Author name: Booksquare

Dissecting the publishing industry with love and skepticism.

But What He Really Wants To Do Is Direct

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Even though we often disagree with his politics, we have a soft spot for Dana Rohrabacher. You gotta love a Congressman who surfs. And, sure, we’d rather he spent a little more time paying attention to running the country, but when a man’s gotta write, nothing’s going to stand in his way. Okay, so he wrote his obligatory* screenplay a long time ago. And what with politics being so time-consuming, it never got off the ground. Possibly it never hit the second draft stage. Rohrabacher might have returned to a life of legislating and surfing had he not — sigh […]

Square Pegs

What If They Said No?

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We realize (truly!) that there is a fundamental difference between the music industry and the publishing industry. The two industries also have much in common, and given that music moves faster than publishing, the technological growing pains faced by one industry provide lessons for the next. The challenge from satellite radio is the latest example of how technology and changing consumer behavior are undermining the longstanding business models for record companies, Hollywood studios and other creators of entertainment content. Legacy systems — acquisition of product, distribution of product, associated accounting, artist development — are being challenged by the most powerful

The Future of Publishing

Happy Publishing Holidays

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Word on the street is that Harlequin is discontinuing its Signature line. This is probably only important to you if you have a clue what the imprint was all about. The rest of us will likely not notice the demise. In unrelated news, a grand total of ten fewer books will be published in 2006, contributing to a decline in market over-saturation.

Publishers and Editors

Judging Writing

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In an article in the New York Press, Sam Sacks takes exception with writing workshops. Where one once found creativity and free-flowing ideas, the experience now lends itself to to an inevitable sense of sameness. He cites Best New American Voices 2006 as Exhibit A of workshopping gone wrong. The question Sacks dances around is that of objectivity versus subjectivity. Writing is absolutely a creative endeavor. If you need to prove this, engage in the age-old exercise of listing three objects and having each member of a small group write a paragraph including those objects. Or just one object. Or

Tools and Craft

Teenage Lit, Or Something Like It

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We took a wrong turn in the bookstore the other day. One moment, we were blissfully considering cookbooks (for someone else, not the BS household); the next, we were lost in a sea of reading teenagers. Have you ever tried to navigate an aisle filled with kids lost in books? Let us assure you that they get cranky when forced to shift to make space for pedestrian traffic. The fire marshall would not be pleased, no sirree! While we are not sure if Edward Rothstein approves of this trend or not, he is clearly not falling on the side of

Books/Mags/Blogs, The Future of Publishing

On Ephemera and Blogging

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A prediction. After today’s blogging hype fades for a tried-and-true historical reason – serious readers have never paid more than a pittance for ephemera – the Internet’s identification with blogging will give way to exploitation of its truly novel capacity: limitless cheap space for substantive, long-form writing. That development will only expand as the last print generation that hates to read off screens dies off. ‘New Journalists’: They gave readers more, not less

Quote of the Week

The Moral of the Story

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Like most nosy bloggers, we have been following the story of Brad Vice and assertions of plagiarism with great interest. Plagiarism is bad. Heck, we might even admit to a moment or two of schadenfreude — what’s the point of having a bad reputation if you don’t live up to it? Then came the niggling doubts, that need to know all, see all, understand all. In the end, however, we simply felt like the kid who’d done a bang up job on putting together the lower left quadrant of the puzzle before realizing someone had walked away with the rest

Square Pegs

Finally

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Some authors simply don’t end well. Neal Stephenson, for example. The man will write forever to avoid ending a book. Also, he seems to have a lot of extra paper or maybe stock in a paper factory. His books tend to rip-roar (in a very broad sense of the term) along before doing everything they can to avoid coming to “The End”. This problem affects more authors than you’d think, which is rough because how you end a book is so very important. The deepest rooted of last lines is the childhood one: “And they all lived happily ever after.”

Books/Mags/Blogs, Tools and Craft

Considering Pseudonyms

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The always-helpful HelenKay Dimon tells us that JK Rowling is looking to the future — and that future has a name change. There will be life beyond Harry Potter. Being taken seriously as a post-Harry writer will be difficult for Rowling. Sure, we’ve heard that lightening strikes twice, but her future work will always be viewed through the lens of what is arguably the greatest literary success ever. Thus, “There are other things I’d like to write. But I’ll need to find a good pseudonym.” While we understand her logic, we feel obliged to tell Rowling the awful truth: the

The Business of Publishing
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