| Tuesday was a big day in the literary world, and Leonor Mamanna, the deputy photo director at Businessweek and Bloomberg Pursuits, is here to explain why Sally Rooney's new novel inspired so much celebration. Plus: the battles that shaped Activision Blizzard, and the Fujifilm camera that's so popular no one can get one. If this email was forwarded to you, click here to sign up. First, there were the bucket hats. Now, the book parties. In 2021, for the release of Sally Rooney's novel Beautiful World Where Are You?, a number of embroidered bucket hats were sent, gratis, to influencers, editors and booksellers, many of whom could be seen sporting them on their Instagram grids. It went so viral that it was parodied. For millennials, that's the ultimate endorsement, and for book publishers, competing for marketing attention in the digital era, the ultimate win. The novel quickly became a bestseller. How, then, could Rooney's publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux top those yellow hats while promoting her fourth novel, Intermezzo? For Tuesday's release, FSG and bookstores went with a kind of throwback publishing trick: the live event model, which is a nice way of saying they're throwing parties. Lots and lots of parties. The sheer volume of Intermezzo events is unusual for the literary fiction genre. (The Harry Potter books, in a category of their own, were feted on a much grander scale, of course.) There were more than 140 scheduled across the US, according to Esquire.  Source: Farrar, Straus and Giroux A quick search for "Sally Rooney events" brought up eight different functions in New York City alone. Last week, FSG and Emma Roberts' celebrity book club Belletrist co-hosted a "premiere event." This party had everything: a step and repeat, a DJ, cookies that looked like the cover, thematically colored chess sets, a station to make friendship bracelets and a photo booth. On Tuesday, McNally Jackson Books in Manhattan hosted a party that included chess lessons—the game plays a key role in the book—and "Sal Roon trivia." From a certain standpoint, it feels a little limited: Why market a book to only people who can physically attend an event? But it makes sense when we return to the bucket hat phenomenon. At a time when most authors don't sell more than 5,000 copies, Rooney has sold millions of novels and become a sort of brand in herself. The merch was a signifier that the reader-fan is part of a like-minded club. And what's a club without a meetup? (Rooney will attend events in the UK, closer to Ireland, where she is based.) It doesn't appear that Rooney fans were deterred as, by many accounts, the parties were well attended and the vibes celebratory. In book publishing, it's notoriously difficult to get a sense of how books are selling; the numbers are all over the place. At an event this year, publishing insiders named marketing as the single hardest part of their jobs. "It is the function of publishing to marry those books we're publishing to the readers," Abrams Chief Executive Officer Mary McAveney said at a panel of fellow CEOs, worrying that publishers had abdicated that responsibility to other customers, such as librarians. When my colleague James Tarmy handed me an advance copy of the novel in late July, I was surprised to see it was both personalized with his name as well as numbered. Such copies regularly go out to the news media, so they can plan their coverage and write reviews, but they're typically not so carefully controlled. I was under strict orders to read it discreetly and return it safely. If I hadn't already suspected that the frenzy around Rooney's book was going to reach new heights, I knew it then. Personally, I am happy to see so many people out partying for a novel; the more people buying and reading books, the better. But a high-end chess set would've been cool, too. I certainly would have posted a picture of it. Related: The Five Books to Put on Your Reading List This Fall (including Intermezzo!) | 
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