Archives - Weekly Update

As I write this, I am hunkered down in my hotel room in Minneapolis before heading out to the opening cocktail party for the American Booksellers Association’s Winter Institute. More than 100 authors are in town for this event, and I, along with 650 booksellers, am looking forward to a crash course in hearing from them and their publishers about the best upcoming titles. Last-minute reading prep is going on now!

On Tuesday night, I thoroughly enjoyed an evening at the Knickerbocker Club, where Daisy Goodwin gave a brilliant talk about Queen Victoria and showed some upcoming clips from the PBS show. She is the screenwriter and an Executive Producer on the show, as well as the author of a book about the queen; I had caught the first two hours of the program on Sunday night, and it was so enjoyable.

Thank you to the many readers who wrote last weekend to share their raves about our new newsletter format, especially embracing that it is so easy to read on mobile. I was pleasantly surprised to see that, though I had been led to believe otherwise, it read perfectly on my Samsung phone! You can see some of those comments in the News & Pop Culture section below.

Happy New Year! Here’s to a brilliant year of books and reading ahead!

Our newsletter comes to you this week via our new newsletter delivery system. As we worked to try to keep the same look and feel that we had before, we analyzed font types and sizes...a lot. At points I felt like I was at the eye doctor trying to figure out “Is this one better, or this?,” reaching that point when they all start to look the same. To those of you reading on mobile, this should be a terrific experience. However, if you are on a Samsung phone using Outlook, my tip to you is to put your phone on “screen rotation” and read horizontally. I have to do this with every newsletter as Samsung refuses to share its email protocol with mailing companies, and thus they cannot design against it. We are now optimized against 23 email platforms! Oh, and Mercury is retrograde until Monday, so you can imagine the fun we had trying to execute a new tech solution when the planets were not aligning.