Spare Us. Please.

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We were recently complimented on our avoidance of profanity (thank you, Karen Palmer who needs a website and/or blog to make linking easy), but sometimes we are pushed to our limits. It was once suggested that we have low tolerance for stupidity; this is true. If you want to push our buttons, facile works. It offers a chance for us to exercise our vocabulary in a positive manner. Fairy tales lead to domestic abuse. We freely admit that things like statistics confuse us. The bell curve seems contrived. We don’t like to speak for most of the women we know, […]

Square Pegs

Others Work So That We Don’t Have To

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Here’s the deal — Jill Monroe is supposed to step in and return this blog to a higher level of discourse (education of youth and stuff). Due to browser issues (use Firefox, refresh cache, save the world from our rants, not that we’re offering advice or anything), she’s unable to get to our reliable system. Until she does, you’re stuck with us. Ha! But we are lazy and without shame. For instance, we could discuss the issues of the pre-published. If we understood what that term meant. Monica Jackson, whom we never met but is a member of the WordPress

Tools and Craft

More Thoughts on Building Readership

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It took us a dizzying while to figure out what was happening in the Independent article linked below. Note: lack of specificity confuses Americans. Diagrams, however, help. At first we were all “yeah!” at the taunting of anti-reading corporate tastemakers (or something like that) then it lead to Richard and Judy (even after a year, we cannot stop our brain from substituting Punch for Richard) and then to a great quote (something ripped straight from our fingers, if we may be so bold). . . The book market certainly needs to expand. What it requires is creative innovation, not mad

Square Pegs

A Quick One, Then We’re Away

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Oh yeah, the cranky machine is running at full capacity. We may require a time out. There is, out there (there being someplace we can’t pinpoint, but it surely exists) a problem with the sales of literary fiction. Now, we do not have at our fingertips a graph of historical sales, but, we suspect, literary fiction has always sold to a lesser degree than genre fiction. If this is not true, then do not tell us as we’re going with that as our thesis. Now, readers are faced with increasing choice and limited budgets. So when we read stuff like

Books/Mags/Blogs

Thinking Maybe Books and Technology Don’t Mix

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Something tells us we’re about to have a cranky day. We would apologize but we’re one sentence into what promised to be an interesting article (promise broken) and already we want to shoot off long diatribes to the journalist’s editor. This is how it starts, isn’t it? E-books have yet to crack the publishing industry, but that hasn’t stopped literature from tackling computer technology as a storytelling device. Well, technically, ebooks have cracked the publishing industry. Perhaps it would be better to suggest that they haven’t set the publishing industry on fire. Yet. We remain convinced that they will find

Books/Mags/Blogs

Why We’d Fail As A Publisher

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We understand exuberance — we’ve been excited about things plenty of times, but our innate sense of fiscal responsibility generally saves our checkbook from our enthusiasm (also, the husband). Perhaps it’s because we don’t look good in red. This may be why we do not publish novels. Sure, Little Brown & Company have proven themselves somewhat experienced in the publishing business. And their professional editors can spot raw talent in the same way we can spot decent Chinese food. An almost-finished novel by a first-time author? Screams “two-book, six figure” deal to us. So what that: “It’s a little tough

Books/Mags/Blogs

Behavior We Shouldn’t Encourage

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Though we shouldn’t have to say this, we will: we hate the covers of 99.9999% of romance novels we encounter. Let us be clear — we like naked men, though tonight, we may have had one or two mental images that were unnecessary. Our fascination with the female breast is exactly zero. Unless you have a hotline to innovations in elastic, in which case we’re interested. And looking up with adoration at some dude? Well, it’s a species that holds burping contests. Still, we have an analytical soul. When someone takes the time to do the math, it catches our

Square Pegs

This Is The Last Time, We Swear

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This will be our final post on Judith Regan and her move-to-Hollywood caravan*. Frankly, we cannot understand why our normally reliable short attention span continues to find this fascinating. We spend less time gawking at accidents while parked on the freeway. Oh, who are we kidding, we remain fascinated because discerning the true reason for the move is tougher than you’d think. Today, we learn the economic reasons for the move: I want my staff to be happy, to live in more affordable homes, to be able to raise their kids without permanently mortgaging their quality of life. We simply

Publishers and Editors

A New Episode in Our Continuing Series on the Chinese Publishing Industry

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The husband, one of the few people we know who reads the Los Angeles Times Business section before he reads the comics, recalled that we have done a series of hard-hitting stories on the publishing industry in China and alerted us to an article that fits perfectly with one of our favorite topics: fake books by fake authors. While our concerns about how tell a fake book from a real book are not answered to our satisfaction, we learned lots of cool things. If we’re following the whole thing correctly, clever entrepeneurs sell fake business books by fake authors, complete

Books/Mags/Blogs, Publishers and Editors

Great Libraries Filled With People, Batman!

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As we begin the process of clearing out last week in anticipation of this week, we are finding lots of fun stuff that we would be remiss in not sharing. For example, a lament on too many visitors to a library. Truly, it is a problem. Hordes of common folk filling spaces meant to be occupied by true scholars and whatnot. It is more evidence of the decline of Western civilization. Next thing you know, there will be fast food in libraries*. Customers of the British Library (see previous for the travails of that institution) are not happy that the

Square Pegs
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