Some press!
We forgot to mention that Newcity recently ran an interview with our very own Jerry...read it here:
Ninety-Seven to Three
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Elizabeth S. Tieri
773-616-0913
getbacktoprint@gmail.com
Ninety-Seven to Three by G.D. Brennan III
BATTLE RAPS TO CLASSIC ROCK GRANDPOPS – A REVOLUTIONARY POETRY COLLECTION
A series of battle rap responses to classic rock songs, Ninety-Seven to Three takes aim at the unquestioned mantras of modern life—the music we all know by heart, by artists like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Journey, AC/DC and Santana. Published by indie imprint Tortoise Books, in conjunction with Back to Print, this collection—alternately funny and thought-provoking—looks at love and desire, ambition and artistry, work and play, and the author’s own journey from chip-on-the-shoulder single guy to loving husband and father.
“The title comes from an anecdote in Keith Richards’ autobiography,” Brennan explains. “When they were working on Exile on Main Street, they had some heroin that was supposedly so potent it needed to be cut at a ratio of ninety-seven parts cut to three parts smack. He thought about writing a song about this ratio, but he never got around to it. So I wrote a poem about it, a poem that ultimately didn’t get into this collection, but that helped inspire it. And I like the implications behind the title—the quixotic battle against impossible odds, which is what we’re trying to do by publishing this independently.”
Still, this collection’s far more than an experiment in publishing—it’s a bold selection of battle verse, equal parts T.S. Eliot and Eminem, a double-barreled shotgun blast at the sacred cash cows of the music industry. Poems include:
- A lyrical dismemberment of Bruce Springsteen’s “Blinded by the Light”
- A lively riff on Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” and its relevance (or irrelevance) to debt-riddled Americans struggling through the Great Recession.
- Musings on “All You Need Is Love” and its frequent misinterpretations.
- A reflection on AC/DC’s “Let Me Put My Love Into You” from a data analyst working in Microsoft SQL Server.
“Most poetry collections are far too long,” Brennan explains. “They’re built around the economics of the traditional publishing industry, where you have to put out a longer book to make it worthwhile to do an offset printing run, and to make the publicity efforts cost-effective. And that works well for novels, but other forms fall by the wayside—novellas, short stories, and poetry collections. Publishers obviously bundle these together for the sake of economics, but they risk losing the coherence and plot arc that pull you through a novel. Here we’re doing something different, something that wouldn’t be possible in the old publishing world. It’s a short, punchy collection of ten poems, with a solid thematic arc, where the reader won’t get bogged down in the middle and will end up wanting more rather than wanting less—a concept album of poems.”
Full track listing is as follows:
01 – I Need You
02 – Blinded By The Light
03 – Don’t Stop Believing
04 – Time
05 – Rust Never Sleeps
06 – (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction
07 – Let Me Put My Love Into You
08 – Like A Rolling Stone
09 – Black Magic Woman
10 – All You Need Is Love
Jerry Brennan graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point and earned a Master's at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. He’s the author of Resistance, which Kirkus Reviews called an “extremely impressive debut.” His writing has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, The Good Men Project and Innerview Magazine; he has also been a frequent contributor and co-editor at Back to Print and the deadline. He resides in Chicago.
Website: www.TortoiseBooks.com
Ninety-Seven to Three will be launched on 3/1/13. It will be available for purchase at Amazon.com through Tortoise Books for $.49 in Kindle format, or $4.99 if you like killing trees. A deluxe version assembled by Back to Print will be available at select independent bookstores in Chicago.
REVIEW COPIES AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST
Promoting the Tortoise (A.K.A. Find a Typo - $50)
So it turns out publicists cost money—not an ungodly amount, but you do need a bank balance with a comma in it. And we’re not there right now. Granted, we were there, but we splurged with our budget for Resistance, buying half-page newspaper ads instead of spending at a more tortoise-like pace so as to actually, you know, sustain some publicity. So we basically shot our load when it comes to promotion and advertising dollars. We’re the three-pump chumps of the book business. Lesson learned for next time.
The good news is there’s still social media and word-of-mouth. We’ve been tweeting and throwing up a couple mentions on facebook every week, and the book’s still selling. Not enough to put commas in our bank account just yet, mind you, but it still has legs—short, stubby, tortoise legs. And we got a review on Amazon from a random stranger who compared us very favorably to our main competition—another novel on the Heydrich assassination, one that’s received the level of critical attention we’d like to eventually get for our books.
We want that level of attention. And we want commas in our bank account. Hopefully not just for ego-feeding purposes, but because this is a great book that people will be glad they purchased. So to get people talking (and hopefully buying), we’re launching a promotion: Find a Typo - $50
Obviously there’s far more to a great book than a lack of typos. (Or tyops, as we like to call them.) And we do think this is a great book, worthy of your money and your time—not just free from mistakes, but actively good, a great and memorable read. It’s a book we published because we wanted it on our own bookshelves. But to handle the big things, you have to prove you can handle the small things, too. Popular perception would have you believe that independently-published books are poorly written and riddled with tyops, and we’d like indie publishing to be as hip and respected and professional as indie rock—not a refuge for people who can’t get a deal with a major company, but an exciting and vibrant corner of the industry, an incubator for talented people putting out professional products.
Here are the ground rules for the promotion:
1) You must have purchased the Kindle or physical version of the book from Amazon after the start of this promotion.
2) You must be the first person to discover and report the typo.
3) The typo MUST be unintentional—something the author would have changed had they noticed it in time. This excludes the following types of intentional spelling and usage choices that would otherwise appear to be typos:
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Words that were spelled using American English in the first third of the book and in British English in the remainder.
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Names that were deliberately spelled differently in the last third of the book because the last narrator wanted to avoid using Czech letters—Čurda vs. Churda, for instance.
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Place names that are spelled in the Czech form in the first two thirds of the book and in the German form in the last part—Lidice and Liditz, for example.
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Names that are spelled differently by different credible sources, such as Josef Gabčik’s first name, which is spelled with an “s” in the Czech Ministry of Defense’s English-language account of Operation Anthropoid but appears as “Jozef” in some other sources.
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Deliberate spelling changes used to convey drunkenness in dialogue.
4) Multiple misspellings of a proper noun—place name, character name, etc.—shall count as one typo.
5) Typos must be reported with an email to marketing@tortoisebooks.com containing a copy of your purchase confirmation email from Amazon and a description of the typo.
6) Payments for this promotion will be made via PayPal.
7) Tortoise Books has the right to discontinue this promotion in the unlikely event that payouts reach $500, or in two months, whichever comes first.
Sound good? Pick up a copy and give it a whirl. We’re sure we’re putting out a solid product, as good as (or better than) anything coming out of a major publishing house. We’re sure it’s in the best shape possible—and if we’re wrong, we'll pay you to tell us about it.
Selling the Tortoise
Apologies to the five or so of you who have been following this journal--we’ve been busy for the last month. We’re always busy, come to think of it, but we’ve been super extra busy getting ready for Chicago’s 2012 Printers Row Lit Fest, where we launched Resistance.
There were a kajillion little things to get done beforehand, and many of those things were dependent on other things; to launch the book, we had to print the book; to print the book, we had to get historical photos from ČTK in Prague; to get the historical photos, we had to raise funds on Kickstarter.
It seemed like a dicey proposition for a while; the fundraising started off slow, so we had to do a little more groveling than expected, and we also had to activate our emergency funding plan, which consisted of liquidating some non-liquid assets. (Think Dan Aykroyd selling his watch to the seedy pawnbroker in Trading Places. OK, it was a notch above that. But only a notch.) BUT we also had some larger-than-expected donations from both friends and random strangers--generous gifts which help push us comfortably over our fundraising goals with a whole day to spare.
After that, of course, we still had plenty to worry about; we found ourselves checking the bank account quasi-religiously for the next few days, waiting for Amazon to actually release our funds, of which they and Kickstarter had taken roughly a 10% cut. And of course, getting the money wasn’t the end of our worries--we had to wire the money to Prague to pay for the pictures. And getting the pictures wasn’t the end of our problems--we had to get them into the manuscript and convert it into a .pdf in a way that it would look like we were professionals who had just paid $1600 for the reprint rights, not rank amateurs in the field of graphic design, building our book cover in Microsoft Paint. And getting it printed wasn’t the end of our worries, nor was buying the advertising, nor was sorting out various seemingly insurmountable Kindle formatting issues, nor was coming home last Monday to find that FedEx had finally delivered our book. (We gotta admit, this part did dial the worry-ometer back quite a bit.)
ANYWAY, the book fair weekend arrived, and the sun was blazing hot, but we kept slathering on the sunblock and somehow escaped burn-free. And we caught a couple printing issues in our final editions (loose pages on three softcovers, and a section inverted on one hardcover) but by and large, the books looked great, and we found more than a few customers, including several who were complete strangers who’d happened across our advertising. We actually sold all of our serviceable softcovers, and put a huge dent in our hardcovers.
Of course, there's still stuff to worry about--the book's out there in the hands of the reading public. Unlike other artists, writers and publishers don’t get to directly observe their audience’s reaction to their work. Musicians can gauge whether a crowd is excited or bored; directors can sit in on advance screenings of a movie and judge the audience’s response; artists can go to their gallery openings and observe the chatter. But if you try watching someone while they read your book, you look pretty damn creepy. So we might as well not worry; we should just trust that it's out there and we'll get the attention we'll deserve.
Then again, maybe we should just hire a publicist.
Publicizing the Tortoise
There's a great scene in Lawrence of Arabia where Lawrence and Sherif Ali have entered the Ottoman city of Deraa on their own, foolishly trying to attract supporters for their Arab revolt in the midst of a Turkish stronghold.
"What are you looking for?" Sherif Ali asks.
Lawrence responds (with more than a little grandiosity): "Some way to announce myself."
To which Sherif Ali says: "Please be patient with him, God."
That's about how we feel when it comes to promotion. When you've put a lot of work into something, you want to let people know about it, but it's hard to do without sounding like an ass. And people pay a lot more attention to what other people say about you than to what you say about you, anyway. Fortunately, everyone's a critic these days, and so there are reviewers a-plenty trolling the interwebs; unfortunately, it's hard to get their attention, especially for something like a book that can't be consumed in a single sitting.
Fortunately, Kirkus Reviews has an Indie arm where you can get projects reviewed. We took a gamble on doing this with Resistance; we wanted to have something blurb-worthy on the back cover for launch, because, hey, no one wants to buy a book unless someone else thinks it's worth buying. Given our production schedule, we were a little worried about what might happen if they didn't like it--but it looks like we'll be fine. Here's the full text of their review:
Brennan’s three intertwined novellas revolve around the Nazi occupation of Prague and the assassination of Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich in 1942. The first section of Brennan’s accomplished and readable novel is a lightly fictionalized “autobiography” of Czechoslovakian Gen. František Moravec. After experience on the Eastern Front during World War I, then time as a Russian prisoner of war and as one of the heads of the Czech resistance in exile, Moravec was one of the chief architects behind Operation Anthropoid, the plot to assassinate Heydrich, the brutal Czech proconsul. The second section is a minute-by-minute documentation of the operation, told through a collection of reports and memoranda. The final section is the almost stream-of-consciousness diary of Czech collaborator Karel as he sits in jail awaiting his execution. “The key to controlling the present is controlling the past ... And the best way to control the past is to tell a story about it,” says one resident of occupied Czechoslovakia, and this is certainly the case in Brennan’s triptych. Three very different prisms are implemented to bring Operation Anthropoid—and the larger experience of Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia—alive for readers. The central events of the story—the plot to kill Heydrich, the assassination itself and the staggering reprisals taken by the Nazis—are approached from several different angles, heightening both the tension and the power of the narratives. Brennan’s command of facts is absolute and his ear for dialogue is pitch-perfect. The author is unafraid of making readers spend a great deal of time with some very unsavory people; Karel is particularly repellent yet mesmerizing.
An extremely impressive debut.
So that's exciting! Definitely blurbable. And it's always nice to put a complicated and intricately-plotted work in the hands of an anonymous stranger and see that they actually get it. After all, without making connections, the whole writing and publishing thing gets kinda lonely.
Of course, we're still looking for more blurbs. So drop us a line at editors@tortoisebooks.com if you'd like a review copy!
Funding the Tortoise
We recently popped in to a conference at the Chicago Cultural Center for advice on building and developing a web presence. They mentioned NOT putting up a website in Flash, because it’s hard to maintain; we promptly didn’t convert our website to Flash. They mentioned putting up biographic information, so as to make it easier for any interested journalists to learn a little about us; we did that relatively promptly. They mentioned blogging regularly to keep the website updated and fresh and sticky; we promptly got too busy getting Resistance ready for launch to maintain our hoped-for blog-post-a-week schedule.
Also, we had to launch a Kickstarter campaign, and we were busy crunching the numbers for that and filming our project video. Now, asking for money isn’t our strong suit. But our first funding plan—the Mega Millions—fell through, and we didn’t want to go too far out of pocket on this thingy, because we’ve already spent a good amount of money getting it out there—advance copies, photo rights, etc. (Granted, it is our flagship project, the Reasonable Doubt to our Rock-A-Fella Records, the Chronic to our Death Row, so we will go way out of pocket if we have to—but we don’t want to have to. And we don't want to threaten to throw Vanilla Ice off a hotel balcony to get funding. Granted, we're not morally opposed to it, but he probably doesn't have the money.) So we’re looking for backers on Kickstarter. Check us out if you’re so inclined. The deadline’s a little tight—somewhat un-tortoise-y—but we want to be able to have as much time in post-production as possible, giving you a book that is worth your hard-earned money. So fund us! You’ll be glad you did.
Branding the Tortoise
We're writers. We're not used to the whole "branding" thing. But we are trying to create a brand here, so it's something we gotta work on, slow and steady.
We're hoping to have a table at the Printers Row Lit Fest, to sell books and connect with new authors and what-not. (We put in our application this week, a couple days ahead of their deadline. We emailed it AND, because tortoises are cautious, we sent a redundant copy via FedEx Overnight with the Next Business Morning delivery option. It felt very un-Tortoise.) ANYWAY, since we'll be selling books, we want a brand for those books, and since we want a brand, we figured we'd better get a logo.
We first needed something as a placeholder for our Twitter account, because we didn't want just the standard blank photo icon, although since Twitter uses an egg, it's oddly apropos. (No one knows which comes first between the chicken or the egg, but when it comes down to the tortoise and the egg, it's clearly the latter, at least as far as they're concerned.) ANYWAY, we combed the interwebs and didn't like most of the pictures, but this proved a worthy logo for the first week:
We wanted something a little more...lively, though.
We mentioned this to our journalist friend Amy Hayden, recently of TimeOut Chicago, while hanging out at Chicago Zine Fest with our friends Elizabeth Tieri and Rob Chambers from Back To Print and The Deadline. (We're involved with those publications as well, so we were helping man the table, while also passing out postcards with a picture of a dead Nazi on them to promote our first book, Resistance. On a side note, just as an FYI, pictures of dead Nazis kinda creep people out, and when your head's shaved, it adds to the general level of creepiness.) ANYWAY, my friend's son--the talented and personable Basil--promptly offered to design a logo for us. Here's what he came up with:
His picture, while not without a certain charm, isn't quite the image we're hoping to project, although we are keeping it on file in the even we start a kids label.
Fortunately, we were also able to enlist the even-more-considerable talents of our good friend Rachele O'Hare, who drew a design that somehow combined the black-and-white seriousness of Tortoise #1 with the whimsy of Tortoise #2. While it still needs a couple slight tweaks, we were excited enough that we showed it off to a good many friends, and we got so excited we had to listen to mellow indie rock and mellow Euro-techno (Lambchop's OH (ohio) and The Notwist's Neon Golden, respectively) to slow us down to our normal tortoise pace. And we still had a hard time sleeping!
Anyway, without further ado, here's what she came up with:
Not bad!
Tortoising Around
After a few days tortoising around the interwebs, and whipping out the trusty Tortoise Books debit card a few times for web hosting and what-not, we finally have a home of our own! Of course, it still doesn't look as good as our facebook page, but, hey, we're working on it. Listening to Brazillian music, which we're really into lately (João Gilberto, in case you're curious) and brewing up some coffee in the trusty Tortoise Books Keurig machine, and peering out the window here and there at busy Chicago on a bright March day, and working on the website. Back to work we go!