Author name: Booksquare

Dissecting the publishing industry with love and skepticism.

We Honestly Don’t Know

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Kitty Burns Florey (Solos) has scared us. Now, don’t get us wrong, we can obsess over just about anything. We adore structure and logic (please, snickering in the back row is rude). We are the type to look down on a maze and see the path clearly. We get misplaced, but we don’t get lost. But, dammit, we never did get diagramming sentences. We were too busy racing forward writing them to ever want to go back and dissect them, except to take out entire swaths of words and replace them with more words. Diagramming the poor things? Would you […]

Square Pegs

It’s So Hard Sometimes. No, Really.

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It’s like you’re handed cheesecake the day you start South Beach. You wanna, you wanna, you wanna…and yet you’re still believing you can lose weight. Sure, an offer of sugar and cream cheese and crushed graham crackers (actually, we have no clue) after four weeks of no carbs can destroy the most dedicated of dieters, but on that first day? No. You still believe you can be the svelte person of your imagination (we would suggest eating the cheesecake remains the best option, but suspect it might weaken our argument, such as it is). The news* has been rife with

Square Pegs

Never Mind Slipping Quietly Into The Room

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A cranky old soul left the blogworld. A bitchy new soul entered the blogworld. Somewhere there’s a song about this. Or there will be. We have faith in the collective unconscious. Bitch Novelist has followed up on her initial promise by taking on the idea of emotional honesty and how maybe it might be, uh, not quite so prevalent in books declared emotionally honest. She takes a hard look at Tobias Wolf’s Old School: As odd as it sounds for a book so often praised as “profound,” the primary emotion evoked from Old School is Mr. Chip’s style nostalgia. Many

Tools and Craft

Almost A Quote of the Week Candidate

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But not quite. We know, we know. Making fun of other people is mean. But it’s healthier than smoking. And, frankly, when we’re pitched one right over the plate, even we can hit it. So, when Sara Nelson says: If there’s a lesson to be learned from the international publishing 101 course that is the Frankfurt book fair, it is that what sells here does not necessarily sell there. … what are we supposed to do? Pretend we didn’t read it? Pretend it’s profound or surprising? Pretend this is something we didn’t know? Barring that, perhaps we could beg for

Books/Mags/Blogs

Personally, We Blame Standardized Tests

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Maud Newton takes a look at the (purported) death of fiction, and all of our favorite suspects are in the room. Was it Ms. Reviewer in the Book Section? Professor Editor with the style guide? Major Marketing and Admiral Acquisition working together? Is it possible that all of supposed best friends of books are quietly poisoning them with publishing arsenic? Yeah, there’s a lot of evidence that novels are suffering at the hands of the professionals. Same for music and movies. Probably computer games, too, but we don’t follow that particular industry. Once art becomes a commercial enterprise, there tends

Square Pegs

In Which the Perfectly Clear is As Muddy As We Suspected

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One of our flaws is our inability to target things (hence winning the most improved player in softball nine years running — if we actually threw to our cut-off person, it was considered a major victory). We cannot sit down and write with a line or, even, a market in mind. Sometimes we get lucky and things naturally fit in a particular area, but mostly, we’re punting. This is pretty much why we finally accepted that we’ll never write for Harlequin. Or not. We never know what will come out of our fingers next. We hear about so many writers

Publishers and Editors

Starting Up

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As we previously noted, Michelle Tessler has started her own agency. In her MediaBistro profile, she highlights her biggest strength: a strong background in the business part of the business. Her self-described start-up agency follows the same process that made her successful at Carlisle & Company. Tesslers likes the smart fiction with a strong voice. Not so much the genre fiction. Likes non-fiction that surprises the reader and goes beyond what’s expected. Read the full profile for all the dirt on the agency. Pitching an Agent: Tessler Literary Agency (Note: AvantGuild members only) The Tessler Agency

Agents

We Often Dream of Blogs

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Imagine our surprise when we woke up this morning to discover that not only had we not posted about this New York Times Magazine article — we hadn’t even finished reading it before we fell asleep. Somehow, Emmylou Harris’s words about a record label being “piracy-proof” resonated in our dreams. The story of Nonesuch, a little label (backed by a corporate giant, which we’ll get to in a moment) that could, shows that art is valued in a world run by marketing and the inevitable projections: if it sells this many units, we’ll make x profit. If it sells this

Square Pegs

Also, Columbus May Not Have Discovered America

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We cannot say why this story amuses us, but there you have it. The problem with history is that it keeps changing. Totally, totally ruins reality, what with nobody ever knowing for sure what the real story is. We so prefer fiction — at least you know the ending’s not going to change. Right. Probably should caveat that as well. Okay. At least you know the ending’s not going to change unless the author goes all artiste on us and rewrites the damn thing. We are going to stop thinking about this subject as, like quantum physics, it’s giving us

Square Pegs

On Whetting The Public’s Appetite

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“[It] is an absurd distraction from Graham’s work. It is an utter misrepresentation. Norman does Graham a great disservice with his obsession with gossip … disappointing in someone who professes to be an academic, and a dereliction of Norman Sherry’s duty as a biographer. The biography is not only vulgar and poorly written but extremely dull. Norman Sherry is very like Inspector Clouseau. He doesn’t understand anything, he gets many things wrong – he is a fantasist.” ‘You’re like Inspector Clouseau, vulgar, wrong. A fantasist obsessed with sex’. ‘Bloody nonsense. Grow up’: As the world of literature met yesterday to

Quote of the Week
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