Posted by: Frances Bedford - Publicity Manager

For the first time in its 104-year book-publishing history, McClelland & Stewart will debut a book in serialized podcast format.

Free audio episodes from The High Road by Terry Fallis will be posted weekly starting June 1, 2010, with the finale airing October 12, 2010. A print and e-book edition will be available for sale beginning September 7, 2010.

The High Road is the highly anticipated sequel to Terry Fallis’s award-winning novel, The Best Laid Plans. The High Road podcast will be read by the author and available, chapter by chapter, in its entirety, in audio download format from www.terryfallis.com and iTunes, among other podcast directories.

This unconventional publishing strategy has already proven successful for Mr. Fallis. His first novel, The Best Laid Plans, began as a podcast, then was self-published, won the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour, and was re-published in print and e-book format to great reviews by McClelland & Stewart. The Best Laid Plans podcast has drawn 3500 subscribers from all over the world.

In a statement posted to his website, Mr. Fallis says:
“I’ve always been a firm believer in the power of podcasting to build an audience, even for literature. I also believe that if listeners like what they hear, even if it’s free, a good portion of them will go out and buy the book. …This decision reflects enlightened thinking by a traditional publisher and a willingness to test the social media waters and explore how it can help drive interest in, and sales of, a book. In this case, my book. Think of it as new media supporting old media.”

Doug Pepper, President and Publisher of McClelland & Stewart Ltd. says:
“For 104 years M&S; has been staying on top of new trends and looking ahead for new ways to market books. We are excited about this opportunity to partner with a savvy author and be adventurous with a bold new idea to build an audience for our books. We expect that, as with the success of The Best Laid Plans, the free podcast will encourage pre-publication word of mouth and ultimately drive sales of the print and e-book editions that follow.”

The High Road by Terry Fallis (Emblem Editions, $19.99, original trade paperback) will be published in print and e-book format on September 7, 2010. This deeply funny satire continues the story of Angus McLintock, an amateur politician who dares to do the unthinkable: tell the truth.

Click here to listen now to the first chapter of The High Road by Terry Fallis.

Posted by: Deon Meyer - author of Thirteen Hours

I have to tell you about my mother.

I know, I know, it’s not the kind of blog subject you’ll expect from a South African crime author, but bear with me, it should all make sense in the end.

My mother. Eighty years old, sharp as a tack, still fiercely independent in her own apartment, a stone’s throw from the Milnerton beach near Cape Town. Every time I publish a new book, I duly deliver one to her, and then the ritual starts. Nowadays, it takes about two weeks before the call comes.

“Hello, my child,” she says.

I’m fifty-one years old, but I’m still ‘my child’.

“Hi, mom.” Bright and breezy, with feigned surprise, even though I know what’s coming. Long silence.

I wait.

Finally, with that exasperated tone of the failed parent: “I did not raise you like that.”

“I know, mom.”

“Where did you learn those words? Not from me, that’s for sure.”

“Of course not, mom.”

“What are my friends going to think? Did you consider that?”

“I’m sorry, mom …”

And when I finally and gently put down the receiver twenty apologetic minutes later, I wonder if I’m the only one. Did Connelly and Child, Barclay and Blunt, Rankin and Mankell get similar calls? Did they feel as guilty?

I mean, I’m fifty-one, for goodness sake.

This past weekend, I had the wonderful privilege of being guest of honour at the Bloody Words Mystery Conference in Toronto. Like all book people across the globe, they were welcoming, kind, hospitable, organised, and passionate. They did not seem to care about ‘those words’ in my books. I was treated like royalty. I had a great time. Until my mother’s voice reached across tens of thousands of kilometers and six time zones, to whisper in my ear.

It was during the Friday night panel with the delightful Ann Mummenhoff as chair, about my life and work. It was all going swimmingly, I thought I was on a roll. And in the middle of a sentence, out of nowhere, I heard my mother’s voice, clear as a bell: Jackal praises its own tail. It’s an old Afrikaans saying, and basically means that it is impolite to talk about yourself, and downright sinful if you start liking it.

I stuttered for a moment, decided to ignore the voice, and soldiered on.

But sooner or later, I will have to explain the seduction of the book tour to my mother. How you get up from your writing, all humbled by the process and very reluctant to talk about yourself, and then you fly off to a place where people ask you questions about yourself, they listen intently when you answer, and even applaud at the end of it all.

During the first week, you unwillingly start opening up.

During the second week, you start getting used to it.

In the third week, you start liking it, and somewhere in the fourth, you can’t seem to stop.

And then, you go home, and your wife tells you to take out the garbage and mow the lawn, and your teenage kids demand that you to ‘pleeeeze’ stop talking about yourself, your two brothers call and insult you and your favourite rugby team, and you come down to earth with a bang.

So, finally, allow me to explain why I had to write about my mother: I was asked to contribute to this blog. I thought about it long and hard. Realised it could be about anything, but not about myself. Because my mother wouldn’t like that.

Posted by: Julie Forrest - Marketing Coordinator, Digital Specialist

I belong to a wonderful book club made up of twelve smart and savvy people who love to read. We all adore books, and we’re very social, but we’re also just a little bit geeky (and I mean that in the nicest possible way). I knew we all had embraced the digital world, but I was still rather amazed when it dawned on me that between us we were reading on every major device available in Canada. We have an iPad, a Sony Reader, a Kindle, a Kobo and a few iPhones and Blackberrys.

So I asked everyone to bring their favourite e-reader to our last meeting for a little show and tell. I also asked folks to champion their preferred device. Here’s what they had to say:

Sandra received a Kobo for Mother’s Day…

I like the Kobo e-reader because of its price point. At $149, it’s a much easier decision to make to take the plunge to an e-reader. It isn’t too “precious” - I’d be worried about running around with an iPad or something more expensive or fragile. And the e-book purchases are through Indigo, a Canadian company. The stylish aqua leather case isn’t too bad either! -Sandra

Lisa is the proud new owner of an iPad…

I had never considered an e-reader until my husband purchased an iPad. I really did not expect to like it as much as I do. It’s small enough to hold and read in bed, more compact than my laptop and the colour and images are gorgeous. I think I prefer to read printed books but I plan to load up some ebooks to our iPad for an upcoming family vacation. If there’s enough memory and a camera in the next generation iPad, it will probably become my computer. The keyboard is not great so I would need an auxiliary keyboard and obviously still need a phone (I love my Blackberry for email and phone). So the iPad and Blackberry are the perfect combination for me. I can see the appeal of dedicated e-readers, but given the prices I can’t see myself buying one. -Lisa

Elle is the proud owner of a Kindle…

I got my Kindle six months ago, for Christmas, and I can say honestly it has been the best Christmas present ever. When I travel, my husband has always joked about needing an extra suitcase to pack my books. Now I can just load up the Kindle and I only need to take one. While I know the device isn’t perfect (no ability to lock documents, not a terribly efficient “filing” system and a completely inexplicable “page numbering” system) many of these problems are the result of being a first generation product. The Kindle does do other things very well: you can bookmark documents, “highlight” passages and take notes - all valuable features when you spend time reviewing books. Also, as a person who is notorious for flipping to the end to find out how a book ends (yes, I cheat) it forces you to read in the moment. Lastly, I love that the screen is NOT backlit - it really does replicate the book-reading experience remarkably well. The Kindle will never replace physical books. I love the shape and feel and smell of real books, and there is something to be said for the ability to flip back easily to a prior page to remind yourself of something you read previously, but for those books you may never read again, or for space saving, you can’t lose with the Kindle.

I have a Sony Reader. While I’m lusting after the iPad, it won’t replace my Sony Reader for books. No backlighting and no wireless are features, not drawbacks for me. I like to read for hours at a time, and e-ink is easy on the eyes. Plus, I have a little case of ADD, and not being able to check Twitter for a few hours is a good thing for me.

Though most of us are e-reading at least some of the time, we still have a couple if devotees of the printed book. Alice is a Librarian and she’s not buying a smart phone or an e-reader anytime soon…

I read blogs and news online, but when it comes to novels, I want to curl up with a book. Partly because they are easier on the eyes, partly simply the tactile pleasure and book design, a “device” is just not the same as a book. I am, frankly, not even tempted. (Plus, spilling tea on a book is not nearly as disastrous!) -Alice

Posted by: Tan Light - Coordinator, Digital Sales & Marketing

Have you heard of the New Face of Fiction? Perhaps not, but undoubtebly you are aware of its members; Ann-Marie MacDonald, Yann Martel and Ami McKay to name a few. Oh, and Canada Reads winner Nicolas Dickner (NFOF 2008) and Amazon.ca First Novel Award winner Jessica Grant (NFOF 2009). So, I guess you could say it’s kind of a big deal.

Nearly 40 books have been published into the New Face of Fiction program in the last 14 years. To celebrate this fact, and our upcoming anniversary, Stoneleigh New Zealand Wine - the official partner of BookClubs.ca - generously offered to sponsor the first ever New Face of Fiction Reader’s Choice Award. After polling Canadian readers across the country, we are very proud to announce that Ann-Marie MacDonald is the winner! On Wednesday, April 28 she was presented with a basket of Stoneleigh wine and a giant cheque for $2000 at a reception in Toronto.

To further the excitement around this program, Random House of Canada partnered with the Connect program at The Design Exchange, to hold a competition for graphic design students across the country. Thier mission was to help us reimagine the New Face of Fiction logo. The results of this competition were unveiled the same night that Ann-Marie was honoured with the New Face of Fiction Reader’s Choice Award. It must have been a very tough call for judges Douglas Coupland, CS Richardson, Louise Dennys, Heather Reisman and Katie Weber, but in the end, three designers were honoured:

Winner - Wesley Tsang, University of Toronto and Sheridan Institute
Runner-up - Christina Martensen, University of Toronto Mississauga
3rd place - Greg Webber, New Brunswick College of Craft and Design

Wesley Tsang will have the opportunity to work with the Random House of Canada design team to incorporate his logo onto our 2011 New Face of Fiction paperback covers. If you are in Toronto this May, you can visit the New Face of Fiction exhibit at The Design Exchange, 234 Bay Street.

Posted by: Amanda Lewis - Production Editorial Assistant, Random House of Canada

Ahhh, nothing beats dinner and a show, especially when said show combines literature and music. On May 1, we donned our finest and flocked to Hugh’s Room in Toronto’s West End for the inaugural Torn from the Pages: An Evening of Music and Prose, part of the Globe and Mail Open House Festival. Musician and author Dave Bidini hosted the event, with proceeds going to PEN Canada and Frontier College.

The evening’s theme was interpretation. Presenters selected books from a single publisher’s catalogue, in this case the venerable Coach House Books. Authors read from their own works or those of others, and musicians interpreted the books into a song or two.

After we finished our salads and entrees we settled back for the show. First up, local poet Matthew Tierney read two poems from Jeremy Dodds’s acclaimed Crabwise to the Hounds, and two from his own book, The Hayflick Limit. He had the crowd tittering with Dodds’s “Epileptic Acupuncturist,” and snagged me with the lines “The mind is a terrible thing/to keep chaste.” The Prince Brothers then set Dodds’s book to music. The combo of the chorus—“acrobats in waiting rooms/flipping through magazines”—and the slide guitar had me reminiscing about watching planes fly overhead in the fields near the Vancouver Airport. Who knows how these associations work.

Sheila Heti, writer and creator of the Trampoline Hall lecture series, was next, reading selections from Darren O’Donnell’s Your Secrets Sleep with Me. In addition to being a writer, O’Donnell is the artistic director of Mammalian Diving Reflex, and one of Heti’s favourite theatre artists. Selina Martin, in white vinyl boots, then took the stage. Blame serendipity: Martin’s song was based on many of the excerpts that Heti had read. If the nodding head of the mustachioed man in the front row was any indication, they both pulled it off admirably.

We then moved west to Winnipeg. Writer Charles Molgat read from Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg, based on Maddin’s film of the same name. Wearing a hockey sweater emblazoned with the logo of My Winnipeg’s mythic Black Tuesdays, Molgat read about major moments in Winnipeg history, including razing the Eaton’s to make way for an ice rink. Manitoba-born singer-songwriter Paul Linklater confessed he chose My Winnipeg as his book to interpret because it was the only one that he could watch on DVD … and even then, he never got around to watching it. He could have fooled me. With his wife, Donna, he played two songs, backed by a delightfully effervescent drummer.

Are you catching the rhythm of the evening? Welcome to intermission, and strawberry sorbet.
The second set was more streamlined, as writers read from their own works rather than others’. Andrew “Double Threat” Wedderburn, himself a musician, read from The Milk Chicken Bomb, a novel about, among other topics, vindictive lemon seeds and how many crumpled balls of foolscap a ten-year-old boy can fit in his mouth before the sodden wads of paper become stuck. For the record, the answer is four. Cuff the Duke’s guitarist Wayne Petti’s sartorial perfection was an ideal introduction to his (by his own admission) creatively titled song “The Milk Chicken Bomb.” Confidence abounded.

Playwright and novelist Claudia Dey did an amazing reading from her debut novel, Stunt. Takeaway advice: always match your outfit to your book. With her black shirt and pants, red boots, and long necklace that mimicked the rope on the cover, Dey coordinated perfectly with Stunt. The Billie Hollies were magnificent in their rendition of Dey’s novel. You might not think a French horn, clarinet, autoharp, stand-up bass, electric guitar, and operatic vocals are the obvious choice to interpret a book about family, the darker parts of ourselves, and tightrope walking. But you’d be wrong.

The night closed with a reading from the bestselling Canadian poetry book of all time. And no, the reclusive bard of Montreal did not make an appearance. Christian Bök’s reading from Eunoia was my personal highlight of the event. Eunoia, perhaps more than any other work in the program, demands to be read aloud. Dressed in a grey suit, Bök even reminded me of David Byrne. He issued a disclaimer—NSFW (Not Safe for Work)—before reading excerpts from the expletive-laden Chapter U. His performance, with its vitality, cacophony, assonance, and expert pacing, merged music and literature so successfully that further musical interpretation was hardly needed. But boy, was it welcome. Dave Bidini and Bidiniband then finished the set with a song that used all five vowels, plus y, and even a range of consonants. Their version of Chapter U set a man dancing solo between the tables. NSFW, indeed.

When the lights came up, we turned to each other, sated and beaming. The evening was a resounding success. An event with such a multitude of performers necessitated numerous set changes, and the transitions were all fairly seamless. The music breathed new life into the texts, if not tearing then gracefully easing them from the pages. Funds went to incredibly worthy literacy organizations. The merch table was swamped. And the paprikash was delicious.

Posted by: Cassandra Sadek - Marketing Manager, Digital Specialist

We sat down with Helen Simonson to ask her some questions about her life as a writer and her new book Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand. The New York Times declared it “Funny, barbed, delightfully winsome storytelling… As with the polished work of Alexander McCall Smith, there is never a dull moment but never a discordant note either.” Here’s what Helen had to say:

Q. How would you summarize your book?

A. Can a retired Major, in an English village, set aside tradition and obligation to pursue an unexpected friendship and a second chance at personal happiness?

Q. How do you choose your characters’ names?

A. Names seem to pop up along with the characters and I find it is very hard to try to impose something else, once a character has introduced himself or herself. I do remember enquiring about a holiday cottage in England and receiving a very polite reply from a Mrs. Pettigrew. I tucked the name away in my head for future use.

Q. How many drafts do you go through?

A. The poet and former US Poet Laureate, Billy Collins, likes to freak out audiences of aspiring poets by claiming, tongue-in-cheek, never to revise. I tend to revise as I go, line by line and chapter by chapter. When I wrote ‘the end’ I thought it was done. However, between an MFA thesis committee, my agent, and my Random House editor (and I), we must have gone through at least eight sets of notes and suggested revisions; and that was before I was fed to the copy editors like raw steak to tigers. Someone warned me that copy editing was like full body flossing, but I was charmed when my copy editor broke from the standard copy marks to pencil ‘Go Major!’ in a margin.

Q. If you could talk to any writer living or dead who would it be, and what would you ask?

A. I’d like to ask Shakespeare what he thinks of the gravitas now accorded his works, and whether he knew what he was onto when he churned out his little cross-dressing crowd-pleasers. Also, how does he feel that while only the bible outsells him, Agatha Christie continues to pursue him closely from the number three spot?

Q. Who is the first person who gets to you read your manuscript?

A. My husband, John, is a banker, not a writer. Yet he has turned out to be a fine editor and, since he knows me so well, he can spot right away when I’m being lazy. For many years I was in a small writing group in Brooklyn (hi to Katherine, Miriam, Christina and Beth) and there is nothing better than a few trustworthy friends, a cheap bottle of wine and everyone reading pages.

Q. What is the first book you remember reading?

A. I remember in England we had Ladybird books; thin hardbacks with full color pictures on the left and words on the right. There were series after series from just a few words per page to condensed versions of Treasure Island and Shakespeare. They literally colored my childhood reading.

Q.What’s on your nightstand right now?

A. A blistering modern Indian novel that was the 2008 Man Booker winner, called White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga (Free Press). A new (Bloomsbury Publishing) reissue of wonderful 1931 novel called The Brontes go to Woolworths by Rachel Ferguson, which is a comedy with strange, dark edges. Cathleen Schine’s The Three Weissmanns of Westport, a modern reimagining of Sense and Sensibility (I received an advance copy - one of the more delightful perks of being an almost published writer).

Personally, I think this would make a great pick for book clubs. You can read the entire interview with Helen Simonson here, or read an excerpt from Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand here.