Tallfellow Press Blog

Book News & Updates

Hello folks!

Just a few updates. We're doing some internal re-structuring, which means the Author Quote of the Week and Publicity Tips are temporarily suspended. However, there's another Droodles Caption contest on the horizon...

In the meantime, here's where you can find more Tallfellow News on the web:

• Great Failures of the Extremely Successful review on Armchair Reviews
• Ten Minutes to the Pitch review on Armchair Reviews
• Write Screenplays That Sell review on Armchair Reviews
• Forever Friends review on Preschool Entertainment
• The Enormous Mister Schmupsle review on Preschool Entertainment
• It's Spring review on Preschool Entertainment

Lots of reviews trickling in, and more in the works!

People Fail Everywhere

Thanks to Technorati, we know now that young people in India are reading (and quoting) Steve Young's introduction to Great Failures.

Gotta love Technorati.

Author Quote of the Week

This one -- a commentary on the Dodgers' recent bad luck -- comes from humorist Steve Young, author of our book Great Failures of the Extremely Successful. Quote courtesy of Steve's regular Guest Column in the L.A. Daily News:

"...Gagne, Kent, Izturis, Drew, etc., etc., etc. With one Dodger after another going down to injuries, it should be no surprise to anyone when in a recent game with Houston, every player on the team simultaneously burst into flames and exploded."

Enjoy! And don't forget to read Steve's satire blog, The Unfiltered Truth.

Great Talk from a Great Author

Great news for Great Failures of the Extremely Successful: author Steve Young now has his own radio show in the greater Los Angeles area!

(Could this get any greater?)

Listen live to Steve's blathering on L.A.'s KTLK (1150 AM), Saturdays, 1-4PM.

This is the local AirAmerica station - liberal talk radio. Steve will be giving away one book a week to the winner of his trivia game. Tune in for more info!

And the Paper Back is Doing Well Too.

The paperback Great Failures is at 2,669 on Amazon.

Thanks to Steve, who is relentless in getting behind his books. He's the one who secured the Hannity interview; he's the kind of author publishers dream of signing.

Radio Works: The Hannity Show

This isn't news to anyone in book sales, but I thought I'd reiterate the point that you really do need to get on radio if at all possible.

Steve Young was on Sean Hannity's show yesterday, and now the hardcover edition of Great Failures of the Extremely Successful is hovering at around 1100 on Amazon.

That means only 1099 books sold more than we did yesterday. Most of those are probably pre-established Best Sellers.

Author Blog

Check out Steve Young's new blog.

Failure is All the Rage

A new book on failure has come out.

In this article, a professor at Georgetown, Michael Kazin, is quoted a saying (I paraphrase) "I don't think anyone's ever written this sort of book before."

But we beg to differ. So I'm hoping our author Steve Young will call this professor and let him know there IS another social history of failure -- Great Failures -- and it's a primary resource -- perfect for future historians.

Ready or Not, Here Life Comes

This morning on The Today Show, Dr. Mel Levine talked about his new book, Ready or Not, Here Life Comes.

The subject of the book is work-life preparedness -- and how twentysomethings lack it. The book examines why young people in this day and age are so shocked and confused when they exit childhood and enter the working world. More and more young people (and I'm one of them!) live at home for longer periods of time and flounder in a variety of careers before figuring out where in the world they fit.

Something about this book's topic reminded me of Steve Young's book on failure, and made me wonder if there's a natural connection between "work-life preparedness" and learning to benefit from failure and rejection.

It seems to me like adolescence sets children up with a series of very simple trials. You pass a test, you hand in your homework, you make the team, you graduate. For many people, all of these things are relatively easy. Maybe that's why so many of us are so shellshocked when we enter the corporate world. Nothing is quite as cut-and-dry as a Shakespeare quiz.

Perhaps -- just perhaps -- the students who fail out of classes, get cut from the football team and get dumped, repeatedly, by members of the opposite sex are the ones who go on to the greatest successes!

Anyway -- read both books and let me know what you think. Maybe we can design a course where overachieving teenagers are forced to fail, purely from a learning and rejection-preparation standpoint.

Syllabusted!

This post does little to support the clever title, but here goes:

The Wharton Business School at UPenn is teaching a class in which one of our books, Great Failures of the Extremely Successful (I post about it often), is being used on the syllabus. The class is called The Literature of Success, and it sounds like a great topic to me.