Are Female Crime Writers Pushed Aside?

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The authors behind The Lipstick Chronicles (Susan McBride, Sarah Strohmeyer, Harley Jane Kozak, Nancy Martin’s) take a look at the idea of a girl ghetto in crime fiction. The discussion features Laura Lippman, David Montgomery, Sarah Weinman, and Harlan Coben, each of whom addresses the idea that women are pushed to the edges of this genre. Their conclusions tend to say no, with qualifiers. The responses are interesting, but we found that one recurring theme didn’t get explored fully (given the format and the fact that the Lipsticks couldn’t have predicted this, it’s understandable): the idea that people write what […]

Books/Mags/Blogs

We, Too, Get Cranky Around Birthday Time

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If we were to say, oh, literary fiction sales suck because all literary fiction sucks, not only would people scream, but we’d have to admit to a slight exaggeration. Only some literary fiction sucks — the law of averages prevents all books of any genre from being the best ever. There is excellent literary fiction and there is bad literary fiction. From a consumer perspective, which is presumably the purpose of writing reviews as they come a little too late in the process to help the author craft a better novel, knowing which books are worth reading and which books

Square Pegs

Toward a Utopia of Book Reviewing for Women

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Recently, we posted a short piece where we read too much into a few words. Most of our enlightened readers got the point immediately. A few chastised us for, well, overreading a few words (which we’d stated up front, so that ship had sailed) and went off on another tangent entirely. Which was fine, but not really the point we wanted to make. So let us try again: bias can be as blatant as using the qualifier “leggy” before calling someone an essayist (because, unless we’re missing something important, the two descriptions are unrelated). Bias can also exist by omission,

Wrapped Up In Books

Hey, Is That A Writer In Your Pocket?

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Forget the personal trainer. That’s so last year. Anyone who’s anyone has a personal screenwriter. See, it’s not enough to have one, two, three, ten screenwriters toil over a script — the star or director also needs to bring along someone who understands his or her vision. Very important. Of course, being a personal screenwriter isn’t just stepping on toes and revising carefully crafted dialogue. It’s also a highly lucrative job, sometimes lasting the duration of of production. A good writer who scrimps and saves over this period can almost afford a house in Culver City. As long as they

Square Pegs

Has The YA Market Reached Its Zenith?

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Just this past weekend, we found ourself in a bookstore, lost in the Young Adult titles. We remarked, quite casually, to the mother that the YA craze was bigger than we’d believed. She, being the smug type, assured us that we don’t know everything. Well, we know this: Dorchester is stepping out of the YA game. The Smooch line is no more. No word on why, though we’ve heard rumors of slow sales, possibly due to less-than-optimal distribution. This is only a guess.

Publishers and Editors

Business Rule One: The Publisher Pays You

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If, perchance, you’re looking for clues about the legitimacy of your publisher, may we offer up the following: For one thing, some e-mails from Ivery were riddled with misspellings and bad grammar. For another, when Geniesse asked [Martha] Ivery to fix some typos in his manuscript, she told him it wasn’t worth bothering about, since it wouldn’t help sales. Yes, it’s true. Typos don’t matter. Readers hardly notice them, and they rarely form judgments based on the fact that a book is virtually unreadable. After all, people purchase books to put on coffee tables. What’s contained between the covers is

Publishers and Editors

Yet They Still Put Their Pants On One Leg At A Time

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Okay, we don’t know that for sure, but it does remain a fact that editors are human, just like most of the rest of us. MediaBistro, in its continuing series of editor interviews, reminds us of that fact. The series also lets us peek inside the publishing business without the painfully awkward conversational lulls that often accompany office tours. For example, we can leapfrog the large piles on Brant Rumble’s desk: If a number is what you’re looking for, then let’s say twenty-five manuscripts and proposals a month. I don’t know if that’s accurate, but whatever the number is, it’s

Publishers and Editors

Reading Is, Indeed, Fun-damental

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Let us state for the record that we’d talk about M.J. Rose’s latest marketing idea even if $5 wasn’t being donated to Reading is Fundamental. But, boy, the second we heard the news, the little animated character from the RIF commercials of our childhood danced across our mind. Luckily, we pulled out of Memory Lane and have returned to the task at hand. Rose has been turning notions of publishing and marketing books upside-down since she finished her first book Lip Service. Now she’s not only built a strong reader base, but her latest title, The Halo Effect (now out

Books/Mags/Blogs

On The Perils of Being A Follower

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In an effort to walk back the cat – young people are listening to iPods, therefore media should be reiterated in a form that they both use and enjoy – big media is taking a stab at the next big thing. Much of it is awkward and some of it is downright dumb. Big Media Wants a Piece Of Your Pod

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