So yeah, I've been sipping deeply from my stained, rapidly-cooling mug of Haterade when writing these columns, ranting about the dumb things authors do, the dumb things agents do, and the dumb (but slightly more defensible) things editors do. But this week, I thought I'd cut out the petty shit, pull back, and look at the big picture. I don't often find myself thinking deep thoughts about the state of the book biz as a whole, and I never thought this was an appropriate venue for discussing it - I mean, seriously, that's what Sara Nelson's letter from the editor is for. But recently, my thoughts turned to the sentiments voiced by a certain RPMCESTMOI, who had this to say in response to one of my columns:

Former New York Post and current New York Daily News staffer and sex-averse blogger Dawn Eden has her book coming out in early December, just in time for Christ-mas. The Thrill of the Chaste: Finding Fulfilmment while Keeping Your Clothes On indeed sounds like a barrel o' laughs, but of particular note are a couple excerpts from the acknowledgements:

Last night saw a book launch party at the Hotel QT for photographer Joan Sinclair's Pink Box: Inside Japan's Sex Clubs. The party itself seemed to draw more Japanophiles than Japanese, though a few from Nippon were in attendance. Also spotted enjoying the pool-humid ambience were newly unemployed gossipist Lloyd Grove, one half of gossip duo Rush & Molloy (formerly paper-mates with Grove at the Daily News, natch), and Z-lister/prehistoric MTV veejay Karen Duffy. We're told that our videographer, Richard Blakeley, did at one point strip to his skivvies and wade into the pool, but fortunately for us all, that footage will remain part of his private collection.

People (putative authors especially) tend to have a lot of misconceptions about what editors do - and, more importantly, don't do. The one that tickles my funny bone the hardest is the misconception that editors sit at their desks during the day and, like, edit books. HA! As fucking if. More likely, editors are answering a phone that never stops ringing while trying to answer emails, coordinate schedules, put out fires, amateur-therapize authors, actually sort of skim some small percentage of their submissions, and make sure all the other departments are actually doing what they're supposed to be doing on behalf of the editor's books (they're usually not). Okay, I caught that yawn. On to the more digestible Unsolisticle portion of the column, where we'll explore what an editor isn't in more detail.

As predicted yesterday, today sees the official announcement of Simon & Schuster's purchase of former Page Sixer Jared Paul Stern's proposal for his gossip tell-all (or tell-most), Stern Measures. The book's actually a personal acquisition of Mark Gompertz, publisher of Simon & Schuster imprint Touchstone Fireside. The Observer plumbs the depths of reaction near and slightly farther than near. "He wore a perfect hat, as I thought he might," reminisces Gompertz about his first meeting with Stern. Even though the deal was reputedly quite comfortable, Stern is still poormouthing his post-Payola Six lifestyle, mentioning that his wife, Ruth "Snoodles" Gutman, has had to take a job. "She is working at a local company that makes, like, gourmet foods," says Stern. Fellow disgraced Page Six gossip and author Ian Spiegelman put it less delicately: "Ruth is working at a fucking factory." The Observer piece also has a few updates on Stern's lawsuit versus nemesis Ron Burkle, and perhaps versus other as-yet unnamed parties as well. Official book deal press release after the jump, for those inclined to read such.

As part of Monday's release of her book I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence, comedienne/caterer Amy Sedaris (or her minions/fans) has released a few publicity stills similar to the one at right. They depict a barely clad Sedaris bespeckled with multicolored sugar sprinkles — apparently this is for a chapter/section in the book called "The Cavity Hole." Now there may be a legitimate cookery connection, but one can't help but note the visual echo of the cover for A Million Little Pieces by unregenerate fabulist James Frey. One suspects that these sprinkles, satirical or not, worked their way into several inconvenient crevices over the course of the photo shoot.

We have it on good authority that former Page Six muckraker and alleged downshaker Jared Paul Stern has in fact sold his book proposal to Simon & Schuster, reputedly for six figures. Same working title (Stern Measures), and despite rumors to the contrary, the book will indeed contain a heapin' helpin' of Ron Burkle. Attempts to reach Stern for further details were met with stony, but somehow smug, silence. Publication target is late 2007; expect an official announcement tomorrow.

We originally classified author Marisha Pessl as "book hot," then upped her to "TV hot," then tweaked the levels down to "Broadway hot" — all based on relevant photos, of course — but it appears that regardless of her photographic hotness, her physical presence underwhelms in terms of performance. An unimpressed witness to Pessl's weekend reading in Bryant Park reports:

• If you've been a New Yorker for longer than 120 minutes, you're probably aware that there is at least one "celebrity" - and we use that term very loosely - hawking their book on any given day. Today it's Amy Sedaris. [Papermag]
  

From an Italian ad campaign for a store-wide 30% off sale at bookseller Mondadori. Their DVD section also has a beautifully remastered version of The 280 Blows.

While these are both doubtlessly fine books (I'll be reading iWoz and blogging it soon), I'm betting that Wozniak's stories about running a Dial-a-Joke line, building Atari games with Steve Jobs, and handing his friends two-dollar bills...doesn't prepare a reader for Pakistani President Musharraf's memoir about leading a bloodless coup, coming close to assassination, and delicately avoiding nuclear war with India while fighting terrorists with the U.S.

Last week, when I explained to authors how to keep their editors from hating them, I got some interesting feedback. In case you are dense: in this context, 'interesting feedback' means 'flame-tipped poison arrows of hatred' the same way that, in a rejection letter, 'I read with interest' means 'I basically did not read, and that which I read I did not read with anything remotely resembling interest.' But because I know that many of these authors' complaints are totally valid, and also because I'm a better, fairer person than any of my detractors (especially the commenter who complained about the freshly minted, "probably female" English lit grads who are too stupid to understand his genius - fuck you, asshole!), I decided to use this week's column as a venue for some of these complainy authors to vent their grievances. So read on for some Dos and Don'ts for editors that I'm sure we can all learn from.

We've enjoyed a lively stream of replies and insults to our original call for contributions to the forthcoming Gawker book, but there's still a bit of room to fill between gutter and margin. Your input is most humbly resolicited, and though potential compensation is limited to recognition and a copy of said book (should we use you), it's not like you're occupied with more important duties. What, you think we're insensitive to the irony of mocking blog book deals while assembling a Gawker book? That's a whole chapter right there, pal. Never underestimate our ability to detect faint signs of life worth bludgeoning out of a supposedly posthumous horse. After the jump, discover our particular spheres of inquiry, plus a submission form. We've even resolved the submission form's technical kinks that thwarted a few well-meaning interactors during the first go-round, so get with the program.

As the Big Lebowski says, new shit has come to light. Sarah Lacy, who co-wrote the BusinessWeek cover story "How this kid made $60 million in 18 months" (about Digg founder Kevin Rose, who now jokes constantly with friends and Digg users about the $60 million he doesn't have), will leave the magazine for a year to work on her book about Web 2.0, she said in an e-mail.

Call it "How this BusinessWeek writer made $500k with one bubble" — Sarah Lacy (pictured right), co-writer of the BusinessWeek cover story that pumped up boys of the bubble and gave Digg founder Kevin Rose a made-up valuation of $60 million, scored a lucrative book deal on the same subject.

Hewlett-Packard's former CEO reveals in her new memoir that she authorized the now-infamous investigation of boardroom leaks before Mark Hurd replaced her, according to the New York Times.

Why do editors do it, anyway? They make less money than any other college graduates they know, their jobs are backbreaking and stressful and impossible to leave at the office, and their career trajectories tend to involve lingering on (or clinging to) the same rung of the corporate ladder for year after frustrating year. And even though teaching a retarded child how to write her own name isn't really so different from working on your average celebrity memoir, that doesn't mean editing qualifies for 'noble calling' status. There must be something that keeps editors from throwing in their red (actually, often blue) pencils, and it can't be the office camaraderie.

The Post today runs an excerpt from former scribe Tom Sykes's memoir of drunkenness, What Did I Do Last Night? A Drunkard's Tale. In it, Sykes tells of an incident when he came home, wasted, and couldn't get inside his apartment door. Thinking his wife had locked him out, he kicked the shit out of the door, screaming and pounding to be let in. When there was no answer, Sykes eventually gave up and slept in the hallway. When he woke up, he had three guns in his face and the NYPD screaming at him. Sykes explained that he was locked out, and an officer took his keys and went upstairs:

Inspired by last year's tome on 70 years of cover designs at Penguin, this Flickr gallery attempts to collect examples of the last few decades' worth of Penguin/Pelican jackets. If anything, the starkly crude, mod, and/or trippy designs are testaments to doing a lot with relatively limited graphic resources. Of course, you've also got plenty of purely objectionable cases of crap abstraction for abstract subjects, such as the coma-inducing Psychiatry To-day.

The Boston Herald ran a story this weekend on the profits (or lack thereof) from blogger book deals; basically, big advances for blog-to-book deals are unwise bets, as spitting out 200 pithy words doesn't necessarily mean one can spit out 200 brilliant pages. Nevertheless, publishers are still throwing money at the blogosphere, as demonstrated by the mind-boggling number of deals stemming from blogs. Granted, there are two types of blog-book (blook?) deals: former or current bloggers who sell work unrelated to their online ramblings, or books purely based on blogs (like Stephanie Klein's Straight Up and Dirty). The former isn't any less likely to succeed than anything else hitting the shelves, but the latter is just a bad idea.