Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘publishing’

Shop Talk |

Harper Perennial celebrates the short story

by Anne Stameshkin

Harper Perennial is already building buzz for its upcoming Summer of the Short Story campaign, declaring that “it’s high time to celebrate the much-loved, but oft-overlooked, short story form.” The publisher will promote six new collections (due to publish this summer and fall)—along with six collections of classic shorts. The festivities will begin in earnest this May, but in the meantime, Perennial is featuring a new story every week in 2009 on a site called Fifty-Two Stories. According to Cal Morgan: Some of them will be new stories from our original collections, or from upcoming hardcovers; some original contributions never […]


Shop Talk |

"The stage is bare. Enter an actor and a book."

by Anne Stameshkin

On the Penguin-UK blog, sales manager Fiona Buckland considers the possibilities of selling books in a “theatre of limited means.” In one of the darkest years of the 1930s depression, Allen Lane founded Penguin with the — then groundbreaking — notion to sell quality writing as cheaply as a pack of cigarettes and to sell them everywhere. Studying our own history gives us pause for thought as we tip headfirst into recession: bleak economic times are sometimes the crucible of inspiration and creativity. I think of the black box theatres so beloved of Peter Brook and endless student productions, in […]


Shop Talk |

something's gotta work: more publishing linkage

by Anne Stameshkin

– Lev Grossman looks back as well as forward when considering the future of publishing. – Motoko Rich examines the industry’s new austerity. – Julian Gough makes a modest (bailout) proposal. – Boris Kachka suggests resurrecting Robert Giroux. – Spotted via Bookslut, Patti Holt makes an argument for ditching hardcovers altogether: – And should you feel like buying a book today, a panel of reviewers at The Guardian takes a stab at naming the 1,000 novels everyone must read. Bonus: it’s not just a list; there is a paragraph-long description of each. If you feel an important book has been […]


Shop Talk |

how publishing really works

by Anne Stameshkin

Welcome to an alternate reality where editorial assistants start at $80,000, 18 copyeditors are assigned to each book, and blogs are hailed as a higher art form…but can we please never say, even in jest, that a novel takes between 10 and 30 years to write? **sound of my head exploding** Thanks, Kathryn, for the link!


Shop Talk |

the wovel

by Anne Stameshkin

Editor/publisher Victoria Blake (Underland Press), along with programmer Jesse Pollack, is the force behind a new literary form: the online serial novel, or wovel; NPR describes it as “Choose your Own Adventure meets Wikipedia.” A self-confessed blog addict who loves reading frequently-updated online content, Blake thought it would be great to have opportunities to read literature online in a serial form, a la Dickens (and more recently Chabon), and to have that experience be interactive. Here is Underland’s official description of the wovel (from their website): Every week, the author posts an installment. Installment length hits the sweet-spot of online […]


Shop Talk |

Get totally depressed! Then get your hope on.

by Anne Stameshkin

The book industry–hell, literature itself–is in jeopardy, and even some of the most avid readers are getting blamed. This has been a very traumatic season for publishing…even highly successful celebrity editors have been laid off from houses big and small, and some publishers aren’t signing any new books. It’s clear we need to think about change at every level of the industry; as publishers, booksellers, journalists, and authors raise the alarm, will we find creative ways to fight the fire or curl up on the floor of a burning house? Read how we might learn to publish without perishing, why […]


Shop Talk |

the book isn't dead yet, but fiction "needs all the help it can get"

by Anne Stameshkin

Happily, not everyone predicts an imminent doomsday for the book (or book publishing). David Ulin at the LA Times urges publishers to stop panicking and “focus on the writing rather than the noise.” And Amelia Atlas at the New York Observer talks to some industry insiders who think the book might do OK in a recession: reading is, after all, a form of escape. She herself suggests: “There are only so many times, it would seem, that the industry can hear the sound of its own death knell and still worry.” Still, she quotes Sonny Mehta as saying that “Fiction […]


Shop Talk |

P&W's Agents and Editors series

by Anne Stameshkin

Over the past year, Grove/Atlantic editor (and friend of FWR) Jofie Ferrari-Adler has been conducting a series of wonderful, in-depth interviews for Poets & Writers magazine with prominent agents and editors. Jofie’s latest feature is a conversation with Chuck Adams of Algonquin, the estimable editor behind Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants and more than 100 other bestsellers; he has seen Cher’s living room and edited Joseph Heller’s prose. Previous interviews in the P&W series highlight the careers of editor Janet Silver and agents Lynn Nesbit, Molly Friedrich, and Nat Sobel.


Shop Talk |

recommended post: how an agent reads

by Anne Stameshkin

Agent Jessica Faust from BookEnds breaks down in this post how she reads each of the following: query letters, proposals, requested manuscripts, revised manuscripts from clients, and books for pleasure. This is helpful reading for anyone preparing agent submissions: Often when reading proposals I’m distracted. I’m reading at home, at night, and dinner is on, or the TV is on, or there is just chaos. A good three chapters is going to make that chaos disappear. Like most readers I don’t have the opportunity for a peaceful few hours to sit quietly and read. Instead I’m counting on the book […]




Literary Partners