Publishing

  • American Lit’s Reclusive Editor

    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…

  • I Know What You Read Last Summer

    More 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…

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

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

    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?…

  • Literary Loyalty, Sad Sequels, Sadder Fans

    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…

  • Loving Writing Back

    My 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…

  • The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Anne Raeff

    The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Anne Raeff

    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.

  • Not Enough Buzz to Go Around

    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 Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #53: Meet WTAW Press

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

    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…

  • The Rumpus Interview with Will Evans

    The Rumpus Interview with Will Evans

    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.

  • The Book as Scholarship

    At 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.

  • Anti-Blackness in Sci-Fi Publishing

    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…

  • Publishers Need Diversity, Too

    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…