23/08/06

Music / Taste Mashup

Via GalleyCat (Via Buzz, Balls & Hype) an article from the WSJ (registration required so no link) on how publishers are looking to sell books to the kids via music:

Having seen the power of songs to promote TV shows, movies and even videogames, publishers and authors are increasingly experimenting with soundtracks for books. Writers like James Patterson, Michael Connelly and Lemony Snicket are giving out CDs with copies of their novels. Others, like Bret Easton Ellis, are posting music suggestions on Web sites, blogs such as Largehearted Boy (and his weekly “Book Notes” feature) or MySpace pages. In many cases, the soundtracks are aimed at appealing to younger readers.

“Publishers are really struggling with the idea of, ‘How are we going to get 16-year-old kids to read, when it’s tough to get them to even watch TV,’” says Chuck Klosterman, who has posted a playlist on the Web for his recent book, “Killing Yourself to Live.” To accompany the book about his pilgrimage to the sites of famous music-related deaths, he chose songs by the Sex Pistols and Nirvana

Not sure I haven’t mentioned this before, or probably read about it elsewhere, but the idea of an extended LibraryThing / LastFM mashup to include music would create an interesting cross-section between music and books, or films, TB shows and so on. Not sure what good it would do other than be mildly distractng though.

This does remind me of one of my favourite CDs of all time. Andrew Vachss, a (very) hard-boiled crime author with a series of detective novels with the character Burke. Burke is insane for obscure blues, and Vachss (combined with his pretty scary manager/agent Lou Banks, and their aptly-named company Ten Angry Pitbulls) put together an awesome CD of the music for one of the novels, Safe House. Buy it.

Posted by Peter Collingridge in Librarything, Music, Publishing.

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