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9/11 in Our Minds, and Our Books
We all have our stories of that day. Here’s mine.
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Whither the Cookbook?
I don’t pretend that by the end of this article we’ll have the future of cookbook publishing figured out, but we all know, as publishers, the opportunities and challenges of the Internet. Instant access prompts enormous gateways to consumer engagement as well as the problem of readily available free content (free recipes as an obvious example).
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Solitary Refinement
Susan Salter Reynolds was a columnist and features writer at the Los Angeles Times for 23 years. Before that, she was an assistant editor at the New York Review of Books.
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Fatal Mistakes: Borders Pounded the Nails In its Own Coffin
Borders is dead. Newspapers, magazines, and blogs are using metaphors like "dinosaur" to describe its end. But for me, a former employee, it's more like Old Yeller: a once great friend who got sick and had to be put down.
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Renaissance: Are niches the new mass market?
Through all the panic and hysteria that's gripped the publishing world over the past few years, and in spite of academic musings on the fate of the book, we're witnessing an unprecedented flourishing of creativity and innovation in the book business. In fact, you could say that the stars have aligned for publishing.
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Contract Headaches
Back in May, when Harold Camping swore that the world would end, an agent I follow on Twitter said something to the effect of, "If I knew the rapture was coming I wouldn't have spent my last year on Earth negotiating the new [a certain Big Six publisher] boilerplate."
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Common Goals: AAP on the GSU e-reserve lawsuit
Paul Courant's recent Soapbox op-ed ("Adversary or Enemy?") doesn't address what motivated three academic publishers to sue, with great reluctance, Georgia State University for copyright infringement: GSU was, and is, systematically downloading and scanning substantial portions of books and posting them on e-reserve, semester after semester, for tens of thousands of students without paying a cent for royalties to the authors and publishers who created the materials.
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Guy (Author) Needs Women!
A male writer tries to convince his female readers his stories aren't just for the boys, even if his book jackets make it look that way.
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Do You Know What a Book Publicist Does?
"People in this business still assume that the only good thing a publicist does is book appearances on Oprah or The Today Show or Good Morning America."
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Adversary or Enemy?: A Publisher Lawsuit Crosses the Line
I once took one of those pricey business school executive education workshops designed to teach leadership skills, and one of the things I learned was the importance of distinguishing between adversaries and enemies. Adversarial engagements are part of everyday life. As an academic administrator, a library manager, and a faculty member, I frequently find that some of my best friends are my adversaries, often in mutually beneficial relationships.
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Murder 101: A Bestselling Author Teaches A 'Killer' Class
Two years ago, Time Out New York asked me to write a set of instructions on how to murder a dinner guest. It was one of the most thrilling writing assignments I'd ever been given. I unleashed my inner P.D. James and created the most foolproof scenario I could imagine—monkshood in the soup: it grows almost everywhere and looks enough like parsley that one could claim it was a tragic accident.
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The View: Is The Glass Half-Full Or Half-Empty?
A symposium held in early March at Boston's Emerson College entitled "Business Models for 21st-Century Literary Publishing" attracted the cream of New England's creative economy, including editors, writers, and publishers. Conference chair Scott Walker, of Orion Magazine, invited me to open the day with an overview of the challenges and opportunities facing the industry, with a specific request to see things not as a glass half-empty, but as a glass half-full. Walker had asked an Irishman to be optimistic. That's like asking a car salesman to be honest. In other words, I really had to work at it.
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Resilience: Even Under Threat, Librarians Put Their Communities First
I'm the new girl in library marketing. It took me a few years to get here. I stumbled out of college into Seattle's thriving Web 2.0 startup scene, until, after a brief stint at Google, I saw (cue choir of angels) a job posting that basically read: "talk to librarians about books." I had an apartment lined up before the publisher's HR department called with the offer. And so I landed in this intimate community of book stewards, in the midst of technological and financial upheaval. To quote my dad: "What an extraordinary time to get into books."
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It's Not All Academic
"Any topic worth writing a book about has people who will be interested in it, if they know the book exists. The trick is to reach them."
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Time Is 'Limitless': When Hollywood Options Your Novel, Get Ready to Wait
A week is a long time in politics. In the movie business, not so much. In the movie business, 10 years isn’t necessarily a long time. When I sold the film rights to The Dark Fields, my PowerBook G3 had a two-gigabyte hard drive and I didn’t have any children. It was 2001 and I was warned not to expect anything to happen quickly. So I figured it might take, what, a year, two years? Tops? If someone had told me it’d be closer to 10, and that would be good going, I’d have laughed, or cried, or both.
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Fill The Showroom, Sales Will Follow:The Bookstore As Filter
As the e-book revolution has undermined the publishing and bookselling business models, frustration, fear, and stagnation have set in. Instead of channeling this frustration into experimentation in publishing as a whole, almost all recent creativity has been directed to the digital world. It is understandable that such a disruptive technology as e-books would demand this attention, but as an industry we risk undermining the foundation of our success if we don't put some of that energy into nurturing, strengthening, and recreating the country's bookstores.
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A Book Fair on the Moon?
I made it to all of my meetings, and we were all on time. And best of all: my feet didn't hurt.
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Better Than Renting Out A Windowless Room: The Blessed Distraction Of Technology
I am "doing BEA" this year for the first time in a while. Generally I prefer to lurk, maybe hit a party at the expo's margins, as I am a big fan of lukewarm white wine.
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The Light At the End of The Publishing Tunnel? On Finding Fans, Not Formats
While the English-language edition of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows sold 44 million copies over three years, the video game Bad Company 2 sold more than five million units in one month. Facebook, with its 116 million U.S. users, draws people in for an average of more than seven hours each month. And while watching videos on TV and the Internet accounted for only nine hours of Americans' time per month, they more than made up for it by watching TV 84 hours monthly.
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Books Without Batteries:The Negative Impacts of Technology
The recent onslaught of e-readers was announced with a veneer of the best of intentions. The book needed improving, said one maven, who also sells diapers and soup online. An MIT visionary predicted that in five years we will read almost no paper books—just digital devices. The book would become a relic, a collector's item, the e-experts agreed. And of course with the death of the book, our bookstores and libraries would wither and die.
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