S&S Unveils Tricked Out Web Site for Night of the Gun

By Rachel Deahl -- Publishers Weekly, 7/21/2008 11:43:00 AM

Further positioning David Carr’s The Night of the Gun as the anti-James Frey addiction memoir, publisher Simon & Schuster has built a companion Web site that, if anything, calls to mind the Smoking Gun’s takedown of A Million Little Pieces. The site, www.nightofthegun.com, is outfitted with videos, pictures, letters and other tidbits from Carr’s life and descent into drug addiction, which he “investigates,” through interviews and research, in the book, which got an announced first printing of 50,000.

David Rosenthal, executive v-p and publisher of S&S, who thinks Carr “redefines the memoir genre” with the book, said the site offer readers more, giving them “essential research material that, in a different era, would have ended up gathering dust in a filing cabinet.”

The site, which was built by Nick Bilton (who, along with Carr, works at the New York Times) in conjunction with S&S, is part of the company’s ongoing effort to bring a level of interactivity to its books. “We’re trying to ramp up our presence on the Web in a lot of different ways,” company spokesperson Adam Rothberg said, noting that S&S will be re-launching its Web site with “a lot of new features” later this year. While Rothberg acknowledged that not every book will lend itself to a site like nightofthegun.com, he said the focus is on “creating content that can travel.”