After a long hiatus, the blog Bookseller Chick is back, providing thoughts on bookstores, publishing, and all things literary. Writes Linsey, the “Bookseller Chick” herself:
A lot has been happening in the book world lately—the flood of great Young Adult books, the rise of the self-publishing success, the increased sales of ebooks, Borders’ bankruptcy, HarperCollins’ [...]
A shoebox full of the mementos of a Parisian woman Sparked Elena Mauli Shapiro’s debut novel, 13, rue Thérèse. The objects fall into the hands of a fictional researcher, and through the sifting of photographs, letters and souvenirs a life emerges. Steven Wingate and Shapiro discuss research, happy accidents, and the power of what we save.
Ever wanted an insider’s view on the publishing process? Algonquin Books has launched the “Ask an Editor” video series on their blog to give you just that. (Via.) Says the site:
Have a question about the publishing world? Submit it in the comments section and one of our editors may very well answer it in [...]
Print book aficionados, here’s a little treat: a video on how a book was made in 1947. (My favorite part? How the author is “finished” writing his story as soon as the last page leaves the typewriter—and the book has a publisher immediately. Ah, if only…) Via.
More interested in [...]
Tyler McMahon loves short stories but worries that collections might be the worst thing to have happened to the genre. However, books like Alan Heathcock’s Volt renew his faith in the collection as an art form of its own, one that makes its stories inseparable from one another—greater even than the sum of their parts.
True or false: It’s harder now to get published than ever.
Answer: It depends.
In the Financial Times, Adrian Turpin argues that the picture for debut novelists isn’t as bleak as you’d think:
For most literary authors, the not-so-brave new world of publishing by numbers is terrible news. But there is one type of [...]
Supply and demand is the basic rule of economics. But will it work for books? Author Sean Cummings thinks so. He’s created a Facebook group and an accompanying website called “Save Publishing! Read a Book at Bedtime.” The site’s rationale:
Read what you like. A magazine, a newspaper or a book. Read [...]
Recently Bitch Magazine published a list, “100 Young Adult Books for the Feminist Reader,” and it includes a lot of great titles I was happy to be reminded of, including classics like A Wrinkle in Time, Harriet the Spy, and The Golden Compass, as well as novels by Ursula LeGuin, Judy Blume, Cynthia Voigt, and [...]
For the last several months, Harper’s staff, recently unionized, has been in conflict with the magazine’s publisher, John R. “Rick” MacArthur. The disagreements stem from various sources, which have been outlined in two recent articles in New York Magazine, here and here. In short: MacArthur is resistant to other avenues of revenue, including fund raising. [...]
New South Books, an Alabama publisher, plans to release a version of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn wherein the n-word is replaced by the word “slave.” 219 times. The professor who originally approached the publisher with the idea did so because he himself felt uncomfortable using the word in class. I, of course, feel [...]
