A new model for publishing--zero money to anybody, a total eclipse of sales, royalties, profits, costs, you name it--launches across the country, literally, next Monday, April 8.
Bringing together the best minds in the book biz, Eclipse Books will publish its first and only book, Now You See It, Now You Don't, with a succession of one-hour laydowns in an arc of delivery totality coast to coast on the day of the eclipse.
"We see a unique opportunity to not upset the apple cart, nor reinvent the wheel, and def not realign the payment model, like, at all. We do not want to be a change agent or disruptor," Eclipse founder Saul "Sol" Lument told Shelf Awareness. "We see this as the perfect escape fiction that will outsell the Trump Bible by a mile. Which is also fiction."
Rooting through a box of 3D glasses collected from Regal 8 Cinemas over the past 10 years, Sol, we mean Saul, continued: "After all, what is more American than ignoring world events and focusing on a disc in the sky for one passing moment?"
Sol added, "My son, Sun, and daughter, Ray, were so bummed out the past few eclipses by cloud cover that once I heard that April 8 was guaranteed by every Penn State-trained meteorologist to be clear skies, I knew I had to act and act now, or well, wait until August 23, 2044, the next one."
Asked what exactly the book is about, Sol/Saul said, "Not sure yet. I have a week. I'm mostly concerned about the rolling laydown date. One-hour timed releases are not easy, you know."
Within minutes of our first conversation, Sol called back, apologizing for a kind of eclipse of the conversation, saying that he actually has an idea for the book. He called it "a special keepsake of a special event," highlighting the key moment of the eclipse, the three or four minutes when the sky is completely dark. "One page. A brilliant re-creation of a brilliant moment. All black. Nothing to see. Everything to see."
When Shelf Awareness suggested that a book should have words and pages, and even ideally an index, Lument said, "Why? That's such old-school thinking. I envision zero burden on supply chain or AI or anything. Why does a book have to be about anything? Especially a book about an eclipse?" --Carl Lennertz