It’s no secret that here at CMP we’re constantly inspired by insanely creative ways of asserting paper beyond a 2D plane. Many great projects in the indie publishing world have been popping up lately that don’t just think outside of the book marketing box, but completely break it. Here are a few that continue to feed my paper, letterpress, and origami addiction:

First comes my huge crush on Cloverfield Press of L.A., a small and exquisite publisher of short stories with letterpress covers and endpapers. Like any good Japanophile, my college habit of consuming anything and everything by Haruki Murakami led me to their beautiful limited edition of “Tony Takitani." Their books remind me very much of Japanese paperbacks in their commuter-friendly size (only 5.75” by 4.25”) but Cloverfield shows a much more careful attention to paper quality, hand numbers their books, and designs with a curator’s eye for clever patterning.

Also, our friends at Featherproof are winning droves of new fans with their free mini-books, combining the art of paper folding with their great lineup of prose. It's a thoughtful way to combine digital and print medias, plus offers that arts-and-crafts sensibility that so many of us lose once we graduate from elementary school. McSweeney’s has caught on, too, adding these to their extensive McSweeney's Recommends list.

Finally, nothing has quite brightened my day today like Cow Books of Tokyo, who are doing their part to get their wares back to their native habitats with field trips to the forest. There's something so eerily complete and humbling about a book in the middle of the woods.

In non-paper news, we're revamping our website and online store! Keep an eye out for the up-and-coming reincarnation of Chinmusicpress.com.

[Editor's Note: We're excited that author M. Thomas Gammarino (of Big in Japan: A Ghost Story) has found the time to write a blog entry for us. He's here in Seattle for his West Coast tour, and - inspired by the Advent Book Blog - decided to recommend a favorite book from 2009, Brian Boyd's On the Origin of Stories (Harvard University Press).
If you're in Vancouver, BC Canada tonight, you can hear Tom read at the fabulous Sophia Books at 450 West Hastings Street. Or come to our Seattle Shinnenkai (Japanese New Year celebration) tomorrow (Friday 1/8) at 6pm at the Little Red Bistro at 400 Dexter Avenue N, where Tom will be reading as well.

And now, without further ado, Tom Gammarino:]
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It‘s a curious question: Why would an animal refined through millions of years of evolution to maximize its chances of survival and reproductive success spend so much time engaging with stories that everyone knows not to be true?

Brian Boyd, best known until now as Vladimir Nabokov’s biographer, gives a refreshingly lucid answer in this masterful synthesis of literary and evolutionary theory. Fiction, argues Boyd, is fundamentally a form of play, and far from being an end in itself, play confers all sorts of evolutionary advantages on the player. Many species have evolved some sort of play, but pretend play is nearly exclusive to humans, which may go a way towards explaining our phenomenal “success.” No serious reader will be surprised to hear that fiction recalibrates our minds, that it enhances our abilities to understand other minds, to anticipate and empathize, to detect patterns, and to think beyond the here and now, helping us in some sense to rehearse for possible futures—what Boyd calls “the possible around the real.”

But how might such a hypothesis bear on the criticism of individual works? Naturally Boyd anticipates this, as one would anticipate he would anticipate (I could run with this for another couple of levels and you’d still know what I was talking about—your dog can’t do that), so he spends the second half of the book on “biocultural” analyses of The Odyssey and—from the other end of some spectrum or other—Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who! The glosses are persuasive throughout, if deliberately and unapologetically tangential, and I admit to having wondered occasionally whether this evolutionary lens wasn’t as reductive as some of the ideological monocles that give me such bad headaches. On the other hand, Boyd certainly never argues that this is the only way to read a text, and it’s only the religious fundamentalist, I think, who won’t find it a useful arrow in the quiver. I especially appreciated Boyd’s reclamation of human universals in a discipline that thought it had done with them several post-structuralist decades ago, and Boyd’s emphasis on the writer’s individuality and his/her (usually his—see Boyd) evolutionary agendas comes as a nice rebuff to aging shibboleths about the death of the author.

Is it too early for me to call On the Origin of Stories a “landmark” in literary criticism? Allow me to do it anyway.

The New York Times today added “teriyaki” to the list of Japanese culinary items bastardized in the United States. The primary culprit? Seattle, which is apparently home to 83 self-styled teriyaki joints.

In Seattle, according to southern food writer John T. Edge, teriyaki shows up in Vietnamese restaurants, in Hawaiian restaurants, on the menu of a Somali roadhouse. Even as the sauce drizzled on top of deep-fried corn dogs.

Often it has little in common with the glaze’s Japanese origins, incorporating non-traditional ingredients such as pineapple juice, peanut butter and lemongrass (separately, of course).

“Seattle has a thousand teriyakis,” [said Boo Yul Ko, owner of Manna Deli & Teriyaki] one afternoon. Her tone was dismissive, as if explaining the looming presence of the Space Needle to a not particularly bright child. “No Americans do the cooking. Koreans do.”

“This is Seattle food,” she said, extending her argument. “For Seattle people. This is what we eat here. Seattle people eat teriyaki. This isn’t Dallas.”

Let me get this straight: the company that brought us hourly sales rankings can't give us honest figures for Kindle sales and e-book downloads? This has smelled fishy to me for a long time, but blogger Mike Cane beat me to it in accusing Amazon of cooking the digital books.

It's simple: Amazon touts Kindle sales and e-book downloads to push the idea that most of us are reading digital books and that the Kindle is the de facto format for reading those books. Of course, if we use common sense, we know that most of us are not yet reading digital books and the Kindle is largely a toy of people who travel in business class or love to buy gadgets.

I'm convinced of two things: E-books are going to keep taking a larger share of the book-selling pie, and the Kindle is destined to be "a high-tech doorstop," as one former Amazon employee told me. The company is just playing the e-book game all wrong. The company acts as if it thinks more about its stockholders than its readers.

It puts out a press release that is impossible to confirm (we sold more e-books than physical books on Christmas Day) and makes statements that sound great but when you think about it, could mean all sorts of things (The Kindle "has become the most gifted item in Amazon's history" is one such statement. How does the company know which items are given as gifts?). It knows these statements will fly across the Internet with little or no skepticism attached. The stock price goes up, people think the Kindle is the ipod of music (it's not by a long shot), and the image of success is complete.

But the problem here is that the gadget that will get avid readers like me to buy an e-book reader is going to have to have more than image behind it. The Kindle just isn't interesting or useful or cheap enough to get me to put down my hardback and buy one. We all know when ipods and smart phones hit the tipping point; the current crop of ebook readers isn't there yet.

Until Amazon releases real figures that give us a detailed look at Kindle sales and e-book downloads, I say it should get no credibility. Stop with the smoke and mirrors and come clean, Amazon!

Of course, it will be difficult to come clean if Kindle sales aren't all that impressive. So I'm predicting continued silence from our Big Brother in Seattle.

This week, the bold, brave and very funny Tom Gammarino (Big in Japan) ventures into the remnants of the New York underworld for his first of three readings in the Big Apple. As we planned his trip, we thought to ourselves, "What better place to kick off this particular book tour than in a former massage parlor?" For those of you who've already read Big in Japan, you may be smirking with understanding. But for those of you who have yet to pick up your copy, you can catch Tom on his cross-country tour and hear for yourselves why we sought out the seedy.

Tonight, Wednesday 12/16 at 8pm, Tom is a guest at The Happy Ending Lounge (lower east side/Chinatown), a former erotic massage parlor turned lounge with a soft spot for events of the literary variety. Every third Wednesday, the Happy Ending Lounge features "I Had It Bad," a reading series "devoted to the embarrassing machinations of the human heart. Authors read fiction and nonfiction about things we feel, but wish we didn't." Again, a perfect venue in which to introduce Brain Tedesco, Big in Japan's unsettled, unsure and at times unsavory-minded protagonist.

Tom's New York tour continues next week at the famous KGB Bar, a New York literary establishment. He will be reading on Monday, 12/21 along with Xiaoda Xiao, the author of The Cave Man (published by our friends at Two Dollar Radio). The evening is entitled "Asia in the Age of Anxiety," and it begins at 7pm. Consider it a little indie press present, just in time for the holidays.

And last but certainly not least, next Wednesday, 12/23, Tom heads to Brooklyn, arguably the new home of the city's literary movement, for a jolly evening at Rocky Sullivan's (yet another NY bar who routinely open their doors for authors and publishers). Catch him there at 7pm.

Books will be available for sale at all three of these events. Or you can buy one from our website (free shipping) to read voraciously beforehand. Tom's also hitting up the Philadelphia area (his home town) on either side of the new year, so be sure to check out his entire east coast tour schedule here.

Get ready, Seattle & Vancouver...Big in Japan is coming your way soon!

This morning's Shelf Awareness contained upsetting news in the very first headline. Kirkus Reviews, the American book review trade publication, would close at the end of 2009. Kirkus published its first issue in 1933, and was bought by The Nielsen Company and as part of Nielsen Business Media's Literary Group. During this infamous recession of ours, Nielsen has also decided to close Editor & Publisher, a publication that has long covered the trends and pitfalls of the American newspaper industry. The New York Times reports that Nielsen Business Media intends to leave the trade publication business entirely.

Reactions to this news are, unsurprisingly, mixed. The New York Observer wastes no time waxing nostalgic. The article quotes literary agent Ira Silverberg, who remarked, "Hearing about their closing reminded me that [Kirkus] were still publishing." ICM co-head Esther Newberg also weighed in: "The reviews were almost always negative and not helpful in any way ... Good riddance." But are these perhaps disgruntled agents, who no doubt have to deal with even more disgruntled authors after the appearance of said negative reviews? As New York Magazine reminds us, Kirkus was always known as the surly, overly-critical grandmother of the review journal family. Boris Kachka writes, "Where PW went soft for a big name or a fresh face, Kirkus could usually be counted on to demolish the overblown writers, and to be unsparing when it came to first novels by photogenic young things. A rave in Kirkus was truly a prize; a hatchet job was an easy enough excuse for a bookstore owner, besieged by the sheer volume of books being flogged, to move on."

I myself am saddened to see Kirkus close its doors. I have great respect for the current team of editors there, and they have been consistently supportive of small indie presses like ourselves. I echo the Seattle PI "Shelf Talk" writer, David, who accurately notes, "Among its fellows - Publisher's Weekly, Booklist and Library Journal - Kirkus often held itself apart, slow to join in a chorus of adulation, and often the only eye to catch some promising talent or sleeper sensation in the offing." Amen. Let's not forget the fact that Kirkus was an early supporter of CMP's own Art Space Tokyo ("This gorgeous book is a working guide, but it's also a work of art."). The editors had a wonderful eye for the brilliant underdog, and were understanding of the realities of small-pressdom (slipping deadlines, printer issues, editors who are also authors who are also publicists who are also project underwriters). In this office at least, we're quietly mourning the loss of Kirkus Reviews.

As for the parent company, I bid Nielsen Business Media good riddance. Let yet another media conglomerate sink into the sticky sands of time. My money is on the little guys (no surprise there). We've always had small profit margins, and so this recession - while difficult, to be sure - is not necessarily bringing about a staggering, unmanageable loss in profits. In this business, every day brings a new challenge, an interesting angle to consider, and that is precisely why those of us here at CMP stick with this crazy publishing game. We'll keep bringing you beautiful, adventurous books, and we'll look for new voices out there to whom we can send review copies (and, coming soon, stickers!).

Just a few days ago, we lamented the meager numbers of literature and poetry that make their way from Japanese to English (see this post). Well, the Quarterly Conversation just published a piece, condensing the recommendations of more than 40 translators, publishers and agents about what they felt needs to be translated into English.

These were the recommendations concerning Japanese literature (click on each recommender's name for the rationale):

1. Yumeno Kyusaku's "Dogura Magura" -- suggested by Open Letters Press Publisher Chad Post and translator Michael Emmerich.

2. Hiromi Ito's "Oge Nuku Jizo: Shin Sugamo Jizo Engi" (The Thorn-pulling Jizo: New Tales of the Jizo at Sugamo) -- suggested by Jeffrey Angles of Western Michigan University.

But we would like to know what you think. So write us! And tell us what absolutely must be translated... and why.

The travails of the nation’s “most literate city”, Seattle, have garnered headlines nationwide – most recently in the Los Angeles Times.

[Side note: Watch for the release of the 2009 Most Literate City survey results in the next few weeks. The two perennial champions, Seattle and Minneapolis, have both lost daily papers and independent bookstores this year, factors which have contributed to their high rankings.]

Focusing on the news that the city’s flagship bookstore, Elliott Bay Book Co., is looking to move from its venerable headquarters in downtown’s Pioneer Square, or shut down, the Times saw Elliott Bay’s troubles as “the familiar story of an independent bookstore getting hammered by book chains, online retailers and big-store discounters…. [with some] peculiar Seattle wrinkles.”

Notable, though, is despite the fact that the Times gives lip service to the “familiar story” and that the Stranger’s Paul Constant directly fingered bookseller nemesis and local employer Amazon in the simultaneous closure of another independent bookstore, (“The simple fact of the matter is this: If you live on Capitol Hill and you've ordered books from an online retailer, you have a hand in Bailey/Coy's closing, especially if you've browsed at Bailey/Coy and then ordered the books online”), most of the commentary focused on other factors, mostly those unique to Seattle and Elliot Bay.

For instance, Knute Berger at Crosscut notes the impact of the recession, last year’s snowstorm and the decline of Pioneer Square. Michael Lieberman of Pioneer Square bookstore Wessel & Lieberman, says management was partly responsible:

Japanese magazine Plus Eighty One (+81), a self-proclaimed pioneer of the bilingual magazine in Japan, has been around for over a decade. Standing behind its subtitle “Creators On The Line,” +81 puts out a well-designed quarterly publication focusing on creative pursuits in a wide array of disciplines. Aside from its regular issues there have been five issues of the Voyage Edition, which up to now has focused on specific cities, countries, and regions such as Brazil, South Africa, and Scandinavia. Newest in the lineup is an enlightening voyage into the world’s magazine publishing industry. Billed as a “Tokyo Graphic Passport,” it in fact covers six different countries and a smattering of other locales in Asia and the rest of the world. Part discourse on the industry on a global scale and part travel guide for bibliophiles and magazine junkies, readers are treated to a diverse and creative format. Filled with images of Amsterdam, Paris, Berlin, London, New York, and Tokyo by photographer Taisuke Koyama, each city profile is broken down into several sections: an overview of “magazine circumstances” in each respective country, oddly succinct and fairly unnecessary histories of that country (limited to the European countries for some reason), a guide to outstanding bookstores in each country’s major city, a curatorial presentation of key magazines from each country, and an interview with a specific publisher/editor/designer followed by several pages of their magazine work. As the introduction notes, it is a chance to celebrate the appeal of the magazine, which was forced to evolve with the advent of television in the 1950s, as it is evolving once again now in the midst of the Digital Age.

Over at Three Percent (a blog named for the fact that translations make up only 3% of what’s published in the US), Chad Post, publisher of Open Letter Books, has just released the latest figures from his two-year-old translation database.

The total number of English translations of fiction and poetry dropped 7% this year, declining from 362 in 2009 to 335 this year. Among them, titles translated from Japanese decreased from 23 to 17, a whopping 26% decline. That makes Japanese the sixth most popular literature, behind Spanish, French, German, Arabic and even Swedish (in that order). It was fifth most popular last year.

The biggest factor behind the drop in Japanese translating appears to be a sharp decline in output from Vertical, Inc., which had been the single largest force in Japanese translation during the last few years. According to Post’s figures, Vertical published 10 translations in 2008 but only five in 2009. Interestingly, three publishers have emerged to take up some of the slack: White Pine Presss, Alma Books and Green Integer, each of which has published two translations from Japanese authors or poets in 2009.

The other major force these days in Japanese translation –- the Japanese government’s Japanese Literature Publishing and Promoting Center –- also saw a decline in books published from 5 in 2008 to 4 in 2009. Formerly known as the Japanese Literature Publishing Project, J-Lit Center has sponsored the translation of some 108 titles since 2002, many though not all of which have been translated into English. (Other target languages are French, German, Russian, and most recently, Indonesian.) It then sells the rights to these pre-translated works to foreign publishers so that they'll be disseminated abroad. But the real inducement is that the Center guarantees to purchase 2,000 copies of each title at 70% of list price.

Notwithstanding, only 34 titles have been published in English since the program’s inception in 2002.

Readers have been waiting for Vladimir Nabokov’s final novel, The Original of Laura (Dying is Fun), for years — decades, for some. In a 1976 letter, he described it as a “not quite finished manuscript of a novel.” That novel was finally published this November, and the book is a literary event.

The novel itself is disappointingly unfinished — nowhere near the “not quite finished” promise of Nabokov’s letter. There are, of course, passages of brilliance, as well as tantalizing hints as to where this complex story would have gone if it had been completed — tantalizing and frustrating. Some chapters seem completed; others are still skeletal. Anyone who is looking for a good novel to read — rather than undertaking the task of figuring out these fragments — should, instead, go to any one of Nabokov’s 17 completed novels.

Nonetheless, this is a literary event. The book itself is extraordinary.

Nabokov composed his novels on index cards, filling in one side of a card — complete with corrections, erasures, crossouts — and continuing on with the next one. (This is a method of composition that he shares with his fictional poet John Shade in Pale Fire: “The manuscript … consists of eighty medium-sized index cards, on each of which Shade reserved the pink upper line for headings …) In The Original of Laura, as published, those index cards have been recreated, complete with perforations for anyone who wishes to push them out and read the novel — almost literally — as Nabokov left it.

Not only is this a great innovation in publishing, it is a model for how posthumous works should be published. Something of this sort should be the model for not only posthumous publishing of the future, but also for a return to some mangled manuscripts currently in publication. Ernest Hemingway’s Garden of Eden, for example, was reworked, altered and published under his name after his death; that manuscript should be put into print following the model of Nabokov’s Laura. Let’s see the original. Emily Dickinson’s poems have been published in various forms, under various numbers, while her handwritten work should be accessible to any interested reader, certainly at less than this price.

Somewhere along the line, the publisher — Alfred Knopf, Random House — came up with a brilliant idea. Yes, a major publishing firm, or someone working within it, came up with a reason for a book being a book, rather than a Kindle. Anyone interested in uniquely published books should at least pick up The Original of Laura in the bookstore and look it over. Here is another review of the book, written by a top Nabokov scholar and biographer, Brian Boyd.

Our friend, journalist Eve Kushner, has decided to take the deplorable state of publishing into her own hands. She’s organizing “Chaat and Chats” a forum for authors (and artists) to meet directly with the reading (and viewing) public while noshing on “chaat”, Indian snacks.

It’ll take place 11am to 4pm on Saturday, December 5 at Taste of the Himalayas in Berkeley.

Unfortunately, Chin Music Press won’t be able to attend, but Eve will have a number of signed copies of our recent release “Oh! A mystery of mono no aware” on hand. Plus books and artwork from a slew of Bay Area creative types, several of whom deal with Asian issues, including Liza Dalby (author of "The Tale of Murasaki", and most recently, "Hidden Buddhas") and Wendy Tokunaga (author of "Midori by Moonlight", and now "Love in Translation"). For a list of who’ll be there, see the Chaat and Chats website.

Eve specializes in writing about Japanese subjects, and earlier this year interviewed “Oh” author Todd Shimoda in AsianWeek. Returning the favor, Todd reviewed Eve’s new book, "Crazy for Kanji: A Student’s Guide to the Wonderful World of Japanese Characters".

In the review, Todd says Eve’s enthusiasm for kanji is so infectious (she’s even named one of her two dogs Kanji), that he’s been inspired to get back to studying kanji. He’s hoping that one day he’ll be able to reread his favorite Japanese novel – Kobo Abe’s "The Ruined Map" – in Japanese.

A book about a frustrated and haunted musician/composer should have a playlist. Tom Gammarino has dutifully created one for his newly released novel, Big in Japan: A Ghost Story, and he's added commentary on how the main character, Brain (that's not a typo), would respond to each song. Check it out on Largehearted Boy. a music blog that also focuses on lit and pop culture.

The last stop on the Chin Music autumn book fair tour-de-force is New Orleans! We're bringing our titles to this year's New Orleans Bookfair, the self-proclaimed "annual book fair of muckraking." The 500-600 blocks of Frenchman Street will be overrun with a good cross section of the local literature-loving public this Saturday, November 7th from 10am to 6pm. This really isn't your typical fair; according to Susan Larson from the New Orleans Times-Picayune, NOLA Bookfair is a hotbed for indie publishers with its track record of a humorous, carefree atmosphere mixed with a sincere dedication to providing opportunities for small publishing houses to display their wares.

David Rutledge, editor of Do You Know? and New Orleans man-about-town, will be manning the Chin Music booth this Saturday. You may be able to catch him at the NOLA bookfair kickoff party this Friday from 6-9pm at Sound Cafe. Best of all, both events are free and promise to attract dedicated fair-goers in elaborate period costumes.

The Stranger's Paul Constant might be right that last weekend's Seattle Bookfest was a "disaster for many of the participants." But that certainly wasn't the case for us. In fact, it was our best event financially this year (and we had a presence at Portland's Wordstock, Chicago's Assoc. of Writers and Writing Programs Conference, and indirectly, via our friends at Two Dollar Radio, at the Brooklyn Book Festival and elsewhere).

Same was the case with our colleagues at Tara Books, an Indian publisher of beautiful handmade books which is represented by Jenn Abel (who also works on CMP's marketing and publicity). She tells me that Tara made its money back within two hours of the fair’s opening on Saturday, gave out lots of catalogs and added tons of people to the mailing list.

Similarly satisfied was Book Publishers Northwest, according to a comment left at the Slog responding to Paul's "mini-rant":

Book Publishers Northwest sold 4x the cost of our booth at Seattle Bookfest and talked to the organizers about buying an entire room next year. We did have a great location, just inside the front door. Many of our members that I talked to, and we had members scattered throughout the exhibits, were satisfied with sales.

Book Fest organizers tell us that some 3,000 people attended and contributed $6,400. Not bad for a first attempt, in my reckoning. San Francisco's Litquake, which, as I've argued here, is a good model for Seattle as it is more local-oriented than national, attracted only 400 people its first year, 1999, at the pinnacle of the Internet boom, when it was a single-day event known as Litstock. This year, it was 9 days long and attracted more than 10,000 people. (See this reference in the Chronicle.)

By contrast, Portland's Wordstock was already attracting 10 to 12,000 people in 2007, its third year of operation, according to Executive Director Greg Netzer. Netzer, who took over management of the festival that year, said that the organizers had no attendance data from the previous two years. Some 13-15,000 attended in both 2008 and 2009.

From what I've gleaned, at least some of the panels were well attended. Bloggers have confirmed that there was standing room only at the graphic novel panel, at Knute Berger's ('Mossback') reading from Pugetopolis, and at the controversial "Is Seattle Hostile to Literary Innovation," panel.

There were problems, of course. Most of the people I asked had issues with the Columbia City location, regardless of its funkiness and proximity to a light rail station (Wordstock's location at the Oregon Convention Center has even less to offer). City-wide marketing could have been improved, signage and parking made more available, and panel topics spruced up. Why didn’t the panels include any of Seattle's new "literary tastemakers" such as Costco's Penny Clark Ianiciello or librarian Nancy Pearl? Or tackle pressing issues like e-books (since we're the home of the Kindle) and the rumored move of Elliot Bay Bookstore to Capitol Hill, which was in the news during the conference itself?

Our friends at Exterminating Angel and Pilot Books were, of course, legitimately upset with their second-class placement in the portable classrooms, and should have received a discount off their exhibitor fees and better signage leading to their booths. Moreover, exhibitors should have been organized according to type, rather than seemingly in alphabetical order.

That said, is it really fair to say that the conference organizers were "irresponsible"? Anyone who agreed to pay for a booth or participate in a panel knew that this was a new fair, starting out in a year of a general recession, and had to consider it a gamble. But at $150 for a booth (half the price of exhibiting at Wordstock), it wasn't such a big gamble, even for a small publisher like us. And for us, at least, it proved to be a gamble well worth it.

For some constructive criticism of the festival, check out this post by Philip Weiss

Chin Music is coming to UH Manoa’s English Department this Thursday for a tag-team double feature! Joining their Colloquium and Reading Series, we're holding a reading and discussion of both Oh! with Todd and Linda Shimoda and our newest title, Big In Japan, with M. Thomas Gammarino. That’s right, you can experience two knockout Chin Music Press titles for the mere price of one! Well… this event is free, but you know what we mean.

The literary takeover is this Thursday, October 29th from 3-4:30pm at the University of Manoa Campus in Kuykendall, Room 410. For more information, you can contact the UHM English Department or take a look at Josh’s event flyer. That is, if you can tear your eyes away from that gorgeous mash-up of the two covers of the featured novels.

A smattering of public uncertainty and a few negative pre-reviews did nothing to stall the attendance at this past weekend’s Seattle Bookfest. The general buzz from the crowd was very positive, which was probably thanks to both the diversity of local exhibitors and the funky, decidedly grassroots-feel to the venue. It also certainly helped that Bookfest’s inaugural launch was held at the (currently unused) Orca K-8 School in Columbia City, which, while undeniably a little bit creepy, provided a meandering layout of nearly two dozen rooms that begged to be explored.

Chin Music had a great audience response. One commentator on Paul Constant’s recent post at The Stranger says that, along with the hard-to-beat Seattle Public Library $1 book swap, our $5 slightly used books were the highlight of the fest. Check out our spread with me in action, with Kate and Kenzo Rutledge helping behind the scenes:

Our big surprise came from a visit from Seattle mayoral candidate Joe Mallahan, whose campaign trail brought him straight to Bookfest. On early Saturday morning he came striding in with his entourage and made a beeline for our table, immediately picking up a copy of Kuhaku.

It turns out that after Mallahan finished graduate school he studied Japanese economic models as a Monbusho scholar near Tokyo. No endorsements from us here, but this is how Mallahan’s copywriter summed up our exchange:

At the Chin Music Press table, Joe compared notes on Japan with the young woman hosting the exhibit. He lived there for a year after finishing grad school, she had recently returned from two years there, and the two of them slipped easily into several minutes of conversation in Japanese. She glowed with delighted surprise that this mayoral candidate spoke her second language so well.

I wouldn’t say that I exactly “glowed with delighted surprise,” but I was indeed impressed that he could speak Japanese so well. Cheers to everyone, local celebrity or not, for coming out last weekend to support CMP.

The final stop on the Chin Music Press autumn tour is The New Orleans Book Fair on November 7th.

I was recently looking through a book of paper swatches our printer sent me, trying to pick out the flyleaves for our newest novel Big in Japan: A Ghost Story. I flipped through swatch after swatch: Cadet Blue, French Roast, Sapphire. They just weren’t doing anything for me. With each new swatch, I couldn’t help but think the same thing over and over: “These papers are just not baller to me.”

And if there’s one thing to say about Chin Music Press, it’s that we are straight baller, through and through. It’s just how we roll. I mean we step into a book fair like Wordstock and we just make it rain. Plain and simple. So you can imagine my distress as I peruse swatch after swatch of lackluster paper samples. And then finally, the very last swatch in the bunch, I found what I was looking for. “Alligator 520.” Motherf$%#in’ Alligator 520. Because if I’m gonna rock gator boots on my feet every night when I head out to the club, how can I expect anything less for my flyleaves?

UPDATE: Big in Japan: A Ghost Story, by M. Thomas Gammarino will be out November 1st, sans gator-skin flyleaves. The economy has hit us all hard.

This weekend (Oct. 24-25) marks the debut of the Seattle Book Fest, filling a hole for Seattle booklovers since the demise of the old Northwest Book Fest in 2004.

The festival will take place in Seattle's Columbia City neighborhood at the Columbia City Event Center (3528 S. Ferdinand St.), only a block away from the new Columbia City light rail station. And unlike the last Northwest Book Fest in 2003, which saw a 55 percent plunge in attendees after a $10 admission fee was charged, admission will be free, but with a $5 suggested donation. From the Seattle Times' summation:

The festival will feature more than 60 local authors, including Seattle-based Garth Stein, author of the best-selling "The Art of Racing in the Rain"; mystery writers Mike Lawson and Robert Ferrigno; literary librarian Nancy Pearl; women's fiction author Jennie Shortridge; novelist Randy Sue Coburn; and poets Sam Hamill and Judith Roche. Fifty exhibitors — including local bookstores Third Place Books and Fremont Place Books; the nonprofit organization Friends of the Library; and publishers Sasquatch Books, University of Washington Press, Mountaineers Books, Copper Canyon Press, Black Heron Press and Fantagraphics Books — have signed up. Panels, workshops and special events will include a Scrabble contest, spelling bee, a bookbinding demomonstration, and a workshop on "how to write a novel in a month."

The program appears decidedly local. Organized by Paul Doyle, the director of the independent Columbia City Cinema, its main sponsors are the Columbia City Business Association and the Rainier Chamber of Commerce. Stranger book critic Paul Constant has already written a negative pre-review:

I'm doing a panel at this Bookfest, but I'm skeptical about how things will go. Major bookstores—Elliott Bay Book Company and University Book Store—aren't taking part, and aside from Pete Dexter, there isn't a single participant who doesn't read in Seattle all the freakin' time.

He's placing his bets on a competing book fair, reportedly being planned for 2010 or 2011 by the University of Washington and the University of Washington Bookstore. "This town ain't big enough," he claims, for both. Or maybe it is, counters author Matt Briggs, the main blogger behind Seattle's edition of Reading Local.

The fact is Seattle seems to have constant bookfests going on. The Esoteric Book Conference was in mid-Sept. Last weekend was the Antiquarian Bookfest. Next weekend is the Anarchist Book Festival, and now there is the new Seattle Book Fest. I am glad the organizers of the festival were as ambitious as they were to attempt to pull of a festival in the monolithic spirit of Wordstock (in Portland) or the old, defunct NW Bookfest. But those events had sponsors, and in this case there is just two people in Columbia City who said they wanted to hold a book fest.

Paul Nelson, a poet, and panel emcee for the festival, commenting on the Stranger's website, argues that the festival should be local and grassroots.

It's a chance for local authors to see and meet other local authors and for small presses to create greater awareness of their books and authors. As the Bumbershoot Book Fair is now toast, there are not enough of these opportunities for local, small presses.

Rather than pattern a Seattle book fair on the old Northwest Book Fest, why not focus on the local, as Paul suggests? Portland's Wordstock is already filling the gap that the Northwest Book Fest previously filled. And if San Francisco's LitQuake festival is any guide (sitting in the shadow of the gargantuan Los Angeles Festival of Books), a local festival can be successful, too. At least according to the New York Times:

[LitQuake] was, over all, a pep rally, an emblem really of the school spirit that San Francisco literary life has established in the last decade or so. And though the city has a venerable history in letters, the community of writers has never been as, well, communitylike as it is today. Like the thriving theater culture in Chicago, which coalesced around a few key companies and created an important center for the art form without becoming a rival to New York City as a center for theater commerce, so San Francisco's writers have come to recognize and trumpet the idea that this city prizes their craft, its solitary difficulty and what can emerge from it, even though there isn't much of a publishing industry here.

Indeed, authors have to be local to participate in LitQuake. One of our authors, Todd Shimoda of Oh! A mystery of mono no aware, just gave a reading at LitQuake's literary bar crawl, LitCrawl. In order to participate, he had to show on his application that he was a "local writer or somehow connected to the Bay Area" (he was a former resident and graduate of Cal Berkeley, though he now lives in Hawaii).

If we are truly the nation's most literate city (see my blog post here), then surely we have enough local talent to fit the bill.

Chin Music Press will be participating in the Seattle Book Fest. Come check us out!

I'm just back from a fruitful trip to Canada, where I attended the first annual Bookcamp Vancouver, a daylong discussion of where the publishing industry is headed. The conference was dubbed an "unconference," which made me a little queasy (what the hell is an "unconference"?), but when I joined the sessions, I soon found out that it meant a moderator would lead a free-ranging discussion with the audience as opposed to assembling a panel of experts and ending with a short Q&A. Because the Bookcamp attendees had impressive knowledge of the industry and where it's likely to go, the unconference format worked wonderfully.

One panel that stood out for me — "Digital Rights Management Versus the Inevitability of Free Content" — was moderated by Sean Cranbury of Books on the Radio. The 45-minute session was spirited and insightful. Since DRM is something I knew little about, I'm sure my summary here will miss the mark in places, but here are some of the highlights from this discussion:

Cranbury defined DRM as "any lock on a file that prevents a person from doing what they want with that file." In this case, we were talking about publishers and vendors keeping e-books from being disseminated freely online. He contrasted this with how a bookseller currently views the sale of a physical book: "Once you give me the money and I've given you the book, we're done. See you next time. And you can give that book to 50 people or leave it in a youth hostel in Greece. I don't care. We're done."

He defined "free content" as "paid content that's free to share." In other words, an e-book that has been paid for but can be shared freely and widely. And then he touched off the conversation with this statement: "There is no evidence to show that a file that's been shared is a lost sale."

From there, I couldn't keep up with who was saying what (seeing as I knew about three people in the room), but here's a sampling of some of the comments that stood out for me.

One avid reader bemoaned the fact that e-books using DRM take away the ability of friends to share their favorite books. "I have this fantasy that I'll have 20 Kindles on my bookshelf so I can lend them out."

Another person suggested that publishers need to "shift consumer perception toward the idea that they're entering a licensing agreement" rather than an out-and-out purchase. But another commenter wondered if consumers would be willing to swallow the idea that there were restrictions on an e-book that aren't there on a physical book.

Many people referred to the music industry to discuss parallels in publishing. Here's Cranbury's take on the music industry's understanding of the digital shift: "They denied the technology, then they fought it, then they sued. Those are the three dumbest things you can do."

People discussed freedom and privacy concerns, especially after the Amazon 1984 debacle, and started to discuss distinctions the publishing industry should seek out to avoid the music industry's pitfalls. One person noted that "there's a difference between copying for profit and copying for a friend."

Finally, several people discussed an interesting O'Reilly report that looked at the P2P impact on book sales. It found that pirated versions of books typically didn't show up on file-sharing sites until about five months after the book had launched. Also, once the pirated version started appearing on sites, publishers typically saw a 6.5% spike in sales!

We ran out of time with the discussion in full gear -- in fact this happened at every talk I attended at bookcamp. Later, Cranbury mentioned to me that he had wanted to close the DRM session with the idea that the digital shift "is going to happen and we have less control over it than we think."

More reason for small publishers to stay nimble and look for openings to dart through as soon as they appear.