The
New York Times Sunday Book Review section recently featured a full-page ad highlighting
the 15-year anniversary of C-SPAN-2 Book TV. On the one hand, showcasing tens
of thousands of hours or programming dedicated to books is great. But on the
other hand, it falls far short of what is needed to truly promote the book
publishing world.
Take
a look: the ad boasted of featuring 9,000 authors, but when you do the math,
that’s fewer than two per day. Heck, in one 30-minute segment you could easily
feature five authors.
Perhaps
the problem is that C-SPAN-2 runs a long speech given by an author and then
reruns it on a loop. Instead, such valuable air-time could be used to review
books, interview authors, or feature shorter speeches that get aired just once.
Don’t
get me wrong. I have nothing against any media outlet that highlights the art
of writers. But if no other station will step forward to promote books, we need
C-SPAN-2 to increase and diversify its coverage. Over the duration of its
existence, I calculate no fewer than four million books were published. They
covered about a fourth of one percent of such books.
C-SPAN-2
wouldn’t even need much of a budget to produce significantly more programming.
It doesn’t take a lot of resource to put on roundtables, interviews, or book
readings. Heck, even airing two-minute book trailers created by authors and
publishers would be helpful to launching a bigger buzz over a greater number of
titles than is presently generated by the TV station.
But
it’s not just to one station to rescue an entire industry. I would love to see
book-related shows and segments air across the TV landscape. Every station can
have a themed book show.
Couldn’t
ESPN feature, once-a-week, a show highlighting sports books? Or maybe the Cooking Channel can cover the new cookbooks. Or can the Weathet Chanel talk to authors of
books about great storms or rescue techniques?
I
know the major networks and leading cable stations can do more to keep books in
front of the public eye. I hope they do. TV executives should realize it’s a
low-cost venture to feature books and authors.
Maybe
one day publishing will get its own reality show. I don’t know if that’s a good
thing, but right now, more TV coverage is preferred.
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BOOK
EXCERPTS:
“To
Life”
“Changing
your life can affect the lives of people around you, and can create a ripple
effect that spreads its influence farther and farther.”
“People
are not afraid of dying, they are afraid of having not lived.”
“We
want to live long enough to get it right, to know that we have realized our
potential and made a difference to the world.”
“Don’t
spend your whole life, with its potential for holiness, on eating, sleeping,
and paying your bills.”
“The
lesson that the world can be a cruel and unfair place is one we need to learn.”
“We
reduce prejudice best by fostering a climate in which it is socially
unacceptable to express prejudiced feelings about another group.”
“We
all have many loyalties- to our families, to our faith, to our job, as well as
to our country- and sometimes those loyalties come into conflict.”
“We
hate people because they remind us of something we hate about ourselves… We are
projecting on to them qualities we don’t want to have associated with
ourselves… People hate, then, because they are small-souled, insecure,
emotionally flawed people. In many cases, they hate themselves first and have
to convince themselves that other people are even worse.”
“For
one day, we try to see the world as it is supposed to be, free of pain and problems,
to hold on to the vision of what it could be if we could just finally manage to
get it right. We needn’t worry, our problems won’t disappear. They will all be
there waiting for us at Sabbaths end- the unpaid bills, the family conflicts,
the problems at work. But for one day, we will have had the liberating
experience of not worrying about them.”
“We
are free to choose how we will live and behave. But we can give away that
freedom by the choices that we make. Every time we choose one path over another,
we are choosing not only for that moment. We are shifting the odds as to how we
will choose the next time we face that situation. For example, if we once cheat
on our diet or falsify information on our income tax return, the next time we
face that choice we will not only have to deal with the temptation again, we
will have to deal with the memory of ourselves as a certain kind of person who
cheats or falsifies. A person can freely choose to become dependent on drugs or
alcohol, so bound to a certain habit that he can no longer freely choose
whether to give it up or not. Think of a person standing at cross-roads, having
to choose between two alternate paths. For the moment, each of them is equally
accessible. But every step taken down path A makes it easier to continue down
path A and harder to turn back and choose path B. What was originally an even
choice has now become an uneven one.”
Brian Feinblum’s
views, opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog are his alone and not that of
his employer, the nation’s largest book promoter. You can follow him on Twitter
@theprexpert and email him at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels more important when discussed in the third-person. This
is copyrighted by BookMarketingBuzzBlog © 2013
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