TUMBLR
Posts tagged "publishing"
Great little essay on publishing in literary journals. It’s true:
What’s the best possible outcome? Your story is accepted, and maybe a year later it appears and is distributed to the journal’s meager readership, who probably won’t read it because they only bought the journal in the first place so they could submit their work to it.
As I said in my TEDx talk, I realized this early on, stopped submitting to journals, and started a blog.
Great article. Bottom line: there will always be gatekeepers, and the more and more books that get published, the more readers will look to gatekeepers to tell them what to read.
we’ll still wind up with a literary marketplace in which a handful of blockbuster names capture most of the sales and attention, personal connections are milked for professional success, and relatively few authoritative voices have the power to lift some artists into the spotlight while others languish in obscurity. Writers who are charming in person and happy to promote themselves and interact with fans will prosper, while antisocial geniuses may fail. (It’s unsettling to wonder how the Salingers, Pynchons, Naipauls and David Foster Wallaces of tomorrow will fare in a world where social networking and glad-handing are de rigueur. Why should extroversion be required of a great novelist?) The result: not a whole lot better than the system we already have, but also (hopefully) not much worse.
“I’m quitting the Internet. Will I be liberated or left behind?” By James Sturm
I made a very deliberate decision to go offline following the release of my book. If I were online right now, I’d be glued to my laptop reading reviews, revisiting interviews via podcasts, and tracking my Amazon ranking. For about a month, such behavior seems excusable—after working for years on a book, it’s only natural that I’d want to see how it was received—but after that, it becomes an obsession. The pride of accomplishment gives way to vanity. I went offline to avoid this.
My book has been out a month, and I’m very tempted…
Oh sweet, look: here is Austin Kleon’s sketch of that future of publishing talk. Austin is the author of Newspaper Blackout and also clearly The Coolest.
Aww, thanks Meaghan!
the idea that the post-Gutenberg era — the period from, roughly, the 15th century to the 20th, an age defined by textuality — was essentially an interruption in the broader arc of human communication. And that we are now, via the discursive architecture of the web, slowly returning to a state in which orality — conversation, gossip, the ephemeral — defines our media culture.
As some of you may know from my flickr handle, deathtogutenberg, I subscribe to this theory.
Love this interview with Pettitt:
I often tell my students that they should start their literature work, their work here, by tearing a book to pieces: Take a book, take some second-hand book, that looks impressive — and just rip it to pieces. And you can see that it’s just made, it’s just glued, it’s just stitched. And it’s not invulnerable. It’s just that someone’s made it. It doesn’t have to be true because it looks good.
How the Paperback Novel Changed Popular Literature | Smithsonian Magazine
The story about the first Penguin paperbacks may be apocryphal, but it is a good one. In 1935, Allen Lane, chairman of the eminent British publishing house Bodley Head, spent a weekend in the country with Agatha Christie. Bodley Head, like many other publishers, was faring poorly during the Depression, and Lane was worrying about how to keep the business afloat. While he was in Exeter station waiting for his train back to London, he browsed shops looking for something good to read. He struck out. All he could find were trendy magazines and junky pulp fiction. And then he had a “Eureka!” moment: What if quality books were available at places like train stations and sold for reasonable prices—the price of a pack of cigarettes, say?

More about me
See my work
Archives
Random post
Likes
RSS Feed
Contact me
Twitter
Flickr
Facebook
BACK TO THE TOP