Showing posts with label publishing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label publishing. Show all posts

Thursday, April 23, 2009

Peter Kaplan


Sorry to hear that Peter Kaplan is stepping down from The New York Observer. I liked him enormously when he lectured last summer at the CPC. Hope the paper will survive without his guidance.

Monday, February 2, 2009

Get well soon, publishing world


Image via UCL Institute of Child Health.

How did Houghton get in this mess? Not, it seems, because of bad publishing.

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Networking books


I want a social networking site for books, please.

Internet Gods, are you listening?

I want to create a profile with my favorite authors, titles, and excerpts. I want to gush about my favorite editions. I want strangers who love Amy Hempel to write on my wall and tell me about one of Hempel's former students who has just published a collection of short stories. I want to know when an author I'm reading is participating in a panel in the city. I want to read reviews and comments from other users and other publications. I want to be able to read excerpts from literary magazines or brand-new novels. I want to read the first two pages so I get excited to rush to the bookstore after a long day at work and a long commute on the crowded subway. I want to be so excited to open that new book that I can't even take the time to take my gloves off. I want to peek at the book in the bag as I walk out of the store - no, I don't even want a bag, I want to carry it so I can open it as I walk.

I will happily list my location and photographs of my bookshelves if this is granted to me. I will happily receive advertisements from publishing houses. I will happily buy a drink at a bar where my new favorite author is reading, and I will pay full price for the hardcover. If it's good, I'll buy multiple copies as gifts.

Facebook will not suffice. I want something more specialized. I want to judge other people by their favorite writers. If authors want to participate, I would be happy to send little messages with flattering notes or constructive criticism, whichever they need more.

I want to make more connections with people on the internet that read. Blogs do not put this content together in a perfect form. Perhaps the social networking world could do better.

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

WANTED: DEAD OR ALIVE

Could it be that the structural obsolescence everyone’s been crowing about for the past decade—defeat at the hands of digital media, Amazon.com, etc.—would have been less painful than this, or at least more world-historically meaningful? What lies ahead instead is a necessary scaling back of ambition: an age in which the gambling spirit that has kept book publishing exciting gives way to a shabby, predictable environment that cows its participants into avoiding all things adventurous and allowing only the proven few a seat at the table.

Will the survivors envy the dead?

No! says John Oakes, who was an executive editor at the independent boutique Atlas Books before financial troubles there led him to leave the company earlier this fall. Mr. Oakes is working with a university in Manhattan on establishing a new summer training program for college graduates seeking careers in the publishing industry. Two such programs, both six weeks long, currently exist—one at Columbia, the other at New York University—and though between the two of them they already send more than 200 young people onto the job market every year, Mr. Oakes is confident there are still more eager beavers out there in need of training.

“From what I’ve seen of their operations, they seem grand, and really wonderful setups with great histories and some important people,” Mr. Oakes said Monday, shortly before flying off to the Frankfurt Book Fair. “But I think that a good overview can be provided in less time for less money, and these days, from what I understand, people seem to be concerned about their time and their money.”

Mr. Oakes envisions an intensive, “nimble” course, with guest speakers who work in the industry providing lessons on every aspect of the business, from design, manufacturing and digital distribution, to marketing, royalties and contracts.

“Particularly in rough times, this makes more sense than ever,” Mr. Oakes said when asked whether the course he’s developing amounts to sending lambs to the slaughter. “Jobs are hard to get, absolutely, but what was wonderful about publishing is still wonderful about publishing, in that it’s a mysterious and wonderful art. Some of the smartest people still stream into publishing, so a course like this can maybe prepare them for what to expect. And there are some jobs out there, and maybe via a program like this they can meet people that will help them get those few jobs that are available.”


I love hearing about the CPC - Lindy and Susan run a fantastic program, and honestly, all the voices in the media presenting them with unqualified praise would not be enough to do them justice. But what a strange article! The headline suggests that publishing is in trouble, that editors will take fewer risks with new writers. The first page of text says that advances will be inflated and book sections are shrinking. But the final section asks whether publishing is over, then has that Oakes quotation defying every point the article seemed to make. Does the Observer believe that our fresh energy injected into the industry will find ways to bring back book reviews and/or up book sales? How will we be able to do that?

We should probably have an online discussion board for CPC grads to discuss the best method to give life to the industry. Assuming, of course, that the industry needs life. Ick, so many death metaphors! This article is no help. When you argue the binary - publishing is either dead or alive - you shove aside some very important grey matter. People who declare publishing alive and well seem ungrounded in economic realities, and people who pronounce it dead seem to be dismissing it from any intellectual, cultural, or monetary potential.

The question is not DEAD OR ALIVE. The question is how to nurse it and nurture it and help it grow. I don't know whether we're nursing it from a new infancy after a digital rebirth or nursing it back to health after sick advances prompted by pressure by shareholders and the burst bubble of the 90s, but it doesn't really matter. Either way we're having a conversation about how to move forward.

Both sides have different senses of urgency. But they admit that a discussion needs to take place. So... let's go. What will we do first?

Thursday, July 17, 2008

Update: Bookworms Are Your Friends

I'm finally abandoning the photo I took of a tennis court in February for a light summer salad I made a few weeks ago. It is summer, after all. Hope it brightens the page a little.

(I've also enabled all comments. If you've visited before and haven't yet said hello, hello!)

Typed my notes instead of hand-writing them today, in hopes of saving a few hours summarizing. But before any of that, here are some updates from Life Beyond Columbia:

GalleyCat has a nice little entry on publishing according to Funky Winkerbean, Judge Parker, and For Better or For Worse. Glad to know determining an advance can be comical.

The Syntax of Things has two fabulous pieces of news: there's a Pandora for books! Also fiction readers have more empathy, according to a research group in Toronto.

I'm missing Brooklyn quite a bit this week. Slate.com has a great slide show of the Brooklyn Museum's "Changing Faces of Brooklyn." And even our bathroom reading, edited by Chris Knutson of Vogue, has made news. This weekend will be a perfect break from the program, with free concerts in Coney Island all through Saturday.

Monday, June 23, 2008

The Columbia Publishing Course launches


The first day of lectures at the Columbia Publishing Course 2008 was today. We heard from David Young, the Chairman & CEO of Hachette Book Group; then three literary agents, Leigh Feldman of Darhansoff, Verrill & Feldman, Jay Mandel of the William Morris Agency, and Scott Moyers of the Wylie Agency; finally, a lecture from Sara Nelson, the Editor-In-Chief of Publishers Weekly.

Some highlights: David Young said he'd learned that authors can be raised from the dead, citing Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Agatha Christie. He reviewed a great deal about the publishing market; Hachette is 5th in the American market, with 642 titles and dominating 10% of the adult market. In his patient voice and British accent, he shared advice about how to handle authors during the copy editing process and their publishing dates, stressing communication (his wife is an author, and he said he'd learned this watching her). He passed out three books: Stephenie Meyer's latest, Twilight, which is supposed to be the next Harry Potter (I'm skeptical, but they're popular), Kate Braestrup's Here If You Need Me, and David Gilmour's The Film Club, brought to us by Jonathan Karp of Twelve (an imprint that does one book a month and is featured in a great little piece by NPR).

Young was enthusiastic about the digital future of the publishing industry - he owns both a Kindle and a Sony Reader, which he believes are "designed" for the publishing community and will make people read a wider selection of books - but he says, "The book is perfectly evolved," and closing a physical book makes people "content." He thinks on-demand printing is a fabulous prospect because the "woeful inefficiencies" of the current industry can be corrected.

He mentioned a site being launched next month called Goodparentsgivegreatbooks.com that supports literacy for young children. He also let us know that 400,000 new ISBNs were published last year - Hachette has focused in recent years on supporting fewer new titles, but giving these more attention.

The afternoon Agents' Panel supported three entirely different backgrounds - one editor from major publishing corporations who had just switched to working as an agent, Scott Moyers, an alum of the course who had switched from a boutique agency to a large agency, Jay Mandel, and finally moderator and boutique publisher Leigh Feldman. Feldman said she feels the biggest role of the literary agent is "managing authors' expectations," which may often feel like one is "a lightning rod for rejection."

The major advantages of working a boutique agency include "total transparency," "great access," and the luxury of taking on clients more easily than one could as an editorial assistant. Agents are responsible these days for more editorial work than they used to be, and they often do a lot of negotiating between authors and editors. They also manage the authors' budgets and are paid by commission. I had the impression that this is, more often than not, a thankless job that requires a tremendous amount of patience, but that provides the opportunity to fight for authors one really believes in and support literary fiction as often as one can. The questions each member of the panel echoed was, "When can you push? How can you push?"

Perhaps the most entertaining part of our day was provided by Sara Nelson of Publishers Weekly.

She described starting out at a fitness magazine where the editor smoked three packs a day and the food editor was anorexic. Good start, right? I tried to take notes on her advice and ended up writing down her life stories.

When she worked as an assistant, her boss finally said to her one day that she was smart and talented and everyone thought she was going to be a great writer, "but you haven't done the job we hired you to do and I need you to sharpen my pencils. Take ownership of the pencils!" And so Nelson took ownership of the pencils, she says, but that was it - her innocence was gone.

When she finally left her job for one she really loved, losing 40% of her pay and turning into a nervous wreck, she said her mother told her to do what her gut told her, "which was great, but I didn't know what my gut said because it was so full of cigarettes and scotch."

She's now gone on to give Publishers Weekly a facelift, including little sidebars like in Lucky magazine.

PW receives 200 books a week and, impressively, reviews 100 of them. They receive these books three or more months in advance. Nelson says she believes magazines are more destined for digital forms because of their financial dependence on advertising. Online advertising is certainly cheaper.

They also made the decision to license their reviews to Amazon, which is what you've probably read if you've ever read a book on Amazon, ever.

Oh! FYI: Borders has just launched their own online bookstore that could compete with Amazon. I'm hoping, anyway. I've always had a soft spot for Borders. Their design is always good - they hire architects to make the best use of each individual space they acquire - and I usually like the people in their stores. Stay alive, little Borders! We're cheering for you!