Allen Barra on “When Curling Was King”

“King Kaufman is to curling – ‘chess on ice,’ as we aficionados refer to it — what Red Smith was to baseball and A.J. Liebling to boxing.  He’s good on just about every other competition in the Winter Olympics as well, and no one has ever given a better account of the politics and vagaries of the Winter Olympics and its judges. Not merely a companion to the Winter Games, this book will have you feeling like an insider.”
— Allen Barra, Wall Street Journal, author of “Yogi Berra, Eternal Yankee.”

Buy “When Curling Was King: Winter Olympics Columns 2002-2006” today at Scribd.com. It’s only $3. That’s barely a nickel per mention of curling!

More praise for “When Curling Was King”

“Thanks to King Kaufman, for the first time in my life I really wish I gave a tinker’s damn about the Winter Olympics.”
— Rob Neyer, ESPN.com

Buy “When Curling Was King: Winter Olympics Columns 2002-2006” today at Scribd.com. It’s only $3. That’s only 17 cents per mention of Bode Miller!

Advance praise for “When Curling Was King”

“King Kaufman looks at sports in a different, smarter way than most people. Reading this collection reminded me that the best sportswriters dig into sports from the outside to find the truth within.”
— Will Leitch, contributing editor, New York Magazine, author of “God Save The Fan.”

Buy “When Curling Was King: Winter Olympics Columns 2002-2006” today at Scribd.com. It’s only $3. That’s only 11 cents per mention of Michelle Kwan!

“When Curling Was King” soft launch

It’s up! I’ve uploaded my first ebook, “When Curling Was King: Winter Olympics Columns, 2002-2006” to Scribd.com. I’ll start the hard sell soon.

So far, with total sales at 0, I’m pretty happy with Scribd. I was expecting an hours-long rasslin’ match to get that thing uploaded, but it was pretty easy. The only thing that went wrong went wrong because of my own dumbness, deleting the document when I didn’t like something when I should have just uploaded a revised version.

That’s monkeying with the search right now. It’s run by Google, and right now Google’s seeing the original document, and when you click through you get “This document has been deleted.” Duh, me. I’m hoping next time Google crawls the site, the deleted version will be forgotten and only the second, correct version will show up.

The preview, which should show the “cover” — really just Page 1 of the PDF but it’s a photo with text on it and it’s supposed to look like a book cover — is showing up as a blank page, which isn’t great. Page 1 of the actual document looks right, though, so I’m hoping that the blank page on preview is another artifact of my dumb deletion and will sort itself out soon.

I’m pretty sure this is the most complex thing I’ve ever done on a computer without getting someone smarter than me — usually my only genius friend, Mignon Khargie — to hold my hand or do it for me.

You can read a preview, featuring the cover, the table of contents, an introduction and one column from each Olympics, here. And if you like what you see, spend the three bucks and read the whole thing.

I’m wondering if I should do more column collections, and I’m also wondering if ebooks organized around various subjects would be a good idea for Salon. Interviews with authors? Investigative pieces? The best of Heather Havrilesky? Let’s see if anyone’s interested in this one first.

My first e-book

With the 2010 Winter Olympics coming up in Vancouver, I’m planning to release a collection of columns I wrote for Salon during the 2002 and 2006 Games. My first e-book will be called “When Curling Was King: Winter Olympics Columns, 2002-2006,” and it’ll be out just as soon as I can figure out how to make Scribd.com do what I want it to do.

This afternoon I tweeted my intentions to publish an e-book called “When Curling Was King,” and I think anyone who happened to read it probably figured I was joking. I mean, curling was never king, right? Right.

But there’s a lot of curling in the book, though of course there’s plenty of figure skating — remember David Pelletier and Jamie Sale? — and hockey and all that flying down the mountain stuff too. Björk makes a cameo appearance. The title’s kind of a joke, is the thing.

I’m trying to figure out if I can make one of a few Creative Commons photos of curlers in Turin work for the “cover,” that is for Page 1 of the e-book, since there’s not really a cover. But if you happen to know of a really great Olympic curling photo from 2002 or 2006 that I might be able to use for free or not much money, let me know.

And how much would you pay for an e-book of my Winter Olympics columns, plus an introduction and a new little introductory paragraph for each piece? A buck? Two? It’ll be about 120 pages. Help me figure this out.