best book of the year – Page 4 – President of Outskirts Press

My last two posts have mentioned our recent “Best Book” winner, Irv Sternberg, and this post is no exception. The December promotion in which we sought one amazing manuscript to publish for free provided a wonderful opportunity to reward a talented author. And Mr. Sternberg provides a nice segue of sorts to this posting’s topic – which is about the Colorado Humanities and their annual Colorado Book Awards. You see, Irv’s prior book, Neptune’s Chariot, was a Colorado Book Awards finalist last year.

Tomorrow, the Colorado Book Awards are being awarded at the Doerr-Hosier Center in Aspen on June 25th, the last day of the week-long Aspen Literary Festival. Outskirts Press is a premiere sponsor of the Colorado Center for the Book and its Colorado Book Awards and I will be on-hand at the event to assist with the distribution of the awards. For a full list of the finalists, please visit the Colorado Humanities website here. Congratulations to them all!

Waaaaay back in December, we ran a promotion looking for the best book submitted to us for publication in that month. The idea behind the promotion was to imitate a traditional publishing submission and publishing process — that is, to identify one single manuscript from among all the submissions we received and “accept it” for free publication and grant it an “advance” of sorts. I wrote about this in a previous blog posting in March.

Two days ago we announced the best book and the talented author in our most recent newsletter: The Persian Project, by Mark Irving.

Mark Irving is the pen name for Irv Sternberg, who has published two previous books with Outskirts Press, both of them regional bestsellers. And for those of you who fear I might be “letting the cat out of the bag” by revealing the author’s nom de plume, you can relax; Mr. Sternberg is open about his double-identity.

Congratulations, Irv!

Now we’re putting the finishing touches on a larger and more exciting “Outskirts Press Best Book of the Year” recognition program for 2010. We will hopefully announce it in July. The good news is that (unlike last year) this program will apply to all the Diamond or Pearl books we have published or will publish in 2010, not just those that come in after–or as a result of–this announcement.