by Porter Anderson

“Amazon Will Be Disrupted One Day”

What may have been the best lesson from the 60 Minutes interview getting so much traction this week is evident, finally, in Jason Del Rey’s piece at AllThingsD. And in bloggy-newsy tradition, it’s all in the piece’s long headline: Afraid Amazon Will Crush Your Small Business? “Complaining Is Not a Strategy,” Says CEO Jeff Bezos. Read More

by Porter Anderson

Kobo's Feast of Burden

Kobo’s Michael Tamblyn broke through the usual code of corporate silence. When things go wrong in large business settings in our digital age, the common mode of response is dictated by Legal. And Legal loves to gag a workforce. No one from the company in question is to speak. No one is to talk. Not even to say things that could help the wider world understand the corporation’s difficult decisions.

What Tamblyn gave us was not only a glimpse of what his company was facing while many of us freely bad-mouthed it for the nine days of the October ordeal, but also a deeply disturbing, problematic issue we all must now take to heart very carefully. Read More

by Porter Anderson

Self-Publishing’s Parallel Disruptions

It comes as news to no one in the indus­try! the indus­try! that self-publishing is con­tro­ver­sial. We may tend, how­ever, to think of it as con­tro­ver­sial for that indus­try, while not look­ing at what it can mean for writ­ers and writ­ing. It is, in fact, a devel­op­ment full of argu­ment not only for pub­lish­ers but also for literature. Read More

by Porter Anderson

Leveling Up: In Praise of Writer Dads

I’m grateful to Gonzalez for spotlighting this subject so many are hesitant to touch, not with a 10-foot poll of how many among us think family men can have as viable and praiseworthy a challenge in writing as family women do. Try putting writer dad into the search field on Twitter. Stand well back from your computer. The hits you get will stretch from here to China. Or from Beijing to us.
So why would so many intelligent people, including Tuch—who is with The Review Review and Beyond the Margins and teaches in Boston’s pivotal Grub Street program)—see women and not men as well, when they hear or read or write the phrase “writer-parent?” Read More

by Porter Anderson

Charleston’s PubSmart Joins Conference Row

Pub­S­mart may be cre­at­ing some­thing we’ve needed to see much more of: a con­fer­ence in which not only business-conscious authors but also smaller pub­lish­ing com­pa­nies can start doing the log­i­cal net­work­ing they’ve needed: with each other. Read More

by Porter Anderson

Can Co-Publishing Make 'You Crime' Pay?

This is a story about a clever way of bringing established, big-selling authors together with emerging writers, and about choosing those emerging writers not only for their literary chops but also for just how digitally savvy they might be in the marketing department. Read More

by Porter Anderson

CONTEC: Self-Publishing's Implications and Impact

As Dr. Florian Geuppert of Books on Demand in Hamburg tells us from his own company’s seven-nation survey: “We have about 25,000 authors…these authors are in Germany, yes, but also in Austria, Switzerland, France, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland. So we asked them what is their motivation? We also wanted to compare the different countries and see where self-publishing really is. Because the movement (toward self-publishing) is broad in Europe, but not at the level of what we see in the US. It will probably get there.” Read More

by Porter Anderson

Pattern Recognition and Writerly Advice | Porter Anderson

How many of us really know how to use all this writerly advice? Particularly when much of it is written by writers for other writers, how much of it is a case of the sight-impaired leading the hard-of-hearing? Does anyone ever worry (you may remember that I like this analogy) that all these how-to books for writers by other writers start to come across like John Updike’s ladies of the church who fund-raise by selling cupcakes to each other? Read More