Perseus Books Group is putting its own spin on how to approach BEA. The company is promising to publish a book within 48 hours and have it ready for a launch party in its booth at 4 p.m. Saturday. The idea, said chief marketing officer Rick Joyce, is to disprove the notion that book publishing is a technology backwater.
The book's content will feature a series of first sentences from the sequel to any book ever written from any publisher, and beginning April 27 Perseus has set up the www.bookthesequel.com Web site to accept submissions for the book, which is being called Book: The Sequel. (Sample suggestion: “You see—I was right,” from Das Kapital Redux). The editorial team, headed by PublicAffairs executive editor Clive Priddle, will begin creating the manuscript from the submissions the Thursday afternoon before the official start of BEA. Perseus is planning to post a schedule of when events will be occurring in the booth—such as designing the cover—and inviting feedback. The aim is to produce a book in all physical and digital formats by Saturday. Perseus plans to sell the 144-page book under the PublicAffairs imprint and will donate royalties to the National Book Foundation. The trade paperback original will be priced at $9.95.
PublicAffairs has had some experience crashing books. Last year at BEA it used Lightning Source to produce quick versions of Scott McClellan's What Happened when it became an overnight hit, but Joyce said the exercise planned this year is more akin “to exploding a book.” He's pretty sure Perseus can pull it off, but said, “It will be a challenge. That's what will make it exciting.”
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