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From BEA to Bake Sales
Here's a bit of irony: we had an editor, happily pregnant and obsessed with all things baby related, buy our working mom book. We figured it was perfect: here's a career woman, as committed to her profession as she is to being a mother, to help shape our book. But soon after coming back from maternity leave, our editor quit to raise her new baby.
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Soapbox: Small Matters
When I left my longstanding, secure executive editor job at DK Publishing, just three months after giving birth to twins, to become U.S. publisher (and the only U.S. employee) for Kyle Books, it might have seemed like a risky move. But just over four months later, DK is laying off more than 100 people and reducing its list by 20% from the 250 titles it currently produces—and I've just acq...
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Soapbox: We'll Be Back
The decline of oversized publishing conglomerates makes for some bleak headlines in the short term, but bodes well for the future of a publishing industry that operates on a scale more appropriate to the medium.
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Soap Box: Preliminaries
One of Elmore Leonard's celebrated 10 Rules of Writing states: “Avoid prologues. They can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword.”
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Soapbox: When You Can't Just Say 'No'
A word that works in so many aspects of life is rarely right for an editor
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Soapbox: No Smoking Whitefish
Running a nonfiction publishing house is stressful enough. When did paranoia become part of the job?
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Soapbox: Critics Don't Need Free Books
Social commentator Ellen Goodman said writing a newspaper column is like being married to a nymphomaniac: “The first two weeks, it's fun.” If that's true, being a blogger is like going to a never-ending orgy. It can take more stamina, or so I learned when I created One-Minute Book Reviews after 11 years as the book editor of the Plain Dealer in Cleveland.
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Front and Center
Walk into one of your favorite stores and chances are you'll walk away with more than you intended to buy. Shopping is more fun when you're enticed to wander around with your senses fully engaged. And you appreciate those moments when you not only see something new but are reminded of something you meant to buy all along—or needed at just that moment.
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Soapbox: Reality Bites
If you are like me, your best shot at end-of-a-hard-day escape isn't TV. It's a book.
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Soapbox: At Last
Just a week after my book was published on April 14, I was #12 on the Times's fiction list. The book hit #11 on PW's list. But overnight success? I'm 70. I've been a writer for 50 years.
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Anderson's Wiki-versy
When Wired editor Chris Anderson found himself accused on the Virginia Quarterly Review blog of lifting passages from Wikipedia entries and other published sources in his new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, he inadvertently revealed some of the most awkward truths about reading and writing in a digital environment.
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Soapbox: The Rights Thing
Publishers and authors must recognize that content has a limitless array of uses.
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Soapbox: Path to the Future, Defend the Google Settlement
Before authors and publishers filed their groundbreaking lawsuits, Google was on a path to scan millions of copyrighted books without compensating authors or publishers, or even considering their interests as the creators of this vast repository of intellectual property.
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Soapbox: How to Be A Great Local Author
Anonymous manages an independent bookstore in New England.
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Soapbox: Come Out, Wherever You Are
When I moved to New York City from Atlanta, one of the first things I wanted to do was visit the Oscar Wilde Bookshop in Greenwich Village, believed to be the country's first bookstore dedicated to gay and lesbian authors. I was dismayed to find a sign on the door announcing the store was closing, citing the down economy.
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Soapbox: Double Duty
I had been a book jacket designer for more than 20 years when I began a writing life. My first book, a memoir, tells of the revelations that followed the sudden death of my husband in 2003, my search for truth and the birth of my new self in midlife. After a career designing covers for other authors, I was thrilled as I imagined my manuscript typeset in pages between boards with a dust jacket.
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Soapbox: Scribbling for Scribd
When I walked into the lobby at Scribd, I noticed an object nailed into the floor: a small plastic ramp. Next to it sat a pile of kick scooters. The ramp was for jumping those scooters into the air. This wasn't going to be the same old publishing experience. The people at Scribd asked if I'd be one of a handful of authors to participate in the new Scribd Store.
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Soapbox: Lost Chords
Whoever said, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture” was obviously an exasperated musician. Whether it was Zappa, Mull or Costello (what a law firm that would have been), they were probably lamenting the inherent problem of describing the ethereal art of music in book form.
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Aiming High
It was our intention to make a movie, not write a book. In the end, we did both. In January 2006, our father died in jail. He'd been homeless for the last 15 years, battling alcoholism. On the day he died, we vowed to make our autobiographical movie, Touching Home, as a tribute to him—in one year.
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A Case For Type
The classic typefaces of the past and the best of the fonts designed today are not irrelevant relics to be consigned to the cellar; they're among the greatest prizes of our patrimony. Now electronic books are marching into the bibliographic marketplace with a saucy swagger, but the typefaces they use make them look more like faceless bureaucrats than the next hot new thing.
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