I was thinking yesterday about the parallels between the literary world and the culinary world while my domestic goddess sister and her chef boyfriend spoke to each other about various chefs (the brilliant ones and the megalomaniacs) and restaurants (from gastronomic pilgrimage sites to pretentious failures). The uneasy union between these two disparate worlds? The cookbook.

So, if you are the home-cook variety of lit geek, consider adding one more book to your collection: This all-star collection of recipes from giants of the culinary world– all the proceeds from the sale of this e-book (yeah, I said it) will go to the recovery in Japan.( I can’t think of a better excuse to buy an ebook.)

Of course, you’re not going to find any mass market recipes in there– no sir. These recipes are from chefs who’ve earned things  equivalent to the Pulitzer. If you’ve ever wanted to brush up your knife skills or broaden your kitchen repertoire past your mom’s lasagna, now is the time. Braised black cod and wakame  soup awaits you.

I often think about the various ways in which the small press world differs from the big press world in terms of company practices and choices and how the former could potentially benefit from borrowing some ideas from the latter.

For example, back in the summer of ’09 I asked the question “How come indie publishers don’t do audio books?” This led me to imagine one-upping big presses by suggesting that small presses produce audio commentary for books, like having a writer walk through their book and talk about each section as though it were director commentary on a dvd.

For the most part, neither of those practices have really materialized in the small press world, as far as I know. Although I didn’t do the audio commentary thing, I thought making an audiobook sounded like such a good idea that when the time came last year I made one for my novel, The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney, which turned out pretty cool. (You can sample it here, and you can get it here for whatever price you want to pay — just scroll down when you get there.)  Thankfully, Ken Baumann, the visionary behind Sator Press, who published my book, is such a fantastically forward-thinking publisher that he supported and nurtured the idea — making Sator Press the first small press (that I know of) to offer a complete audiobook version of one of their titles.  Full disclosure, my audiobook has yet to garner much critical appreciation or even very much public commentary at all — which is probably to be expected, at least in part because it’s such an anomaly — but in fact I have received emails and gchats and even a few pieces of snail mail from people saying how much they dug it, leading me to believe that there is potential interest to be found in this untapped market.

Which brings me to what I propose could be another untapped market for the indie/small/micro press……something called “Transmedia Storytelling.”

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So there is a story in the book, about the Ottoman times when Bulgaria was under Turkish rule and the Ottomans forcefully recruited Bulgarian boys for their army; janissaries, who were made to deny their families and god. There is a story about Bulgarian rebels who fought for Macedonia’s freedom, about the aftermath of the Balkan Wars. Stories about the 1923 Communist uprising, about the events of 1944 when the Communist Party finally seized control of Bulgaria, about the so-called Process of Rebirth during which the Party forcefully changed the names of all Bulgarian Muslims to what were deemed “proper, Bulgarian” names. There are stories about things I myself witnessed and lived through: the fall of Communism in 1989, the results of this fall, or about the people who leave Bulgaria every year to make their luck abroad. READ MORE >