Television Sales Is a Funny Business, Sometimes It’s Hard To Find The Laughs

Patricia Scarlett’s debut novel, Blinded by the Brass Ring, the first in the Jewelle Joseph Series will be out in April 2023 and screen rights are available.

“A fun and flirtatious insight into the nuanced experience of being an ambitious career-driven woman living a Black experience in a White workplace. A familiar conversation that has not been heard yet . . . .”

~ Donisha Prendergast, Writer/Director, Actor, Public Speaker

Looking to the journals she has kept over the years about the inner and outer workings of the domestic and international TV industry, Patricia Scarlett, founder of Media Business Institute, a Toronto-based TV training and production company, wrote Blinded by the Brass Ring. This debut novel in the Jewelle Joseph Series centres on the professional and personal life of Jewelle Joseph, an Afro-Canadian international television sales and distribution executive who works for a small TV channel with a big reputation.

• Screen rights are available. Contact Robin Philpot: robin@barakabooks.com 514-808-8504
• Novel available for pre-order in January 2023 from Baraka Books. Pub date: 1 April 2023.

Stylish and ambitious, Jewelle Joseph (JJ to her friends) has the perfect opportunity to make her move into senior management through the newly created sales and distribution spin-off company. It will mean a significant salary increase and equally important it will allow her to reign in and  over her rival and fellow international sales executive, Chantal Mercier. But Chantal’s got her eye on the VP of sales position too. The competition between these two ambitious women moves from the glitzy office towers of downtown Toronto to the glamorous world of the international television market in Cannes. While navigating family drama—a philandering father and traditional Jamaican mother who tries to control Jewelle’s life and the lives of her siblings—Jewelle tries to balance her doubts about her boyfriend Anthony Brown, who Jewelle perceives as lacking in ambition, and the hot and heavy pursuit of her by Johann Eriksson, a dashing and successful Swedish television executive. Her posse’s honesty and support keep her grounded.

Author Patricia Scarlett’s stories reflect contemporary Black life in Canada and explore the intersections of race, class, and culture through a Caribbean-Canadian lens. Over the span of her career, she has worn many hats, including those of entrepreneur and consultant. She founded Scarlett Media to provide a variety of consultative services to independent producers and broadcasters on media production and distribution. Her early experience in the industry began at TVOntario where she worked primarily in international sales. As a highly successful Sales Executive, Scarlett was responsible for opening up the Latin American market and she initiated and closed TVOntario’s first educational broadcast and educational non-broadcast sales in Brazil. Her relationships with producers and broadcasters culminated in several significant achievements including her licensing Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, winner of the Camera D’Or at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, to CBC Television. She is the recipient of the 2020 Afroglobal Television Media Award.

Baraka Books was very sad to learn that Mick Lowe, author of the Nickel Range Trilogy passed away on Saturday, April 17 at the age of 73.

Mick loved his adopted home town of Sudbury. He devoted much of his great story-telling talent as a reporter and author to the hard-rock miners and their many struggles for justice and dignity.

The Raids, Vol. 1 of the Trilogy, is a fictional account of true-life battle that took place in the early 60s vicious beatings, riots, and covert operations. It is built around 19-year old Jake McCool who undergoes a rite of passage—his first shift underground in a hard rock mine.

Dave Patterson, a hard rock miner and former president of Sudbury Steelworkers’ Local 6500, describes The Raids as “… a compelling story of political power, love and hatred all rolled into a gritty, hard-hitting novel of the Nickel Range.” The Raids has also appeared in German.

In The Insatiable Maw Jake McCool, who was injured in the mine, starts working at the Copper Cliff Smelter complex in the early 70s. He finds himself embroiled in a vicious fight over health and safety, and particularly the poisoned air in the smelter and around. Through his cast of characters, Mick Lowe chronicles an entire community’s eco-defiance that led to the greening of Sudbury.

Wintersong. It is September 1978, 11,700 hard rock miners and smelter and refinery workers at Inco’s Sudbury operations face a stark choice. Should they remain on the job? Or take seemingly suicidal strike action against a huge multinational that has stocked up enough nickel to last a year? They choose the latter and win.

The Nickel Range Trilogy is working class literature at its best, echoing the great tradition of writers like Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser, Steinbeck and Dos Passos.  Few novels in Canada focus on workers and work and even fewer deal with work in industry, particularly in a unionized setting. Mick bucked that trend and did it well.

Although Mick has left us, he has left his adopted home town and country—Mick was born and raised in Nebraska and came to Canada as a draft dodger—and workers everywhere a wonderful legacy. He will be sorely missed.

Our condolences go out to his family and friends.

Robin Philpot, Publisher