Publishing
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Publishing Industry’s Diversity Limits Revealed
JK Rowling has published rejection letters she received writing under the name Robert Galbraith. Rowling has racked up book sales worth billions for the Harry Potter series, but set out to see if she could sell a novel without Potter’s help.…
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Does Commercial Success Hurt Literature?
Publishers are offering big paydays to debut authors—that’s the good news. The bad news is that the books earning big money aren’t particularly literary. Tom Leclair at The Daily Beast takes to task Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney’s novel The Nest as too…
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The Art of Losing Isn’t Hard to Master
Just as there is subjective rejection, there’s subjective acceptance—the editor who sparks to your characters, your plot, your manuscript because of their personal experiences—and you want someone who understands your story to be the champion it needs. Let’s be real.…
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This Ain’t a Zine It’s an Arms Race
Die publishing industry; zines forever! Liska Jakobs reports live from last weekend’s LA Zine Fest, where DIY publishing continues to flourish even as the contradictions of modern capitalism reveal themselves: You don’t need an MFA to make a zine. You sure as…
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Publishers Lobby to Lift Cuban Embargo
Publishers want access to Cuba. The longstanding trade embargo with Cuba includes books and educational materials, but publishers have been lobbying the White House to lift the embargo. The island nation has a literacy rate near 100%.
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How Far We Have(n’t) Come
As part of a series on diversity in publishing at Brooklyn Magazine, Molly McArdle talks with professionals across the publishing world about the state of diversity in the publishing industry today.
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A Good Literary Agent Is Hard to Find
Finding a literary agent isn’t easy. It might just be the worst thing ever. Over at Publisher’s Weekly, Ken Pisani looks at the troubling process he went through until he found an agent—one he went to high school with.
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Take a Closer Look
A survey by book publisher Lee & Low showed that 78 percent of the publishing workforce is composed of straight white women, causing headlines about how women run publishing. But that’s not the whole story: Yet these attention grabbers glazed over one of…
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Tearing Down the Paywall
Academic journals are essential to scholarly research. Scientists making new discoveries publish their findings in these journals, for example, but also read the journals to stay abreast of the latest research. The journals are also hugely profitable—just not for the…
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White Women Dominate Publishing?
Man Booker prize-winner Marlon James was right: the people who work in publishing are overwhelmingly white and female. New data shows that publishing executives, editors, and the staff behind books are predominantly white women: At the executive level, publishing is 86…
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The End of the Tour
As if reading weren’t a solitary enough activity, one of the last remaining sources of human contact between writers and readers is on the wane. For Electric Literature, Keith Lee Morris laments the decline of the IRL interface: I’d never…
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The Changing Face of Philadelphia Media
For The Awl, Andrew Thompson writes on the changing face of local media in Philadelphia, after the close of several local print papers and the rise of Philadelphia magazine.