The book release party is a staple of the Brooklyn nightlife scene. Wait, let’s try that again, it seems wrong. The book release party is a staple of the Brooklyn free wine and snacks scene. Authors work hard enough on their books, and in order to get people to come out and appreciate that fact, they lure us with wine and some snacks and sometimes book-themed food. No author would think of sabotaging their own book release party, or so we thought, until we came across the Kickstarter asking for help making the release party for Josh Gondelman and Joe Berkowitz’s You Blew It so terrible that it becomes the worst book release party of all time.
As the Kickstarter page explains (with a video featuring our own Tim Donnelly and Meghan Stephens), the author team is raising as much money as possible to provide the guests at their book release party on October 13 with things like “room-temperature beverages, vile-tasting snacks, tacky decorations, and unpleasant background music.” For the snacks, the duo are promising to serve things like circus peanuts and trail mix with the M&M’s picked out and we assume they’re looking to serve Pepsi as their drink, as it’s widely known to be the worst soda in existence. If you decide to back this Kickstarter, you can further humiliate Gondelman and Berkowitz by paying to select bad songs to put on the party playlist ($10), getting one of them to email you an embarrassing secret ($5) or getting them to confess their love to you at the party, emotionally and uncomfortably ($50).
You might be wondering why these two are asking for money to throw a bad party, especially when the book is being published by an established publishing company. But come on now, these two have got their work cut out for them, if they want to have a more uncomfortable and depressing release party than the one held for Andrew Cuomo’s despised All Things Possible.