The death of the book party. How sad. Just when authors were finally getting younger and sexier too.

Once, book parties “were as central to the book-publishing experience as collecting blurbs and freaking out over your book jacket,” he wrote in an e-mail message. “How else could you get through this self-induced ordeal without imagining the scene: reviewers and critics and editors and writers. . . . The hugging, the raised glasses, the rueful toast by one’s editor about how long the book took, the copies displayed on a mantelpiece.”

Not so now. “In these cost-cutting days, the book party is no longer to be counted on as a well-earned prize,” Atlas lamented. For one, publishers see book parties as a waste of money. The marketing budget, they argue, is far better spent on advertising or placement in bookstores. Unless you’ve written a surefire best seller — something about, say, sex, Hollywood, God, dogs, dieting or Abraham Lincoln — publishers are hesitant to spring for more than a few bottles of wine and some snacks from Fairway.

You’re lucky if you get a buy-your-own-beer and Doritos launch at most places these days. But where else will you sell 60 copies of your book at once, you midlist hack?