If you're in the Baton Rouge area, drop by LSU's Manship School of Communication this evening at 7 pm for a good read and a great cause. Jason Berry will be talking about and reading from Last of the Red Hot Poppas, and the Louisiana Environmental Action Network will be selling his book. We've teamed up with LEAN to help them raise money and to highlight the fact that Poppas, at its core, is a novel about environmental degradation that precedes and directly connects to the broken levees.

LEAN is on the front lines of the fight for the environment in Louisiana — and it is hard to imagine a state with more glaring environmental problems. Here's how LEAN describes itself:

LEAN was founded to help Louisiana citizens change the balance of power and challenge the insanity of continued economic and ecological suicide as practiced Lousiana-style.

That's LEAN's style. Up front and in your face. From what I can tell from my little corner of the Pacific Northwest, LEAN is doing some amazing work. Talking to LEAN's MaryLee Orr on the phone, you get a sense of how dedicated and hardworking these folks are. They are on a mission, and so are we. I called to see if they'd want to join us at the LSU event, and it took MaryLee a millisecond to say yes.

I'm hoping we can do more with LEAN and use Poppas to raise awareness about how deep-seated the state's environmental problems are. Today is just the beginning.

Ellis Henican, a Newsday columnist and Fox News commentator, had this to say about Poppas in his Sunday column:

HOMIE PLUG: If Sean Penn's Willie Stark in All the King's Men leaves you craving a more authentic taste of Bayou bluster, try Last of the Red Hot Poppas. The hilariously twisted new novel from New Orleans native Jason Berry is a far more knowing take on the tragicomedy that is Louisiana politics.

Right on. Jason is reading at LSU this Thursday at 7. We're teaming up with the Louisiana Environmental Action Network on this one. More on them in a later post.

So I dropped off my girls at John Hay elementary school on the top of Queen Anne hill this morning, tuned in my favorite radio show and drove through the light rain to my office in Ballard. Steve Scher was talking about robots, a topic close to my heart after years of covering the tech scene in Japan. And the fellow explaining to Steve how Japan relates to its robots was informative and funny, making jokes about Will Smith and I Robot while also explaining why Takadanobaba Station plays the Astroboy theme song when trains pull in.

Well it turns out that one of my favorite contributors from my J@pan Inc days was the man on the radio. Tim Hornyak has a new book and it sounds great: Loving the Machine: The Art and Science of Japanese Robots from Kodansha International.

Tim wrote some humorous and informative pieces for me during my tenure at J@pan Inc. He interviewed gadget guru Kenji Kawakami of chindogu fame a couple of times and did a cover story on the bizarre Doctor Nakamats. Can't wait to read his book — he's got that Bill Bryson touch of lacing his writing with interesting facts and anecdotes. So, Tim, if you're reading, congrats!

Some recent updates to the structure of our Voices of New Orleans sub-site:

- We've shifted News to the main column and will be including much more commentary. Colleen Mondor is also onboard as an official contributor. Expect more from her soon!

- Our entries on Voices have always been fairly in-depth, and as such, we've moved them to Feature status. We want to maintain a small but high-quality level of output for these posts. The full feature archive is listed in the middle column now for easy access. These features will also appear chronologically between news posts and are set off with larger type and a light background.

- Our RSS Feed now combines both "news" and "features." So expect more frequent updates in your newsreaders.

- The photo in the masthead is from Octavia Books in New Orleans.

And many thanks to everyone who has been linking to and supporting the site.

Brian Turner has put his poetry reading on YouTube, an innovative twist that comes from From the Fishouse.

We get the finished Poppas video next Monday. I'm thinking YouTube ...

Jessa Crispin of Bookslut fame writes about the death of the traditional bookstore tour in this article from The Book Standard.

As a publisher that has launched two books in bars and one in a museum, we know what she's talking about. Bookstores that just go through the motions are missing out on a resurging interest in literature that is not readily reflected in their bottom lines. Lit blogs are flourishing; people are writing and talking more about books than I can ever remember in my 43 years on Earth. And literary types are doing more interesting things to promote their books. David Eggers and his posse but on a whole show to raise funds for 826 Valencia. Jonathan Lethem publishes a limited collection of short stories and demands that the book not be sold in stores or distributed to trade journals, magazines or newspapers. These are exciting times for publishers, and that's partly why we joined the fray.

To date, our most successful reading in terms of sales was in a bar in the Upper Ninth Ward of New Orleans about five and a half months after the levees broke. It was — not coincidentally — also the most fun.

But a word should be said for the inspired booksellers out there (and Jessa mentions this in her piece): There is no reason bookstores can't hold exciting, interesting literary events, and many do. Follow the lead of Tom Lowenburg at Octavia Books in New Orleans (p.s.: Jason Berry is reading from Poppas there this Saturday at 6 pm) and put out a little wine and cheese to give the event the feel of a party; Janis Frame at Book Buffs in Denver provided a sushi spread for our Kuhaku reading, and the hour or so we spent there felt so much more like a conversation than a monologue. This ain't brain surgery folks — just make it fun and pay attention, because the people are reading, writing and talking about literature a lot these days.

We're addicted to stats. Well, at least I am. We're hooked into Google Analytics as well as Mint, as well as a free Crazy Egg account. I want to know everything about our visitors — where they come from, how long they're staying, which pages they visit and which links they use to get to those pages.

The more I know the better I can sculpt our site, and hopefully, get people to where they're going more efficiently. And sell more books. Lots of books.

Until recently, there was one source of traffic we had no real method of quantifying: external links from non-web sources. For example, links in a PDF (like our Poppas sample chapter) or links in a newsletter.

So what I did was go and write a plugin for Mint. A "pepper," in Mint parlance. It's called "Link Spice." You can read all the dirty details here, but essentially it allows us to add two variables to all URLs. Link Spice then searches our logs and parses for those variables and shows us in a few, wide brushstrokes an overview on external traffic.

The pepper is available for free from my website, so if anyone else out there is using Mint and wants to track their external linkage, go grab it.

For an example of it in action, download the Poppas chapter 1 PDF and click on the link on the first or last page. Then check out the URL that it directs you to in your browser.

Susan Larson has a great piece on Jason Berry in today's Times-Picayune. She gives us a glimpse of the man, not just the writer — a sure sign of a skilled profiler.

The death of Rex LaSalle is inspiring some exciting art. Check out the cover of the latest Gambit Weekly, New Orleans' free paper. "Murder at the Mansion" features an excerpt from Last of the Red Hot Poppas, an interview with writer Jason Berry and a pretty wild cover.

We're still putting the finishing touches on the video we promised, but the delay is for a very good reason: Paul Soniat of New Orleans has written a song in honor of Rex; he'll be recording it soon so that we can use it in the film.

Sara Gran has a very funny piece about being a writer in Brooklyn in The New York Times.

Thanks to Colleen for the tip. and if you don't know Sara Gran's work, there's no better place to start than with Colleen's review of Come Closer on our Voices of New Orleans blog.

And it's a good one. From yesterday's Times-Picayune.

Also, thanks to everyone who came out to the Ogden yesterday. Some of you asked whether the little film we created about the late Governor Rex LaSalle will be up on the website. The answer is yes, hopefully in a couple of days.

From yesterday's New York Times: Google is creating a search system to plumb the archives of newspaper, magazine and other publications, allowing you to search for articles and information that in some cases are more than 200 years old.

Picking the proper venue to launch a Chin Music title is always tricky. We've been lucky so far thanks to help from locals in Tokyo, where we launched Kuhaku at The Pink Cow, and New Orleans, where we launched Do You Know at the Saturn.

For Poppas, we turned away from watering holes and to a special little museum called the The Ogden Museum of Southern Art at 925 Camp Street in New Orleans. Jason Berry will be reading and signing there from 2 to 4 pm this Sunday, September 10th, thus kicking off our Poppas tour. If you're in the area, please come celebrate with us.

Next week, Jason's also speaking at noon on Thursday the 14th at a Hotel Monteleone Literary Luncheon, and at 6 pm on Saturday the 16th at Octavia, a bookstore tucked into a quiet block of Uptown that comes as close as anywhere in New Orleans of reminding me of home (Seattle) — a bookstore, a yoga studio and a coffee shop right next to each other (just missing the microbrewery and perhaps a Scandinavian gift shop). Octavia is a great place for a reading in part because owner Tom Lowenburg and his staff make great hosts and have been known to open a bottle of wine or two from time to time.

Finally, on Sunday the 17th, Jason will be at the St. Tammany Art Association in Covington, LA, from 5 pm. It looks like the perfect building to hear about larger-than-life Governor Rex LaSalle. Please drop by and support the arts in southern Louisiana if you have the time.