cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Making Hay I just did a phone interview with a Canadian radio station. That's 2 interviews with Canadian news outlets in as many days. Why is Canada suddenly paying attention to me? What I really need to be doing today is, like, write and edit. But I'm getting hit with all of these interview requests and it would be stupid to pass the opportunities by. The actual interviews are very quick to do. Usually no more than 10 or 15 minutes. The preparation takes a lot more time. I don't want to go into an interview with someone from another country or city without being well-informed about their geography, economy and ecology. I like to research exactly what types of inv@sive species they have in that area and what the effects of those species have been. Otherwise its just 'blah blah blah' without any information that might be useful to the listener or reader. It also just seems like the polite thing to do. I also just got off the phone with my agent. I'm worried that she might be sort of half-retired and is losing her will to really reach for things. She's in her 60's and hasn't shown up in person at her NYC office since before Christmas. She has a little hobby farm in Vermont where she seems to spend more and more of her time. She wasn't nearly so focused and enthusiastic about this project as I need her to be. That said, she at least agreed that this is a very big and awesome thing and that we should be able to get bids on it from several different publishers. ____________ Ah, she called me back again with a little bit more enthusiasm. A lot more, actually. I outlined my proposals for maximizing sales of the first book when it launches, which involves my writing an op-ed piece for the T1mes in which I introduce a a completely new term and concept for thinking about the total amount of suffering that goes into producing food. She is going to help me get the article placed. Also, I told her that no matter what we must retain foreign rights in whatever contract we settle on. I have this crazy idea to identify the most profitable foreign markets for the new book and take a trip to each of them in order to write a bonus chapter that will be included in the edition for that country. Then I'll have all of these extra chapters that I did overseas for the other markets. I'll put them all together and have what amounts to an international sequel to sell on the American market. Ha! I think its fucking brilliant. Instead of getting just, say, $50k advance for the book, over the next 2 years I could reap $50k US advance, $10k for Germany, $10k for the UK, $10k for France, $10k for Japan, $10k for Australia. I don't know whether China is really a potential market or not. Without the bonus chapters I would probably get maybe $1k or $2k for each of those markets at the most. I expect that I could cover the travel expenses for the European chapters for around $5k. Australia would be a bit more and England would be a lot less, since I have friends there to stay with and hunt with. Anyway, my agent thinks that this is a great idea. We have a really good plan here. She's going to start pitching the book to other publishers tomorrow and we'll go from there. 3:32 p.m. - 2011-01-06 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
||||||
|
||||||