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Join NOW!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 […]
...moreMeryl 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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Max Porter discusses his debut novel, Grief is the Thing with Feathers, literary genres, and the changing roles of editors.
...moreOs&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 […]
...moreComedian 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 […]
...moreDon’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.
...moreWithout 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 […]
...moreMore and more, book publishers are turning to data studies and algorithms to predict which kinds of books will sell. Susanne Althof, in a piece for WIRED, interrogates the wisdom of such an approach, speaking with people in the industry who worry it will compromise the diversity of books being put out and the tech […]
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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, […]
...moreLoyalty 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 […]
...moreMy name is on the phone bill. The student loan bills, medical bills, internet service provider bills, car insurance bills, the lease. My name is on three bank accounts, the present combined balances of which are insufficient to pay any one of the aforementioned bills. My name is also on a book, my first novel, […]
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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.
...moreAt 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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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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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.
...moreAt Open Letters Monthly, Rohan Maitzen questions the measurement of scholarly value in academia, and suggests scholars should reevaluate the book as the be-all, end-all when it comes to informing others in their field of new developments.
...moreLess 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.
...moreThe 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 […]
...moreIn the world of publishing, everything’s a gamble. How do successful editors manage to push out bestsellers? Is it good instincts, or data-driven predictions? Turns out, it’s a mix of both, and the influences are rarely ever clear.
...moreNot 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 […]
...moreBook 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 […]
...moreBeyond 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 […]
...moreAt 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 […]
...moreWomen 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 […]
...moreJames Patterson’s new imprint promises to solve our modern conflict between reading and time. But the problem it diagnoses may be more for writers than for readers: Does Patterson want to produce garbage books for what he presumes are garbage minds? Of course not.
...moreOver at Publishing Perspectives, Andy Hunter, Publisher & COO of Catapult, Publisher of Literary Hub, and Co-Founding Chairman of Electric Literature, explains the different approaches but shared mission of his three ventures: There’s a common mission between them: to bring attention to, and advocate for, literary writing.
...moreJames 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 […]
...moreThe Annual Library Budget Survey, published last week, found that libraries around the world have varying growth expectations for the coming year, with North American libraries tending toward negative. On the plus side, libraries in developing countries (with developing markets) are growing. Time to pass the torch?
...moreChanges 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 […]
...moreWith every year you can hear a celebrity narrate Moby-Dick for $14.95, audiobook sales account for increasingly greater shares of publishing houses’ revenues. Listen up.
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