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Viewing all posts tagged "publishing"
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”Readers and publishers alike need to stop envisioning books as just “content.” In many ways, the digital revolution makes the back-end invisible and therefore hard to quantify, monetarily. Does anyone ever think how expensive it is to run the massive Google server farms? Or the enviromental impact of the billions of cell phones, ipods, and e-readers (not to mention computers), that last for only a couple years and are not recyclable? … Publishing works the same way. A book is not just content and production. We’re not the enemy here, we’re just trying to feel our way forward to an unfamiliar future–and in an unfamiliar present.
MobyLives writing on the challenges of transitioning from books to e-books
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Nielsen folds Kirkus Reviews
This is very, very sad news. With most newspaper book critics gone and Kirkus now shuttered, the traditional review landscape is looking very sparse indeed. (via Daring Fireball)
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Some half-formed thoughts on one future for bookselling
Reblogging this from austinkleon, who writes:
The future seems to be splitting in to directions: print-on-demand on the low-end, and book-as-object on the high-end. Interesting.
Not only that — it seems like Doctorow is looking forward to a future of extremely decentralized and deeply personal publishing. Sounds exciting.
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”There’s something inherent in the culture of reading and publishing that historically, perceptually, and financially makes it difficult for shorter works to succeed. If it’s true (as I think it is) that reading culture as we know it was born in the mid-Victorian triangulation of affordable mass printing, widespread literacy, and a middle class with a lot of leisure time on its hands, then it’s no surprise that the novel became the most dominant and popular literary form. The novels we read today aren’t the “loose, baggy monsters” that the Victorians read, but we did inherit a few of their prejudices: namely, we tend to associate heft with seriousness, while slighter volumes seem exactly that…slight. Printing technology also favors longer forms, as the cost of printing, say, Moby Dick isn’t that much more than that of printing, say, Billy Budd–and proportionally, as a ratio of pages to dollars, printing the longer work costs a whole lot less. Combine this with consumers’ unwillingness to fork out too much money for what looks like a lot less book, and–presto!–the profit margin on novellas can be perilously low.
Replacement Press Blog, talking about novellas
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”I don’t have answers, just a feeling that the journal-as-proving-ground model has gotten creaky, at least when it comes to attracting readers. Maybe it still works for the writers and the agents and the publishers. I’d like to know where the readers are in this equation.
Jennifer Howard, reacting to reacting to news that journal TriQuarterly is going online-only. This trend will probably only continue. As Howard notes, not many of these journals were read much in their heyday, and with new media competing for audiences’ attention it’s likely they’ll be read even less in the future.
TriQuarterly is currently running on a Blogger site; hopefully that will change soon. It will be interesting to see if these publications will be able to survive and thrive online. As writers realize publishers are becoming less necessary, perhaps we’ll see online journals act as gatekeepers to author-hosted short stories, with original criticism mixed in. Time will tell. (via The Millions)
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A clean well-lighted place for books
A set of notes detailing some different approaches for bookstores to take as we embark on our wild and woolly journey into our 21st-century media landscape. A few ideas: creating something more akin to a library and cafe, or perhaps shelving books according to publisher — accompanied by stronger branding by publishers, resulting in each publisher creating more of an identity by the types of books it publishes. (via The Millions)
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”There was a brief, shiny moment sometime in the early 90s when Barnes & Nobles and Borders were opening on every corner, and at the same time the bubbling dot-coms were luring editorial talent away from print and into digital publishing. Those two factors converged to make life as a Publisher or Acquisitions editor pretty lush for a few years — salaries in the industry went up by over 30% and the enormous competition to sign talent to fill the shelves of all those miles of shelves in those new stores (and that mysterious new thing called Amazon.com too) made way for expense accounts and advance budgets that were unprecedented. That crazy growth, however, was totally unsustainable. Once the dot-com bubble burst, and new stores were no longer coming online, we were left with no new growth, a significant erosion of independent bookstores, consumer trained to expect cheap prices on books, and a overabundance of new “B-level” titles.
Julie Trelstad, commenting on this blog post about the continuing downturn in publishing. As the dot-com bubble and the resulting credit bubble continue to work their ways out of our economic system, hopefully traditional media enterprises (like book publishing) can find a way to regain their equilibrium. (via fluffynotes)
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City of Saints and Madmen: The Untold Story by Jeff VanderMeer
When the small press publishing City of Saints and Madmen, Jeff VanderMeer’s first collection of novellas, told him he could have carte blanch designing the interior, he went a little overboard. Here explaining the long series of trials, bouts of self-doubt, and bursts of hubris that were necessary to bring City of Saints to press.
This is a long and sometimes agonizing essay, but it’s definitely worth the read. City of Saints was the first book VanderMeer published in his excellent Ambergris cycle. In a few weeks Finch, the last book in the cycle, will be released. VanderMeer has posted a retrospective in which he brings the entire Ambergris cycle to bed; that’s where I found this essay.
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Novice Authors Must Promote Themselves, Since Publishers Won't
Fascinating look into how writers are using new media to promote and market their books — because their publishers aren’t helping . Includes a couple of success stories. (via austinkleon)
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Robin writes a book (and you get a copy)
Robin Sloan is writing a novella. Rather than try to find a publisher for it — a difficult proposition for most writers, since few publishing houses will touch a novella from all but the most established authors — he’s turning to the Internet. Using Kickstarter, a crowd-sourcing web site for funding projects and endeavors, he’s hoping to raise enough money to self-publish the finished book.
Sloan has already published two short stories to his blog, accompanied by gorgeous cover art: Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store and The Writer & the Witch. They’re both available on Amazon for the Kindle, each for 99¢.
This definitely sounds like the coming new model of publishing. Sloan quickly surpassed his $3,500 goal and is (right now) approaching $6,000 with 214 backers. That’s quite a bit more than the average advance for a first novel, let alone 30,000-word novella.
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With masterful precision and care, Larkspur Press has made an impression on the literary scene
Really wonderful article on Larkspur Press, the great little old-school publisher here in Kentucky.
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”We need to try harder with print. We can’t just give up on it. Inevitably there will be some loss of newspaper readership, but even that will stabilize. Not everyone wants all their news online. Do we all want to look at screens from 8am to 10pm? There’s room in the world for both online and paper. It doesn’t have to be zero-sum. I guess that’s one of the things that’s always frustrating to hear, that the rise of the Internet means the death of print. There’s always this zero-sum way of painting any given industry or trend, while the reality will be more nuanced. I think newspapers that adjust a bit will survive and still do great work. But we do need to give people reasons to pay money for the physical object. The landscape right now does require that we in the print world try harder. We have to think of the things that print does best, and do those things better than ever before. We need to use the paper, maximize the physical product.
Dave Eggers discussing his new book Zeitoun the future of print in this Rumpus.net interview. Eggers’ philosophy is most clearly seen in the kinds of books published by McSweeney’s; they’re beautiful objects in themselves, with nice paper and foil-stamped covers and creative endpapers.
Salon also has a review and interview, in which Eggers talks more at length about Katrina and the nature of natural disasters.
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”There has been a measurable cultural change in society’s commitment to literary reading. In a cultural moment when we are hearing nothing but bad news, we have reassuring evidence that the dumbing down of our culture is not inevitable.
Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, as quoted in this NYT article about a measurable increase in fiction reading. We can probably thank Oprah and Stephanie Meyer for this increase.
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Suggest Some Books For the Holidays
John Scalzi encourages his readers to recommend books as gifts this holiday season. I couldn’t agree more. Not only are books awesome Christmas gifts, but the publishing industry as a whole is in dire straights right now and could use a little extra help. (He particularly recommends Nick Harkaway’s The Gone-Away World, which I’m going to have to add to my Amazon wish list.)
Likes
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this is how I want to camp.
sweethomestyle:Camping (via redmann)
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“These Machines Kill Fascists” designed by You and Me, The Royal We
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ADA ad designed by Jeseok Yi
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where do I get trunks like that??
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Just saw a foursquare check-in to a church. I’m not sure God appreciates other people trying to...
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