Tina Brown, “Queen of Buzz,” clearly realized what went wrong with her last book venture back at Talk/Miramax. (Well, other than the getting-into-a-war-with-the-Weinsteins thing.) With the newly announced partnership between her Daily Beast website and Perseus Book Group, she’ll release books on the “buzzy” topics of the day, but at a rapid-fire pace. First she’ll start by selling E-books by the Beast’s roster of impressive contributors, and then she’ll move on to a quick-turnaround series of paperback releases. Dubbed “Beast Books,” the new venture will try to expand a currently struggling new field of publishing — think those hastily cobbled Time and Newsweek “Commemorative Issues” about things like presidential elections, combined with the reporting juice of that slender Us Weekly tome about the demise of Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston’s marriage. “There is a real window of interest when people want to know something,” Brown said. “And that window slams shut pretty quickly in the media cycle.” It’s true! For example, by the time December 2008 rolled around, we’d already forgotten all about our onetime Olympic hero Michael Phelps. It wasn’t until he got busted for smoking pot in January of 2009 that we even thought about his book, No Limits, released the month before. Not that we bought it, or anything, because everything we wanted to know was already online. But still! We thought about it.
