Best of the Sugar Beet Book

We finally got a publisher for the Best of the Sugar Beet, a collection of pieces from the fake Mormon satirical newspaper upon which I used to spend a lot of time and energy. It's a lady in SLC who has her own small press that she does full time, with a paid assistant and a real office. It's called Pince Nez Press, and she's done some nice books. She has some bread-and-butter books related to private schools in San Francisco, which finances her to branch out and experiment with some humor and fiction. She got some notoriety from "God's Brothel," a book of stories about women caught in polygamist hell.

But anyway, I think she'll be great to work with. She seems really solid in the areas of hand-selling books to stores and doing marketing campaigns and stuff, just the sorts of things I wouldn't want to do much myself, were I to self-publish. Most importantly, she really loves our material and says she would love to live and breathe it for a full year of intensive promotion of the book. She's not LDS but grew up in Utah.

There's no money up front, but she takes the financial risk and does the publishing work, although we'll help with promotion, events, etc. (she's big on launch parties, that sort of thing). I will act as editor of the book; in fact, I already have the basic ms. selected for this vol. 1, but need to do more formatting, proofing, arranging, etc. It's highly likely we'll do some additional volumes too.

Our working title for this first book is "The Mormon Tabernacle Enquirer," to try to appeal to as broad an audience as possible. "Sugar Beet" will be in a subtitle somewhere. We're not sure about time frame yet, but she says she moves pretty fast on books. I think this will be really fun!

In other publishing news, I had a book titled "Conversations with Mormon Authors" accepted by a small Mormon press in NYC. However, I have not heard from the publisher in several months, although I've completed the process of getting the interviews ready for publication. I am hoping he is just too busy right now and will get back to me sometime . . .

So counting the anthology of Mormon missionary memoirs I'm putting together with Holly Welker, I still have four book projects on my plate currently. I wonder which will be the first to see the light of day and which, if any, will die unpublished.