Your Soul Vs. Data? When Jellybooks’ Andrew Rhomberg wrote at Digital Book World recently about publishers having a Fear of Data in an age of digital metrics, I thought that taking that issue to authors would be a worthwhile exercise. And I tried it out on some trusted colleagues by making it the “Provocations in… Read More
Two New Efforts In Publishing Diversity: ‘Learning From Each Other’s Narratives’
‘There Are So Many Reasons To Write’ We’ve joined the global conversation on the intersection of race and writing. But is it enough? These viewpoints echo that of Zed Books’ Crystal Mahey-Morgan, who told me in an interview for The Bookseller less than a year ago: “We need to move beyond rhetoric and good… Read More
Why We Don’t Read More? Are Books Still Our Best Bet?
What If Books Just Aren’t It Anymore? Why don’t we start with the assumption that social media and the web are taking over because people actually enjoy them and go from there? Baldur Bjarnason Baldur Bjarnason does seem to actually enjoy getting het up about things. And he’s good at it, too. People generally like… Read More
Is This Headline Taxing Your Attention Span?
How Bad Is This Going To Get? We Don’t Know The co-founder of the highly popular authors’ blog site Writer Unboxed, Therese Walsh, is also an accomplished novelist. Her latest book, The Moon Sisters, is from Penguin Random House’s Crown Publishing division. She runs a sophisticated monthly rotation of professional-class writers’ comment at Writer Unboxed, while… Read More
If the 'Elastic Mind' Snaps: A Lenten Lullaby
“This will be my last post until Monday, April 13, 2015.” No, not me. (You wish.) No, that’s a colleague, the memoirist Kathy Pooler. She’s a good, cold-weather Catholic, mind you, so Lent means a lot more to her than it does to troppo Protestants like me. Following a retreat with some author-colleagues, Pooler has decided… Read More
In The Season Of Giving: Unwrap The Truth For Your Creative Loved Ones
A Token Of Your Esteem: Honesty The greatest gift you can give to a creative friend or relative sometimes is a compassionate, thoughtful, patient negativeresponse. Not negative in terms of how you say it or any intention of being hurtful. Exactly the opposite: negative in the sense of an authentic, truthful reaction in a world… Read More
The Gate We Should Have Kept: And Was Mystique That Bad?
One of the most perceptive regulars in #FutureChat, The FutureBook digital publishing community’s weekly live discussion, is Carla Douglas of BeyondPaperEditing.com in Kingston, Ontario. And in a recent doing of the discussion, Douglas pointed out that writing, while once among the most isolated and solitary of careers has been made one of the most social by digital… Read More
Writers in Conference: The Micro-Tension Of A Pause
Autumn And Authors Holding Their Breaths The townspeople of Salem, Massachusetts, are busy this week pointing out to visitors their brilliant fall leaves. “They should be on the ground by now,” one longtime resident says, shaking his head. “Should have hit the grass a long time ago.” And like the eerie pause in the pace… Read More
Mission Critical At Writer Unboxed’s UnConfab in Salem
Reviewing? What’s Your Motive? Next week, I’ll be leading a session on criticism — “When To Listen And What To Hear” — at Writer Unboxed’s “Un-Conference” event in Salem, Massachusetts…where they know a few things about being critical. That session and this column are not about the more extreme moments in consumer review that have… 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