Posts Tagged: Publishing

This Week in Indie Bookstores

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Bookstore sales continue to grow. In the wake of the presidential election, bookstores are becoming more than just shops and are serving their communities as impromptu community centers. More independent bookstores are becoming publishers. Bushwick Brooklyn’s Molasses Books has started fundraising for good causes following Trump’s election. Bridgeside Books in Waterbury is trying to make Black […]

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Publishing When Life Comes at You Fast

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Meryl Williams was going to publish her roller derby memoir in 2016. Then she moved. Then she decided to move again. Some other things happened too. In a new essay for The Billfold, Williams walks us through her one step forward, two steps back journey towards (not) getting published (yet). She is good at showing the silver lining […]

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The Rumpus Interview with Max Porter

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Max Porter discusses his debut novel, Grief is the Thing with Feathers, literary genres, and the changing roles of editors.

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That Painful Money Subject

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Os&1s Reads’s The Art of Commerce talks with Merritt Tierce, author of Love Me Back, about the relationship between writers and money: Publishing is a machine that does what it does. You’re grateful, of course, to have the connection to it, because part of what it does is present your book to thousands and thousands of readers. That’s […]

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Publish a Book in Twelve Easy Steps

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Comedian Sara Benincasa is no stranger to being a working writer—in fact, she just wrote a book about it. Now, at Medium, she shares her secrets on getting published. Accessible and funny, Benincasa offers tips like “NO MONEY UPFRONT BECAUSE ANY AGENT WHO DOES THAT IS A CROOK,” details about advances and royalties, and the always-important […]

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Zoë Ruiz in Conversation with Micah Perks

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Don’t miss this interview at The Believer between former Rumpus Managing Editor Zoë Ruiz and contributor Micah Perks on Perks’s new novel, What Becomes Us—a story told from the point of view of twin fetuses inside the main character. Topics discussed include the book’s themes of “nice girls,” hunger, and the desire to feed oneself, as well as the publishing process.

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American Lit’s Reclusive Editor

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Without editor Robert Gottlieb, contemporary classics such as True Grit and Catch-22 might not exist in the forms we know them—but that doesn’t seem to move him. In a rare interview for the Guardian, Michelle Dean visited Gottlieb at his New York home to talk about his long list of achievements, which he demurely brushes […]

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The Storming Bohemian Punks the Muse #6: What’s Love Got to Do with It?

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My sister wrote and published a memoir about our childhood. It’s a good book, and I’m proud of her. It has won awards, and put her in demand on a national speaking circuit. Am I jealous of my little sister? Yep. She’s an engineer by training; I was the artist in the family. By rights, […]

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Literary Loyalty, Sad Sequels, Sadder Fans

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Loyalty seems to have no payoff for fans of every and any book that has ever had a sequel, because these next installments almost always disappoint—but why does it have to be this way? For Cultured Vultures, Nat Wassell gives a few examples of flaccid sequels and continuations; discusses responsibility from the author, publisher, and […]

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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Anne Raeff

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Married authors Anne Raeff and Lori Ostlund, both winners of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, discuss their craft, their process, and the way they negotiate the give and take involved in sharing a vocation.

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Not Enough Buzz to Go Around

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At Lit Hub, Ilana Masad outlines the importance of publicists in generating buzz for new books in a social media saturated-environment, and the struggle many authors face to generate their own publicity at small presses without the resources to do more: The difference between being published with a “Big 5” publisher versus a small or independent […]

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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #53: Meet WTAW Press

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Peg Alford Pursell is the author of the forthcoming book of flash and hybrid prose, Show Her a Flower, A Bird, A Shadow (ELJ Publications). Her work has been published in VOLT, the Journal of Compressed Arts, and RHINO, among others, and shortlisted for the Flannery O’Connor Award. She produces Why There Are Words, the acclaimed Bay Area reading series she […]

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The Rumpus Interview with Will Evans

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Will Evans, Executive Director of Deep Vellum Publishing, talks about publishing translated works as well as the Texas and Dallas literary scene he wants to help grow.

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Anti-Blackness in Sci-Fi Publishing

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Less than two percent of science fiction stories published in 2015 were by black writers. And a recent study found that black speculative fiction writers face “universal” racism—more damning evidence demonstrating the institutionalized racism in book publishing, and the importance of introducing more diversity at every level of the process.

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Publishers Need Diversity, Too

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The publishing industry is at a cultural turning point, with recognition and celebration of writers of color on the rise. But despite the surge in the publishing industry’s interest in works by writers of color, the people working behind the scenes still lack much-needed diversity. Recent studies have found that the majority of those who […]

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A No-Hitter

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Not even James Patterson or Stephen King have reached a top-twenty spot with a new book on the New York Times‘s Bestseller list this year. Publishers are blaming mediocre sales of adult fiction on lessened media coverage due to recent acts of violence and terrorism and increased political coverage for the 2016 presidential race. Even so, it’s […]

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What Do You Call It?

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Book titles are an essential component of the texts they gesture at. They’re also advertising. At Catapult, Hannah Gersen recounts the naming process for her novel Home Field: A short story title can be fanciful or obscure or may even contribute something important to the meaning of the story, but a book title needs to have a […]

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21st Century Magical Realist

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Beyond the obvious fact of when it was written or published, what does it mean for literature to be contemporary? Is a work’s relevance determined by market trends and cultural currents? In her monthly advice column for Electric Literature, Elisa Gabbert allays a writer’s temporally induced anxieties: Magical realism “has been done,” yes, but so […]

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Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Publishing

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At Electric Literature, Lincoln Michel talks about the “taboo” topic of book sales, and offers some advice for writers: Writers should absolutely write with an eye toward art, not markets. Thinking about sales while creating art rarely produces anything good. But I’m still naïve enough to think that knowledge is always better than ignorance, and […]

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Women Writers Gain Popularity, But Men Still Lead Industry

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Women writing about women is popular right now in the publishing world—like Emma Cline, who recently released The Girls. USA Today runs through the many books about women, by women. But despite the rising popularity of these authors and the prominence of women within the publishing industry, top jobs are still held by men. Suzanne Rindell, whose […]

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The Real Thing

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James Patterson has announced a new imprint of $5 books designed to hook readers who can’t afford more expensive titles. He’s already written personally written twenty titles for the project: Asked if he hoped this was going to be the gateway to people reading deeper, longer books down the road, he said, “No. This is […]

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Overtime Changes Could Upend Publishing Industry Norms

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Changes to overtime laws could have a big impact the way the publishing industry pays staff. Salaried employees earning less than $47,476 a year will be entitled to overtime pay at a rate of one and a half times their base pay beginning December 1, 2016. This change could have major implications for the publishing industry […]

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