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Sarah Walker is a successful television writer, including being credited with an episode of the final season of Silicon Valley. While the imprint did not thrive, I’m awfully proud of my ability to identify talent.
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One of the few remaining artifacts of the imprint on the web is a desperate tongue-in-cheek plea by me begging people to sample the books for free in an effort to stoke word of mouth action. Still we soldiered on, putting more titles into the world until a combination of internal issues at F+W, Jane Friedman leaving for greener pastures ( she’s now a hugely in demand all-around books and publishing expert), and a global recession killed it. I thought the books turned out great, but like most books, the sales were modest. For about 36 hours I felt like a big shot (pardon the pun). The books were bound together in a super cool Advance Reader Copy and given out at Book Expo America by F+W, along with TOW Books shot glasses. It’s a shame, it was really funny, and had it sold like anticipated, the imprint might’ve launched with additional energy.īut we also had other good books in the queue, including Oh, The Humanity!: A Gentle Guide to Social Interaction for the Feeble Young Introvert by Jason Roeder: So we all folded and the book was pulped. A decision would be literally years down the line, and even a positive outcome would do nothing for the fate of the book.
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If I went forward, the organization would’ve considered taking on the case for free, but I alone would be liable for any damages if we lost. I had a lawyer for a nonprofit law group that takes on First Amendment cases (not the ACLU) say that he thought it could be a Supreme Court test case, along the lines of the famous 2 Live Crew Pretty Woman case. Now, this is all something of a legal grey area in terms of what is satire and what is parody and what is and is not allowed. Unfortunately, a few weeks prior to the book’s release, the publisher of the original EB mysteries decided to challenge our right to publish, sending a letter threatening legal action if the book was released.
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Bush was drawn from a series of parodies I’d done at the Modern Humorist website using the childhood detective to lampoon our political culture. Encyclopedia Brown and the Mysterious Presidency of George W. That first book, the one I wrote, was well into multiple printings on pre-orders alone. Well…things were looking great for awhile. The plan was that I would write the first book and then we’d release a few a year under the banner, trying to leverage the audience at the McSweeney’s website into sustainable sales.
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I don’t think any of us figured it for a gazillion-dollar idea, but it seemed fun.
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Jane would handle everything at the publisher.
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My responsibility was to recruit writers and edit their books.
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It sounded like a great idea, so I dreamed up TOW Books, giving it a fake backstory of having origins with a grandfather who was a tow truck driver who self-published joke books that he would sell to people when he arrived to haul their cars. At the time, I was also editing McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, a cultishly popular humor website, of which Jane was a fan, and being an enterprising thinker, she asked what I thought of creatively overseeing an imprint under the F+W Publications (the corporate entity that included Writer’s Digest) banner. I didn’t have space to tell the story of how I once had my own publishing imprint, so I’m going to do that here.Īs I recall, TOW (The Original Warner) Books was not actually my idea, but was instead spawned by Jane Friedman who had been my editor at Writer’s Digest Books for a writing advice parody ( Fondling Your Muse: Advice from a Published Author to the Writerly Aspirant: A Hands-On Guide to Writing Your Very Own New York Times Bestseller) I published in 2005. This week’s Tribune column is on how I think Grove Atlantic giving Roxane Gay her own publishing imprint is a good idea and one other publishers should emulate.