When the San Diego Comic-Con was founded in 1970, it provided an exclusive space where fans, dealers, collectors, and industry professionals could come together to celebrate their love of comics and popular culture. In the decades since, Comic-Con has grown in size and scope, attracting hundreds of thousands of fans each summer and increased attention from the media industries, especially Hollywood, which uses the convention’s exclusivity to spread promotional hype far and wide. What made the San Diego Comic-Con a Hollywood destination? How does the industry’s presence at Comic-Con shape our ideas about what it means to be a fan? And what can this single event tell us about the relationship between media industries and their fans, past and present? Only at Comic-Con answers these questions and more as it examines the connection between exclusivity and the proliferation of media industry promotion at the longest-running comic convention in North America.
 

• All authors desire to get their books into the hands of as many readers as possible. Though it is a publisher’s role to aid and assist authors in marketing and publicity for every book, the role of any publisher necessarily takes a back seat to your all-important efforts. Nobody else can do this essential work as effectively as you can.

• This handbook will prepare you to take the lead in executing your own publicity plan. It is designed to guide you, step-by-step, through the process of making a success of your book. It’s jam-packed with the essential tools, ideas, and resources you’ll need to achieve that goal, from an independent publisher who has provided a launching pad for authors like Ilya Kaminsky, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Jennifer Michael Hecht, Maggie Smith, Matthew Zapruder, and 250 others.

• Thoroughly and joyfully embrace the notion of self-promotion, knowing that it’s the book—your book—you’re breathing life into. You wouldn’t have written and published your book if you didn’t believe in it, and in yourself, as a writer with important artistic talent to share. Your publisher believes in you. Your family and friends believe in you. Your current readers believe in you. And future readers will believe in you.

Jeffrey Levine, Publisher, Tupelo Press

You’ll learn the essentials for book marketing as an indie author in a digital age:
• Develop your author image and brand across social channels
• Create an engaging social media presence
• Grow your audience and meaningfully connect with them
• Build an attractive, searchable website—no coding skills needed
• Launch a publicity campaign that gets you reviews
• Ensure your book is on bookstore and library shelves
• Practice mindful literary citizenship
• Learn from Tupelo authors (who were in your shoes not too long ago!)

In this era of Antiques Roadshow and eBay, it is hard to imagine a time when Americans did not treasure the home furnishings of elite early American families. But as this book demonstrates, antiquing—particularly the practice of valuing old things for their aesthetic qualities—is a relatively recent invention whose origins can be found in the early years of the twentieth century. Although nineteenth-century Americans did appreciate heirlooms, they saw them as memory markers, tangible representations of honored ancestors or local history.

In Out of the Attic, Briann G. Greenfield traces the transformation of antiques from family keepsakes to valuable artistic objects, examining the role of collectors, dealers, and museum makers in the construction of a new tradition based on the aesthetic qualities of early American furnishings. While recognizing the significance of antiques as symbols of an enduring American culture, Greenfield also delves behind popular rhetoric to examine the development of a retail structure specifically designed to facilitate the buying and selling of old wares. With antique shops proliferating all over New England, pickers going door-to-door in search of "finds," and forgers taking illicit advantage of growing demand, antique owners and collectors found themselves trying to navigate a retail market characterized by escalating prices and high stakes purchases. In this sense, antiques functioned as more than remnants of a treasured past; they became modern consumer goods.

The book is divided into a series of case studies, each intended to illuminate some aspect of "the dynamic of consumer history." One chapter examines the role of Jewish dealers in promoting American antiques; another profiles Jessie Baker Gardner, a small-time collector and would-be museum maker from Providence, Rhode Island. Greenfield also looks at the institutionalization of antiques, with chapters focusing on Henry Flynt of Deerfield, Massachusetts, who embraced the "aestheticization of antiques" in the 1940s and 1950s, and on Smithsonian curator C. Malcolm Watkins, who challenged the decorative art market during the 1950s and 1960s by purchasing old tools and crude furniture for the nation's museum.