The first line of my first review – for my bio of Jack Kerouac, Desolate Angel – was in the Boston Globe, and it started, “Dennis McNally isn’t going to like me.” Not promising. Actually, after I read it I ended up not being terribly depressed, because it wasn’t a review of my book, it was a review … [Read more...]
We Have Liftoff
The pace is definitely picking up. Amazon started shipping books two weeks early, and already I’ve had the pleasure of seeing a picture on my friend Jan’s FB page of her reading the book. Now that’s satisfying. The folks at a very cool website called All About Jazz asked for a sample from the … [Read more...]
The Book Arrives
I’m sitting here holding a finished copy of the book and feeling a gamut of emotions. Fortunately, pleasure predominates—it just plain feels good in my hands (take that, Kindle!). The process of making a book, as I’ve said elsewhere, is a group effort, and the Counterpoint folks came through like … [Read more...]
Alternet Ends The Days Between
The past six weeks were the days between. I don’t mean this in the Grateful Dead song sense (for those of you who don’t know the song of that title, it was, for my money, the last great Hunter-Garcia collaboration and talked about the span of life between their youth and the 1990’s – life in … [Read more...]
Radio Gives the Book a Warm Reception
This being my third go-round with publishing a book, I’ve got a moderately jaded – let’s call it realistic – set of expectations, which can be summed up as, “If they buy you cheap, they’ll sell you cheap.” With notable exceptions, most books that start out small stay that way – publishers scale … [Read more...]
Getting Near the End – Page Proofs
So as I said in the first post, when you get galleys you actually have a bound book (if incomplete and not as nice as your future finished book) in your hands, which is a big deal. But page proofs, even though they're not bound, are the last step in terms of dealing with the words. You actually … [Read more...]
Galleys Day – When a Book Becomes Real
I've been around long enough to have watched changes in this book-writing thing. I swear the first draft of my first book was handwritten. Nowadays, of course, you write a book on a computer, and while I got to edit On Highway 61 on paper (my editor is as old school as I am), I then copyedited it … [Read more...]