U2-A Diary

I did an email interview about U2 – A Diary with Terapija, a music wb site in Croatia. (Terapija is the Croatian word for “therapy.”) They’ve just posted it on their web site. If you’ve been reading the blog, you’ll have already heard some of the Q&A about the book, but they also asked some other questions like favorite U2 songs, favorite books/movies, and so forth.

I mentioned in the previous post that I sent a video to Croatia that was aired during the launch of their translation of U2 – A Diary. My original video ran about 11 minutes, but was edited down (thankfully) to five minutes for airing during the press event. My son, Sean, actually found the edited video on YouTube, and I figured I’d post it here for anyone interested in hearing what I said. (Remember, it’s edited, so some of the context of certain comments may be lost.)

From Roars via Aaron comes this cool photo of the HMV store in Manchester (UK), where U2 – A Diary has been chosen to be part of a big wall of U2 goodies to promote the new album.

Two things stand out to me:

1. How cool to see the book featured like that underneath and surrounded by nothing but official releases?! Awesome.

2. Unrelated: I haven’t seen a U2 display like that at any retail store in forever. Are there any U.S. retailers that have that many U2 CDS and DVDs in stock and on shelves?

I want to share a big THANK YOU to Alan Cross for mentioning U2 – A Diary on his popular radio podcast, “The Ongoing History of New Music Minute.” It happened yesterday, and Alan is kind enough to let me share the short MP3 file here on the blog.

Download here. (365k MP3)

If you click through to see the larger image on Flickr, you’ll see that’s me next to Eminem. And Ronnie Wood. And there’s Slash above me. John Lennon and Andy Summers below me. Pretty cool, if you ask me. :)

You can imagine my surprise when I saw this a couple nights ago at the local Barnes & Noble: my book on display on an endcap! That’s some nice publicity. And for all the criticism that the final book cover took, I actually think it stands out much better in this environment than the other covers. The wide black space really makes the book title quite eye-catching.

Or maybe it’s just that my eyes are used to seeing this cover and so I noticed it more quickly? Possible. Still, it’s just cool to see the book getting promoted like this.