Another gossipy article that's a vaguely interesting topic of conversation

“It‘s hard for me to imagine a big corporation that’s not already involved in books wanting to buy a publishing company now,” said Laura Owen, who spent a year working at independently owned Skyhorse Publishing after graduating from Harvard in 2006 and currently serves as the editor of the monthly trade newsletter Publishing Trends. “I mean, it’s funny. There must have been something that was more appealing about it then.”

An article from The Observer about moguls in the publishing business. A few nice quotations in there from Lindy (she's right; we rarely spoke of Perkins during the course - we were more anxious to meet new editors who were doing excellent work).

It is hard to make a blockbusting book. You can put a great cover on a vampire novel and market it well and get a couple of movie deals out of it if you're a very smart company. But buying a small collection of short stories from a new literary fiction writer isn't going to please your investors.

On a related note: MobyLives pointed out last week that a publisher inadvertently differentiated between fiction and literary fiction (via Three Percent). Today in a rough interview on Bookslut, Cynthia Ozick differentiates between culture and high culture. How big is the gap between these two? If you specify that fiction and literary fiction are different demographics, does that make you a snob?