Taking a break from late-night editing of Art Space Tokyo, I found a new review of Last of the Red Hot Poppas by the Midwest Book Review. The writer called our Baton Rouge murder mystery "utterly compelling from cover to cover." Nice. I will sleep well tonight. But first, a little more editing to go.

The whole (short) review is on the Poppas Amazon page.

We're not shy at CMP, so when Nik Mercer of Anthem magazine asked if he could interview us for the magazine's website, we said, "Hell yes," then proceeded to talk over each other until Nik had enough to emerge with this nifty little interview.. Anybody else want to chat?

Last of the Red Hot Poppas and our favorite fictional governor, Rex LaSalle, got a nice writeup in the American Spectator about 10 days ago. It was woven into a piece favorably comparing Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal to Barack Obama (!). Well, all I'll say on that topic is the conservatives over at the Spectator have impeccable literary taste. Here's a blurb:

... a rambunctious (and at times uproarious) fictional ride through Louisiana's infamous political circus.

Check out the whole article here.

Our second book, and so far, our best-seller, Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans? just got a very positive review in the Midwest Book Review, an online review service that publishes its reviews on Amazon and in other forums. Here's a snippet:

(A) collection of heartfelt true stories told by survivors, evacuees, and natives of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the lethal city flooding. A handful of black-and-white illustrations grace this collection of brief reminiscences of New Orleans as it once was, the hardship of survival, attempts to return to the city, the hope of rebuilding despite the overwhelming challenges, and much more. A dollop of humor here and there intersperse the at times harsh true stories, in this highly recommended tribute.

I don't have the exact count on me right now, but our first run of DYK will probably be sold out in a few months. If you'd like to get a copy of the first edition, or send it to a friend, consider ordering it over our site. From now until Fat Tuesday, Chin Music Press is contributing $5 for every copy of DYK and Last of the Red Hot Poppas bought over our site to help displaced writers in southern Louisiana. We'll be donating the proceeds to KARES, a group that has been helping writers in various ways since soon after the levees broke in New Orleans.

Anne Lovett writes good things about Last of the Red Hot Poppas on the Georgia Writers' website:

[I]t’s a delicious gumbo. Take the spirit of A Confederacy of Dunces, blend with a murdered Louisiana governor and a steel magnolia First Lady, then throw in a few corrupt politicians, the Mafia, zydeco music, a canny African-American undertaker, an Assistant Attorney General who’s trying to do what’s right, and a young woman trying to come to terms with her growing-up in the bayou with a stepfather who’s built a 60-foot tall statue of Jesus. Then thicken with a serious message about vested interests and the environment. You might come away feeling you understand a little more about what went wrong during the Katrina crisis.

Jason Berry, author of Last of the Red Hot Poppas and a contributor to Do You Know, was interviewed this week about life in New Orleans post-Katrina by Critical Mass, a blog from the National Book Critics Circle board of directors.

Part one deals with life after Katrina, and part two focuses on his writing, with insightful cul de sacs into the New Orleans music scene and the environment.

We're on a roll this week. The National Cathloc Reporter is running an excellent review of Last of the Red Hot Poppas in its June 8 edition. Since the online version charges people who don't subscribe to the paper, here's a passage from the review that gives you a sense of the insightful approach of reviewer Tom Roberts:

One of the unintended benefits of Last of the Red Hot Poppas is the deep immersion one gets into pre-Katrina Louisiana, an experience of a kind of “Louisiana whole,� before everything began coming apart.

In a broad sense — more in the manner of art than slapstick — this is a political/religious comedy about a powerful politician and the people around him. In the end everyone, in some way or other, winds up talking to God and wondering why and how they’ve wound up in an ever more complicated cover-up of a murder.

When you don't have the muscle to get your authors on Oprah! and Fresh Air or reviews in the NYT, you can sometimes forget that all your work to get the word out about your books takes time to bubble up. This Sunday we got a little write-up in The Daily Advertiser in Lafayette, LA, which reminded me that no matter how many calls you've made about a book and how many galley sets you have sent out, when you are small, you still have the potential to be discovered well after your release.

OK, so the paragraph from Lafayette won't set us over the top, but it does show that our marketing efforts need to focus on the long-run with each book.

And by the way, it takes just one sentence — even a sentence fragment — to make a publisher smile. This is the sentence that made my Sunday:

Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans ($18.50) is another ingeniously packaged title from Chin Music Press

Nice.

The esteemed quarterly Lousiana Cultural Vistas has a thoughtful review of Last of the Red Hot Poppas in its latest issue. Check it out.

One other reason to check it out: Vistas is the first publication I've seen in a long time to use the Nxt Book technology to replicate a paper publication online. I remember how this was billed as the next breakout application for online publishing years ago, and it's kind of fun to zoom in and out and turn the pages of the magazine. But for whatever reason — perhaps it is too stuck in the traditional paradigm of flipping pages and paper-based layout? — we rarely see this application used.

The one thing Nxt Book does that I like is allow the reader to make random connections, like when you read the newspaper and jump from one topic to the next. Online news reading tends to focus you — the more you drill down into a subject, the less likely you are to find something interesting of a completely different nature — and it is difficult to jump from a piece on Keith Richards talking about what he did with his late father's ashes to the influence of the Mormon church on American politics, as I did this morning while reading The Seattle Times. Of course, this may not be an experience readers need to have, and it may go the way of album cover art — fondly remembered but not essential.

What attracts writers to New Orleans? Jason Berry and Christine Wiltz will be discussing this very question this Friday on a panel at the Tennessee Williams Festival.

Much has been said about the loss of so many gifted musicians in New Orleans because of the broken levees. While this is true and it's not clear if they will ever be allowed to come back, the literary scene, on the other hand, is thriving. Perhaps tragedy draws out the writer in all of us. Jason and Christine will riff on this theme with the guidance of moderator Ralph Adamo this Friday at 10 am.

Chin Music Press has just won its first award. The cover of Last of the Red Hot Poppas was awarded a HOW International Design Award of merit in the covers category. It's featured in their International Design Annual and will eventually be online.

Let me congratulate Craig, of course, but also two people who helped make this crazy global origami-book-cover project end up so beautiful: Illustrator Leslie Staub and the president of Yushin Printing in Japan, Kohiyama-san, who actually helped fold the poster/cover by hand. Now that's a work ethic!

Briefly, Craig and Leslie coordinated the very exact dimensions of the artwork from CMP HQ in Tokyo and Leslie's studio in Durham, NC. Then Leslie painted Rex and the other characters on a gold-leaf background and a man named Bubba took a photo of the finished art and sent it to Craig. Kohiyama-san then finished the project by having his staff make the first couple of folds by hand on the thousands of posters we printed. A machine did the final folds.

So time to uncork the champagne. Congrats Craig, Leslie and Kohiyama-san. And thanks to Jason Berry for giving us something special to wrap!

Minor edit by Craig: Regarding the folding — actually the final copies were also done by hand. The folding machine used was only able to do two folds. The cover itself required either two folds + an "unfold-pullout" or three folds. So in the end Kohiyama-san and his workers unfolded or refolded every single one of the 4,000 copies. And still got us the completed book from data to a Seattle bound boat in two weeks!

The Daily Advertiser in Lafayette, LA, (that's smack in the middle of Cajun country, in case you're wondering) ran a strong review of Last of the Red Hot Poppas this Sunday. Here's an excerpt:

Poppas is a cliffhanger that’s a little too close for comfort, although I have to believe Louisiana politics cannot be quite this bad, naïve though I may be. Exaggeration and extreme conflict do make for great reading. Still, you can’t miss the similarities of popular leadership who make us laugh while selling our souls down the river.

A syndicated columnist in Mississippi has written a neat synopsis of Jason Berry's Last of the Red Hot Poppas. But before you read it, let me offer a spoiler alert: The columnist makes it clear who kills Rex and why — if you plan to read the book or are in the middle of it, maybe skip this one. But if you've already read Poppas, check it out in the Clarion Ledger.

Lou Major Sr. of the Daily News in Bogalusa, LA, picked up the latest issue of Louisiana Cultural Vistas magazine and was mesmerized by the Poppas excerpt juxtaposed with Philip Gould's captionless photos of Louisiana politicians. He wrote a column about it today.

And for those with too much time on their hands this Martin Luther King Jr. Monday, here's a post I wrote a few weeks ago on the same topic.

Postscript: Jason Berry will be reading from Last of the Red Hot Poppas at Jefferson Parish Library at 7:30 tomorrow (the 16th). The event is free and open to the public, so go check it out. And next week, we'll be hosting a Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans reading at the same place. More on that later.

Check out the latest review of Poppas in the Press-Register of Mobile, Alabama.

Here's a taste:

Rather than attempt to summarize a complicated story line that features Gulf Coast mobsters, strippers, toxic-waste injection wells, double-dealing, murder and so on, suffice it to say that the book is funny and engaging. To use a well-worn regional analogy, if it were a bowl of gumbo it would be one-quarter John Kennedy Toole and three-quarters Elmore Leonard, seasoned by Berry's journalistic-style reportage and insights.

Jason Berry is the Mobile Writers Guild guest tomorrow at 7 pm at the Mobile Public Library. The reading is free and open to the public, so drop by and hear Jason bring the characters of Last of the Red Hot Poppas to life.

OK, to make up for the reviews and articles I referred to yesterday that weren't online, here's a good interview with Jason Berry from the Jackson Free Press in Mississippi that ran before Thanksgiving.

I first came across Philip Gould's photography in Jason Berry's living room down in New Orleans this February. Jason had just presented me with the mesmerizing Louisiana Faces. Gould is a masterful photographer on many levels, but it is his portraits of the people of Louisiana that grab me the most.

So it was a special Christmas treat to get the latest version of Louisiana Cultural Vistas. I knew it would feature an excerpt of Last of the Red Hot Poppas but had not realized the excerpt would be coupled with Gould's work. Gould's photos and Berry's words hit just the right notes together. And the fact that the magazine editors decided to print Gould's photos without explanatory captions allows us to imagine that the characters in the pictures have jumped right out of the novel. It's a great touch.

Some other good Poppas news: Curtis Wilkie wrote a glowing review of the novel in The Southern Register, the newsletter for the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. Wilkie writes that "Berry gets it just right in this jambalaya of a novel concerning high corruption and lowly scoundrels," adding later:

"Money, of course, has flowed for years from Big Oil, which plunders the Gulf Coast, pollutes its people and puts money in the pockets of politicians. The skies over Baton Rouge are a testament to Big Oil's power; refineries burn there with the impunity of hell itself. Thus, an aide to the governor is pleased when the sky turns blue for LaSalle's funeral. 'He had persuaded Exxon to cut the smokestacks to clear air for the services.'

"Laconic lines like this drive the narrative; lines such as the one where an FBI agent is told, 'Your problem is deciding who not to indict.' This is, after all, a state where a recent roster of convicts included a governor, an attorney general, an elections commissioner, an agriculture commissioner, three insurance commissioners, a congressman, a Federal judge, a state president and sundry local officials."

Neither of the publications cited above are available online, which serves as another reminder that not all the good reading can be had on the Internet just yet.

Nothing like a good review of one of our titles to put us in the holiday spirit. This comes from an entertainment magazine down in New Orleans called Where Y'at. Reviewer Ira Brooker had this to say about Jason Berry's novel:

Virtually every page is imbued with a behind-the-scenes quality that makes the reader think, “Gee, I bet that’s what it’s really like when they close the doors at a mortuary/FBI meeting/Governor’s Mansion!� ...

Equal parts dark satire, page-turning thriller and compelling character study, Last of the Red Hot Poppas is a sharp, provocative debut that should appeal to any reader who’s ever shaken his head and wondered just what this state (or country) is coming to.

Thank you, Where Y'at!

If you've completely sated yourself on our Chin Music holiday specials, allow me to guide you to some other great gift ideas on our sister site, Voices of New Orleans. Colleen Mondor has reviewed a dozen books for us since February — from Poppy Z. Brite's Soul Kitchen to the first four Neighborhood Story Project books — and any one of them would make a good gift idea. Check out all of Colleen's reviews here.

We're invoking the spirit of Cleveland-area furniture retailers this holiday season by offering you crazy discounts on our beautiful, entertaining books. Trust us, the bibliophiles in your life will love the following:

The Chin Music Collection: All three titles for $40*
* A savings of $31.50 — crazy!

or, for the less fiscally endowed among you who still want to wow a book lover or two, we recommend:

Kuhaku for Kurisumasu
Our baby, Kuhaku & Other Accounts from Japan, for just $15, almost 50% off the $28.50 retail price.

These books make great gifts. And if you buy lots of them via our website, it will all but ensure that we can keep on making more. So, thank you, ahead of time, for supporting us!

I arrived back in Seattle after a whirlwind trip to Tokyo — man, I still love that city — to find this very positive review of Last of the Red Hot Poppas in the Chicago Tribune.

My favorite line is the reviewer's description of First Lady Amelia LaSalle as "a woman who could give Lady Macbeth a fair fight in an evening-gown-and-iron will competition."

This is the biggest publication yet to cover a Chin Music Press release. We're breaking through, little by little.

They came (120+ of y'all); they ate (40 bowls of gumbo in about an hour, plus a slew of other meals); they drank (oohh, my, did they drink 300+ glasses worth); and they bought them books (many, many dozen).

Thanks to everyone who came out last Thursday and made the Tokyo Poppas release event a complete success. A huge thanks to Sanbancho Cafe for being gracious and accommodating hosts. For Kaizan and Nakamura-san for dragging their giant JBL speaker over from Komae and performing a unique 50-minute ambient sax duo (described by one patron as, "Whale Sex Music"). Thanks to Kohiyama-san, the president of Yushin Printing, for providing us with giant blow-ups of 'ole Rex's mug. And thanks to Bruce for flying his nomadic self out here and making the event feel whole!

Sanbancho Cafe was probably the perfect venue for the event. We had as many people show up as we did at the Kuhaku release two years ago, but it never once felt crowded and, perhaps most importantly, we got to really meet and talk with a large number of Japanese writers and editors. Or perhaps most, most importantly, a lot of Japanese folk got to taste some damn tasty gumbo! To which, I send much respect to the Sanbancho Cafe head chef for stretching his culinary legs out and giving this Southern dish a serious go.

All in all a success and we hope to do more of these next year! Lots more to talk about from Bruce's recent trip out here, but for now, here's some more photos:

More photos after the break ...

Most people don't know that Chicago's nickname comes from the bluster of its politicians and not the velocity of the wind. Many of the characters in Jason Berry's novel, Last of the Red Hot Poppas, should feel quite at home here as Jason kicks off the Midwest leg of his book tour.

Jason will be reading at 6:30 tonight at Kate the Great's Book Emporium (5550 N. Broadway, 773-561-1932). Come join Chicagoans and New Orleans evacuees in the area as Jason reads from his novel and talks about the fictive Governor Rex LaSalle.

Jason will be at Notre Dame tomorrow. He'll be at Columbia College in Chicago on Friday at noon, then at the Quadrangle Club on the University of Chicago campus that evening. He'll wind up this leg of the trip with an appearance at the Call to Action conference, a Catholic network to foster peace and justice, in Milwaukee on Saturday. Hope some of you in the Chicago area can catch him at one of these events.

Tomorrow is a very big day for books in southern Louisiana. First, there's the Louisiana Book Festival in Baton Rouge. I'll be hosting a panel on Do You Know at 10 am with Sarah Inman and Jason Berry. Brother Dave will be there too. We'll also be signing the book after the event.

Jason will also be on two separate panels to talk about 1) the environment and 2) his new novel, Last of the Red Hot Poppas. And Sarah will be reading from her novel, Finishing Skills. The event is free, so come on down.

In New Orleans, the 5th annual New Orleans Book Fair will take place. Our peeps at Nolafugees will be hawking Chin Music books along with their own latest creation, Chris Rose is Dead 2 Me. We're hoping to be able to get there after our Baton Rouge appearance, so see you all at one or the other of these book fests.

(Update: The correct date is Thursday the 16th of Nov.)

It's almost that time of the year again — November. And obviously that can only mean one thing: Tokyo Book Release Party! In celebration of Poppas of course.

THE DIRTY SOUTHERN POLITICIAN WORKSHOP is being held at SANBANCHO Cafe between Kudanshita, Hanzomon, and Ichigaya stations (about 10 mins walk from any of them). It's being held on November 16th (Thurs.) and runs from 7 - 11pm. Free entry. Live sax playing. New Orleans Gumbo. Food and drinks served by the bar.

If it's anything like our Kuhaku event two years ago, this should be blast. Hope to see all you Tokyoites there.

More info + map:

Chin Music Press Invites You To:
THE DIRTY SOUTHERN POLITICIAN WORKSHOP
(New Orleans Amakudari Koushu Kai)

Last of the Red Hot Poppas book release party

Thursday, November 16th, 19:00 ~ 23:00
At SANBANCHO Cafe (near Yasukuni Shrine (Kudanshita sta.))
NO COVER CHARGE

Join us in celebration of the release of Last of the Red Hot Poppas, a novel about one of the dirtiest of dirty southern politicians.

Drinks and food (including a special one night only New Orleans gumbo dish) served by SANBANCHO Cafe.

Sponsored / Produced by:
Chin Music Press
and Yushin Printing

Graciously Hosted by:
SANBANCHO Cafe - 03 3265 9017

Directions to the event:
SanBanCho Cafe is located near Yasukuni Shrine, 8 minutes from Hanzomon St., 10 minutes from Kudanshita St., or 12 minutes walk from Ichigaya station. (see attached map)

SANBANCHO Cafe
Chiyoda-ku
Sanbancho 28-4
03 3265 9017

This film by Jason Berry offers some clues.

Colleen Mondor has just reviewed Last of the Red Hot Poppas on Bookslut. Here's a taste:

From their trademark shortened book size that fits perfectly in the hand, to the elegant title page and sewn-in bookmark, everything about this book is a collector’s dream. It’s a beautiful art object that also includes a well-written and smartly-told story.

The Ballard burglar is by no means a smart man. Imagine ripping off the headquarters of Chin Music Press and: 1) looking for cash (who they kidding?) 2) looking for expensive hardware (ibid) and 3) not stealing a book (idiot!).

So, yeah, we got broken into over the weekend. And so did some of the neighboring businesses. Some of them had far more substantial losses than we did. The semi-literate burglar ransacked several offices, looking for cash and small items he could carry, dropping many of the things he was trying to steal along the way (my neighbors arrived at work today to find a new video camera on their floor!) and finally opening a door to an office that still had people in it! OK, this guy is not a master criminal. He probably doesn't even have a bachelor's. But he did make a proper mess of CMP HQ. For a moment Sunday, sifting through all the papers on the floor, I thought I was in my brother's apartment (ba-dum bum).

But we're back to normal now, although with a cancelled credit card.

We also received a rather tepid review of Poppas in the Baton Rouge Advocate Sunday. But then — and it may sound cliche, but these sorts of emails make my day — we received a message from a reader of DYK that said in part:

"I just purchased Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans? from Elliot Bay and read it in the same day. As an evacuee from New Orleans to Seattle, it was moving to see people outside of New Orleans realize what an impact the city has. You were able get writers who captured the essence of the city that is so unique and beautiful. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

All in all, it was a good day.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In honor of this most unfortunate anniversary, even sister site cannedcoffee.com has turned to New Orleans. Rex Noone, author of the lagniappe in Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?, discusses his very troubled city while sipping an iced coffee from Starbucks.

Over on Voices of New Orleans, David Rutledge writes about the loss of an American city.

And finally, Jason Berry, author of Last of the Red Hot Poppas, has this to say in today's Boston Globe.

To all those people on the Gulf Coast who had their houses or loved ones washed away from the broken levees or who have been trying to repair your lives despite the broken promises of our government and the sickening nonchalance of our leaders, to all those people who feel forgotten and alone, we send our prayers from our one-room office in a Seattle warehouse district. We Americans have to do better. We just have to.

The late great Governor Rex LaSalle and his cohorts arrived safely in the US after a harrowing week stuck in a container with agitated bomb-sniffing dogs nearby.

For Rex — the fictional guvna of Looziana featured in Jason Berry's new novel, Last of the Red Hot Poppas — it was just another crazy week in an event-filled life (and death). We're hoping the trips from here to our distributor and to bookstores nationwide in the next couple of weeks are boring as sin for Rex and the gang. Then our beautiful little book can sit seductively on the shelves and call out to you to touch, flip through and ultimately read it.

And just for good measure, writer Lee Smith sent us this comment on the book today that we think sums up Jason's work very nicely:

"Both wildly entertaining and deadly serious, Last of the Red Hot Poppas is a fabulous read — nobody understands Louisiana politics (and its larger-than-life characters) better than Jason Berry. I couldn't put this one down."

So look for Poppas to appear in your bookstores in early September. Or if you just can't wait (as Rex would tell you, life is just too short to dally), order directly from us and get free shipping until the end of the month.

Last of the Red Hot Poppas is back from printing! The Poppas sub-site is up and ready for advance orders. It's also stock full of risque book close-ups.

The book has been in our hands now for over a week, and I think it's safe to say the production quality has met and exceeded our high standards. Kohiyama-san over here in Tokyo has been instrumental in pushing the final production through to meet our tight schedule.

Let me just quickly run through a list of things about the book:
1. It's very well made. The binding, the printing, the glue, the bookmark, the size of the signatures, the evenness of the ink ... It's all impeccable. If you were in any way disappointed with the build quality of Do You Know, Poppas goes back into old-school Kuhaku-esque well-madeness. In fact, I think it goes beyond the Kuhaku production quality. If you like well-made books, Poppas will not dissapoint.

2. The poster came out great. Poster?! We worked closely with Leslie Staub to get a great piece of art for the cover. Leslie produced a beautiful painting which everyone who purchases the book gets a full-sized reproduction of — one idea led to another and the cover ended up turning into an intricately folded A2 poster. That's another blog post in and of itself.

3. The papers all work really well together. We ended up using about five different papers in the book (cover, board-covers, end-papers, tobira, body-text) and (to much relief!), it feels singular and natural.

4. Because of all the papers and layers, working your way into this book is a weirdly sensual (in a book-gets-sexy kinda sense) journey in and of itself.

For now, check out the sub-site and don't forget to download the first chapter if you want a sneak peak at Jason Berry's great novel before ordering.

Craig is expecting to see a finished copy of Last of the Red Hot Poppas this week. With our first two books — printed in Iceland and Minnesota, respectively — I was the first to see them, but since we opted to print in Japan this time, Craig will get first glance and then try to convey the nuances of the book to me over the phone. Obviously, we're a bit jittery this week.

This project is a first in many ways for us: First novel, first book with just one author, first time to print in Japan, first time to have a dust jacket (one that unfolds into a poster!), first time to hire an outside marketing team, first time to use postcards for promotion, etc., etc. I've learned a lot in the last few months. And during this time, some thoughts about publishing have crystallized for me. Here's a quick, incomplete list of what working on Poppas taught me:

1. Even a novel is a collective work. I used to think that a novelist was 99% of a novel. It's just not true, especially if you're shooting to make a literary object. The designer, artist, editors and printers all go a long way to shape the book. One of the things CMP will not do is allow a writer the right to reject a cover. It's a fairly standard right conferred on novelists, but we opted to keep total control of the design. Because of that, Poppas is edgier, more interesting and will appeal to a whole different kind of reader than we would have drawn with a more conventional approach — or so I believe.

2. The sewn-in bookmark is part of our marketing budget. As we entered further into the world of blurbs and book promotion, I have been thinking a lot about how we differentiate ourselves from the pack. In the end, I believe it's by putting more money into production, refining the book, making it beautiful. That way of thinking helped us land a distributor with our first book. I believe we are better off spending $750 of that last thousand bucks on the book itself and the other $250 on marketing. It means we might not jump out of the gate as fast as others, but we'll slowly win the respect of readers.

3. Imitating large NY firms will bring certain failure. As we put Poppas together, we had lots of discussion about promoting the book, and some of that discussion inevitably centered on what other larger publishers do to promote their work. The more I learned how large publishers promote their books, the more I felt that to imitate them would be to bring certain failure. Yes, we send review copies to Kirkus and Publishers Weekly like everyone else in the industry, but beyond that, we need to use the Internet far more than the average publisher to build a community (not just sales), we need to do events in a unique way (not just typical readings) and we need to find low-cost ways to reach you (email newsletters, blogs and postcards, for example). Other publishers use these tools as well, but for us they are vital — we can't bank on reviewers reading our work, and we can't expect media to pay attention to us as much as we'd like, so these smaller tools are sometimes all we have.

More on the book itself soon.

Poppas is at the printers, rolling around in hot ink.

We've been comparatively hush-hush about Poppas. Not for any particularly good reason, just that we've been a focused machine of editing and designing these past couple of months.

Editorially this thing is tight. Design wise this is probably the most playful I've gotten with any of our books. Gone are the tired 'ole serif'd titles! Gone is the Minion! Gone is the hyper-small size!

What's in? A collection of beautiful Japanese papers. Professional attention to book-binding and production. A giant, commercially unmarred original piece of artwork from Leslie Staub. Fedra Sans. Jannon Moderne. A new, improved, innovative take on the obi (belly band).

It's exciting, and I'm over here holding my breath waiting for the finished product to roll hot and steamy off the presses. It's scheduled to be in my humidity soaked possession in a little over a week.

In the meantime I'm distracting my 8-year-old-can't-wait-for-christmas like self by putting together the Poppas sub-site for chinmusicpress.com. That should hopefully be up and running within a week or so.

I designed Do You Know out in the open, naked for all to see. And while fun, it was a touch awkward and made the whole design process a little more self-concious than I'd like it to be. So Poppas was done privately, and I'll be going back over the design publicly. Which is probably the much more sensible way of doing this sort of thing.

For publishers, NPR combines with The New York Times and Oprah to create the holy trinity of book publicity. Well, thanks to Jason Berry, author of our forthcoming Last of the Red Hot Poppas, Chin Music Press and Do You Know crept into Monday's All Things Considered. We're watching the traffic generated by the links to our site and will report back if anyone is interested.

Today I asked a well-known bookstore to host a reading for our next book, a novel called Last of the Red Hot Poppas, which will be out in September. The store's quick, polite rejection tells a lot about what we're up against. Here's an excerpt:

I am sorry, but there is no way that we can schedule a reading by an unknown novelist at the store in the fall ... It is very, very difficult to do fiction here unless the person is a name brand. Even for fairly well known fiction writers, we get, if we are lucky, twenty people not related to the author.

Fair enough. I understand their position. To be honest, I don't even care, because somewhere deep inside of me I know that going about this whole publishing business in the same way that the big New York firms do — spend loads on marketing, sign brand-name writers, do six-week book tours, etc. — is both demeaning and suicidal. The reason we got into this industry in the first place was to exploit the blind spots of an industry grown obese with bad books and sloppy distribution policies, not to imitate the biggest players.

I love our Japanese paper man. He's small and spry and keeps saying, "YES YES YES" in Japanese while you speak to him. He's in his 60s with big, wild eyes behind huge bifocals. "YES YES YES" is forever coming out of his mouth.

We want it to be a poster, we say, and he screams back "YES YES YES!" Folded like this, we say. "YES! I SEE!"

And off he goes to his wall of paper samples. Mumbling and YESing as he quickly snaps a handful of sample packets from the massive wall. They come flying at us — literally, he's throwing them onto the table — whilst never taking his eyes off the wall. A finger held in the air, nose up, searching. He dumps four, five, six packets, each with three or four pages swung out for us to inspect.

He loves our idea — I think this is the most exciting project he's seen in ages. But I get the feeling he loves everything. Everything is great. Everything deserves a YES. And he is going to show you how it can be done.

He rifles through the samples going back and forth, explaining fold quality vs. print quality vs. thickness vs. finish vs ... It never ends. And his explanations are all full of paper history. YES! This is a good paper because ... This was actually used in a book I made in 1968, YES! Excellent quality.

After designing two books blind — in totally different continents than the printers, having to defer to mysterious Icelanders or slack-jawed Americans for material availability — being able to sit here in the paper shop with the Yes Man, digging through his files and brain is like getting a new set of perfect eyes. It also happens to be a lot of fun.

And from the way things are looking, our next book should be damn handsome.