Turn Off The Lights I have to agree with Tony Frankel at Stage and Cinema on this one: Get into your headphones and shut your eyes. Invisible Cities wants to live inside your head. And the darker that place might be, the better. Never in all my travels had I ventured as far as Adelma.… Read More
Could We Get Over "Women's Fiction," Please?
Author Randy Susan Meyers, in What Does ‘Women’s Fiction’ Mean? at Beyond the Margins, has found the courage to call into question a classification that may be the perfect example of the trap of ghettoization. She writes: One can only assume…that what one needs to write ‘women’s fiction’ is simply a uterus. Jests aside, this category seems suddenly entrenched… Read More
A New Voice in the Book World: The Author
Many in publishing today like to call the author Hugh Howey ”overexposed.” And, as is usually the case when you hear this about a newsmaker, it means his messages are hitting home. For all the fine writers we have working today, we have not, until now, had one who had the time, the temperament, the visibility, and the stamina to articulate with real force the author’s experience of the digital dynamic. This is a firebrand, a smart one. Read More
Free the Writers! (From Each Other)
What do we need to do, in-community, to keep reminding each other to turn to the audience and deliver our best lines to the world, not to each other? Authors are striding through the sleeper cars and dining carriages of Twitter asking other writers to “buy my book!” This is hashtagged hokum. Read More
Publishing, Between Revolution and Revolt
Follow that burning fuse. It runs between these two curiously different words. We may need to think about which of them is closer to us. Revolution. Pretty comfortable. Thanks to Madison Avenue, we nowadays say “revolution” for every change, from geopolitical alliances to bathroom tissue. Revolt. Not so comfortable. More acute. Something or someone feels out of control. It’s an uprising, not a downfalling. Dangerous. Read More
Is the "Publishers' Monopoly" Broken?
Dana Beth Weinberg at Digital Book World 2014: “Should traditional publishers feel threatened by the potential of self-publishing? Of course they should.” Read More
#EtherIssue: Is the Price Ever Right for Books?
What does it do to the perceived value of reading and books by the marketplace when pricing—whether by traditional publishers, retailers, or self-publishers—goes so substantially lower than it once was? Read More
New Year's Restitutions
In everyone’s defense: we’re being driven to this stark-staring fixation on word counts by the Digital Enablement. Nobody dast blame us. This is Boom Town, baby. Everybody can publish, publish, publish. Who cares if you have nothing to say? Write a book, anyway. No, write four. Per year. If you don’t, you’re a wuss. Five-hundred words…I told you that part already, right? Okay. Happy new year. Read More
Scale: That All the Books Should Be Counted
#EtherIssue is on holiday hiatus now, but we’ll return to our regular schedule with Issues on the Ether on Tuesday, January 7, and our weekly #EtherIssue live Twitter discussion on the topic on Wednesday, January 8, at 11 a.m. ET / 4 p.m. GMT. This week, review our big recap of our robust discussion on ebooks and that alleged “flattening” of the market. Read More
#EtherIssue at Publishing Perspectives: Lists of Books…and Biases?
Do we need a better understanding of how many books are authored by men and how many by women? Or does it not matter? Are all these lists—Best Gardening in Dim Light Books for 2013!—really worth anything unless the various media waving them at us tell us how they created them? Read More