Kemble Scott

Who is Kemble Scott?

Kemble Scott is the pseudonym for fiction used by American journalist Scott James, writer of a weekly column about the San Francisco Bay Area that appears in The New York Times and The Bay Citizen. His debut novel SoMa became a bestseller in the spring of 2007. The novel tells the interwoven stories of twentysomethings on the prowl for thrills in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood following the city’s infamous Dot-com crash. In June 2008 the novel SoMa was honored as a finalist for the national Lambda Literary award for debut fiction.

At the time SoMa was published, James produced a series of videos for YouTube in which he appeared as Kemble Scott to take viewers to the real places that inspired the novel. It’s believed this was the first time an author launched a novel this way. The videos received thousands of views and may have contributed to the book’s bestseller status. The influential tech blog Valleywag noted the videos, but criticized them for being too tame, compared to the sexually explicit content of the novel.

In May 2009 James published his second novel, The Sower by Kemble Scott. The first edition premiered as a digital book and was the first novel sold by social publisher Scribd.com in a new e-commerce venture called "Scribd Store," according to the Associated Press.