The Bibliophile: Horsin’ Around

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It’s officially too-hot-to-sleep season in Windsor, and so in between refilling our water bottles for the sixteenth time and trying to find the shadiest route down the street to the cafe, we decided it was time to wake The Bibliophile from its summer slumber.

In the spirit of fresh starts, we’ll be adding some additional kinds of content to this newsletter: alongside excerpts, essays, publicity news, and exclusive interviews with our authors, keep an eye out for industry musings and behind-the-scenes stories, featuring contributions from each of us and illuminating some of the day-to-day in the life of a publishing house, and what it is that makes us Biblioasis. (We do take requests: tell us what you’d like to know!)

Today it’s my pleasure to introduce Julia Lei, who’s recently started with us in publicity. Julia comes to us with a background in research and digital marketing and we’re delighted to have her aboard the good ship Biblio. Read on to learn a little bit about her early adventures in publishing, and a couple of the excellent books she’s been working on.

Vanessa Stauffer
Managing Editor

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September has marked the beginning of fall since I could remember running to catch the yellow bus on the first day of school. This has remained constant for over two decades, from elementary through grad school, despite changes over the years in fall’s hotness and my modes of transportation. This June, however, I started working as a publicist at Biblioasis, and the learning curve has dissolved my entrenched perspective on the season’s boundaries and contents.

Instead of seminars to attend and tutorials to teach, my fall calendar is now full of exciting bookish events to plan for and manage. To track preparation progress, our team consults multiple, ever-evolving to-do lists that are equally frightening and satisfying to look at. In particular, the title schedule and master media lists direct my daily triaging of tasks and toggling of tabs as we gear up for the closest batch of Biblioasis publication dates. The first of which, the August 6, 2024, publication of Hello, Horse by Richard Kelly Kemick, marks my new fall.

Establishing a new daily routine around a new job is challenging enough without the seasons shifting on you. As I try to get my steps in and drink enough water, I find inspo in the day-in-the-life of Richard Kelly Kemick, an award-winning poet, journalist, and fiction writer. Being his publicist, I was able to review his author questionnaire, which is a document authors new to Biblioasis fill out so we can get to know them better and do the best publicity possible for their work. The following is drawn from Richard’s finished questionnaire:

Q:

It’s useful to us to have a sense of your existing commitments and the lead time you might need for promotional and publicity opportunities. Give us a quick Day-in-the-Life sketch of your typical availability. What’s an average twenty-four hours like for you?

A:

7 am: Rouse from slumber
8 am: Walk dog and infant child with Litia to Litia’s work
9 am: Breakfast and then put infant child down for nap
9:30 to whenever Christ wills it: Write
12 pm: Walk dog and infant child to post office to check mail and gossip with fellow Rossland residents
1 pm: Lunch!
1:30 pm: Put infant child down for nap
1:30 to whenever Christ wills it: Write/read/nap
3 pm: Litia returns home from work
3–6 pm: Write
6:30 pm: Dinner!
7–9 pm: Go to school gymnasium and FUCKING CRUSH at volleyball
9–10 pm: Go home and gossip with Litia, talk shit about the fellow Rossland residents I gossiped with earlier in the day
10–11 pm: Read Ducks, Newburyport
11 pm: Slip into slumber

Seems like someone is adulting well . . . eight hours of sleep? I don’t know her, but one can dream. To stay on track with basic self maintenance and work, I started using a sticky note system on my desk that honestly looks better than it works. It might be time for me to try a good ol’ notebook, like the kind Roland Allen decided to write about in The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper. From an interview with the author, here’s a peek behind the making of this non-fiction title, which comes out September 4, 2024.

Q:

Can you tell me a bit more about yourself and how The Notebook came to be?

A:

I am from London originally. I studied English literature in Manchester University, which was great, and gave me some critical knowledge. Then I was an English teacher abroad in Poland for a couple of years. For most of my working life I’ve worked in publishing, but not on the editorial side. You might say that I’ve spent much longer working Excel grids than Word documents. Always on the sales side. Mostly illustrated books, mostly international markets—either the foreign rights market or the American market.

I’m very interested in the business behind things, so when I found that one of the first uses of notebooks was bookkeeping, it made perfect sense to me. Notebooks are so important within the bookkeeping field, and that has such an impact on other things, that it’s bound to spill over. That’s why you get really interesting things like the zibaldone, which are these Italian notebooks that normal people kept at home. People from all kinds of trades keep zibaldone. It was cheap and affordable and it’s a way a normal person can appreciate literature in an era before print. They came into existence because everyone in Florence had a notebook for bookkeeping. Because I have been working on the business end of things all my working life, I find that very relatable. On top of selling books, I started writing books under pseudonyms on the side as a fun thing to do. I’ve written eight books under five names, but they are all gift and novelty books. From a writing point of view it was good training. I’m quite good at sitting down and writing one thousand words. That was good discipline, writing about bicycles, aroma therapy, marijuana, sourdough bread, all these weird little nonfiction books.

I’d always wanted to publish a book about notebooks, but never found an author to do it, never found an editor who got it, so I started to write it myself.

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In addition to The Notebook, here are some other noteworthy reads from Biblioasis for the (eventual) upcoming sweater weather:

Thanks for reading!

Until next time,

Julia Lei
Publicist