Welcome
Dear All:
1. This blog will give you periodic announcements about Soft Skull books as they pass through some significant phases in their lifecycle: we'll tell you about books we've just acquired, we'll let you know when sample chapters (or indeed the entire PDF) would be available for download, we'll tell you when you can buy the book... (See categories "Anticipatory" and "Shameless Hussying;" see also our Coming Soon page
2. This blog will allow us to gloat about reviews, awards, coverage, and scathing criticism from people whose opinions we love to loathe. (For example, we would have linked to Ann Coulter's now-sadly-vanished Sept 2004 column in which two of the four in-her-view most fraudulent books published in the U.S. in the last decade were published by Soft Skull, or the Wall Street Journal editorial excoriating us for issuing a revised version of Arming America, an item that characterized us as "[taking] pride in putting out books other publishers avoid like ricin.") This would appear under the category "Gloating."
3. This blog will pontificate on matters whereon we feel qualified to speak, whether or not we in fact are qualified—everything from such perennials as "Author Tours—Are they Worth It?" and "Advertising—Does it Sell Books?," to newsy spur-of-the-moment stuff about natural disasters and unnatural incompetence, to our stance on Google Print for Publishers (will someone let us file an amicus brief on behalf of Google, pro bono, of course). And, because it's coming up so soon, and because unlike Book Expo America it appears not to be an endeavor subject to much blogging, my dispatches from the Frankfurt Book Fair. Category="Pontification," although Frankfurt may get its own cataegory, we're thinking this one through.
4. We'll also allude to miscellaneous events of note (largely though not exclusively ours). However for the complete skinny on events featuring our authors, we have a handy calendar on our website. We call it the Events page.
5. We'll also have occasional author interviews. We've found that it is not uncommon for a freelancer to do an interview with one of our authors (or even a feature, or review, or some such) and have it get killed by the editor for whatever reason. Where appropriate, legal, and approved and kosher and such, we'll post those. (Perhaps opinion pieces written by our authors that didn't make it past the Op-Ed editor? We'll take it as it comes...)
Also: please do bear with us as we embark on this process. We're woefully understaffed and undercapitalized—our primary obligation is to our books, and their authors, and making sure as many books get from the authors to you, the readers. In trying our best to do that, we always have to engage in triage, which can mean things are updated too often, or not enough, the site might be visually little clunky as we scrape together the hours needed to make it pretty, we may have all kinds of typos and broken links, and we might engage a little too much in the hard-sell. But so much of what allows us to do the books we do is the brute fact that we keep as low an overhead as possible, and sometimes all you get is what you pay for.
That said, it is our hope that this blog will mostly give you way more than what you pay for...
Thanks, folks!