Author name: Booksquare

Dissecting the publishing industry with love and skepticism.

How Not To Start A Book Club

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Possibly one of the most fascinating things going on this week (yes, back from vacation and ready to go) is the story of Borders and its online book club. After sitting on the sidelines for about ten years, the retail giant has decided it’s about time to go with a little book club love. Alas, it’s a decision to enter into a time warp as well. We applaud the decision to go with original content — good move on the part of Borders. The rest? Hmm, not so much. First, let us say that there’s a bizarre, almost obsessive, interest […]

Books/Mags/Blogs

On Slow, Painful Baby Steps

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“For me the Web is like a teenager’s room,” Menaker [Daniel Menaker, editor-in-chief of the Random House Publishing Group] said. “It can be very messy, and you don’t quite know how to bring order to it. But you can’t ignore it. You have to deal with it.” Booked-Up Publishers Could Be in a Bind

Quote of the Week

Lazy Daze Of…Fall

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We are just now getting around to taking our summer vacation. There’s an excellent chance that we’ll feel the urge to post from our undisclosed location…if that’s the case, expect nothing from brilliance, if not, well, we’re in a bad mood this week anyway. Nothing worse than a cranky blogger, right? And, yes, we were so busy that we forgot to line up guests to post in our absence.

Square Pegs

In Which The Publishing Industry Continues To Exhibit A Profound Lack Of Understanding Of The Real World

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There is a saying that, if we recall correctly, suggests that closing the barn door after the horse escapes is rather foolish. Unless you are really trying to protect hay, in which case, you may ultimately be seen as practical. We are not sure the latest scheme initiated by publishers will be seen as practical, possibly because it does not seem to, oh, show an awareness of how the world works. Let us begin with a bit of positivity: creating smart “use” tags — a concept called digital rights management in the real world — to identify levels of content

The Future of Publishing

Make Her Laugh Make Her Cry

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Once upon a time, you could write a book and that was that. Somehow — magic, probably — customers found the books and fortunes were made. Hmm, not entirely true. Authors have always been part artist, part salespeople; it’s simply that the marketing thing wasn’t mentioned in public. Bad for digestion, you know. At Three Rivers Press, Carrie Thornton likes books that focus on today’s culture (as long as said focus will be relevant tomorrow, see: Bob Marley example). She also like authors who come with a nice little platform, making it easy to launch the book into the cruel,

Publishers and Editors

Contest Emptor

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Let us all be honest for a moment: writing contests are often fundraisers. While you, the writer, might get a critique and maybe your work will make its way to an editor or agent’s desk, the contests are often a way for organizations to make money. No shame in that, by the way, but those who enter contests need to recall this. They probably won’t, of course. Writers are notoriously willfully blind when it comes to the business of writing. One must have a certain level of hubris to submit work to agents and editors, it’s true, but one must

Square Pegs

On Learning Something New

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The task of flipping the book upside-down every eight pages is actually less tedious than it sounds. An outsider novelist goes, er, traditional: Mark Z. Danielewski’s postmodern cred is genuine, but so is his attention to the teenage heart in the new ‘Only Revolutions.’

Quote of the Week

If Content Is King…

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We’re going to do something dangerous. We’re going to make an assumption (yes, yes, we know): we’re going to assume that a few of you are old enough to remember the olden days. Those halcyon moments of yore, when watching television meant taking what they wanted to show you, when listening to the radio meant suffering through someone else’s idea of good music, and when reading the book you wanted was dependent on your local bookstore’s decision to stock it. Times have changed. We have downloadable television. We have satellite radio and iPods and MP3 players in our cars. We

Marketing For Introverts, The Future of Publishing

In Which A Publisher Speaks Openly

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We do so love interviews with editors, but so often they are politically correct. You know how it goes: good story, strong writing, make me happy. Always helpful, but not always realistic. Publishing is, after all, as much a business as an art. Maybe that’s why we found MediaBistro’s interview with Richard Nash of Soft Skull Press so refreshing. It felt like a real person was answering the questions, not a corporate entity. For the one or two of you who are unfamiliar with Soft Skull, they are a New York-based small press. They focus on publishing books that other

Publishers and Editors

More Web Advice For Writers

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Let us start the day by returning to a topic near and dear to everyone’s heart: your website. For reasons that shall remain private, we have been doing a worldwide tour of author websites for the past several weeks, and can say that there’s something rotten in the state of websites. First, the tough love. To those authors who insist upon adding a musical interlude to the web experience, stop. Read carefully: your taste in music sucks. There is absolutely no song that you can include as part of your web experience that will sound good to anyone, including you.

Back To Basics, Marketing For Introverts
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