letters Daily, and others. That's thousands of people(at the very least!) becoming interested in your 5 year old book who never would have known it existed had it not been for the publisher blog getting the ball rolling.
Posted by: Yohan | January 04, 2006 at 02:55 PM
Also, I think it would be great to see Abu Aardvark on BookTV over on CSPAN2. It seems to me that you and your book would be a perfect fit and it would get you some exposure in yet another medium! You'd reach a large audience that includes people like my mother: people who are very much interested in books and ideas but who don't have much to do with either the internet or political science journals.
I also know from personal experience that BookTV is an excellent source of stocking stuffer ideas.
Posted by: Yohan | January 04, 2006 at 03:10 PM
Yohan, you're right - and that's an interesting idea, by the way. Really, I think of this Voices blog more as "page 2" of Abu Aardvark, which AA readers who don't want to read aobut Voices can skip. It isn't really meant to have an independent identity - its value will hopefully come later, when the book starts getting reviewed. We'll see.
Posted by: the aardvark | January 04, 2006 at 03:11 PM
You could also try to score a booking with Chris Lydon, who is a very skilled interviewer with an interest in the Middle East, the media, and blogs!
His site is:
http://radioopensource.org/
Posted by: praktike | January 04, 2006 at 03:39 PM