Once More With Feeling: The LATBR Publishes Its Last

By •

Rumor has it that I’m going to be on News Hour with Jim Lehrer tonight. I’ll be talking about the demise of the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Eight minutes isn’t near long enough to cover a topic this broad; it’s barely enough to get started with the conversation. Yesterday was the last day for the dedicated book review, and it makes me sad to know it’s gone, but if you didn’t see it coming, you weren’t paying attention. To blame the Internet for the demise of the LATBR is to address part of the problem. Yes, book lovers are […]

Reviewing Reviewing

Lost in Blogland

By •

[BS: Today, we bring back debut author Jennifer Epstein, whose lovely novel The Painter from Shanghai has garnered some great reviews and accolades. Despite glowing words from the NYT, Jennifer has learned that to market a book, one has to market herself. Follow her up and down the blogosphere…and special thanks to Jennifer for her patience: she had this piece ready a month ago, while we were lost in remodelingland] I have pretty much always known that I wanted to be a writer. Having my first short story “published” in ’78 was what clinched it: The Magic Swingset—a piece I’d

Wrapped Up In Books

Sittin’ Here, Watching The Market Go By

By •

Associated Press headline: “Apple sells 1 million iPhones in first 3 days”. Add to that the six million phones already in the hands of customers (all of whom, I should note, chose to update their software…right when I was updating mine). Doing some quick, nearly caffeine-free math, that’s 7 million web-enabled, application-ready phones in the wild. Now is the time for bold, decisive, maybe even counterintuitive action. And counting. In March of this year, Apple released the Software Developer’s Kit (aka SDK) with hopes that people would create cool tools for the iPhone. This wasn’t a clever ploy to gin

The Future of Publishing

On Same As It Ever Was

By •

To get a sense of how market trends are affecting publishing, it’s important to understand how those trends break from, but also mirror, those of the past. In the 1700s, when booksellers came to replace the aristocracy as the primary patrons of the literary arts in England, writers such as Henry Fielding and the Irish poet Oliver Goldsmith decried the phenomenon as a “fatal revolution.” Fielding wrote a dramatic satire on the subject called The Author’s Farce, and Goldsmith railed ceaselessly against book merchants even as he profited by them. To wit: “You cannot but be sensible, gentlemen, that a

Quote of the Week
Scroll to Top