Books/Mags/Blogs

Our fascination with The DaVinci Code comes not from the book itself (though we were shocked to discover it weighs in at 600 pages — we had no clue, which is a testament to the pacing), but the reaction to the book. We recently met a man who told us we were wrong about history; he asserted that history is concrete, unmoveable. What you see is what you get. There are no variables. Especially when that history is captured by film or photographs. “But what about,” we wondered, “the person standing just outside the picture? What do they see?” It […]

We admit it — we are finger-tied. A publisher actually publishes a book called katie.com without acquiring the rights to the domain name? Seriously? Like, who slept through Marketing 101? Did nobody realize that lots of people would visit the domain, only to be sorely disappointed (or is it possible that they don’t know somebody who’s dialed 867-5309 in hopes of reaching some chick called Jenny?)? Did nobody anticipate the megabytes of bad publicity this error would generate? We don’t make fun of our fellow humans because we derive pleasure from it. Okay, we do, but with material like this,

What does it say about our relationship that the husband not only TiVoed the Democratic Convention but also queued up the best moments for our viewing pleasure? This despite the fact that all politicians send him to ranting and raving (he’s quite non-partisan when it comes to shouting at the television). As our skepticism caught a later flight, we spent the night basking in the warm glow of this obvious affection…until he mentioned that The Daily Show’s highlights mirrored his. Our convention will surely be different from the rest of the world’s. We still have much to say about our

It is natural that our thoughts turn to chicklit at a time like this (this being when we are helping our friend Linda sort through the fifty or so books she acquired at last night’s literacy signing — we’ll get to that later — many of which were chicklit, despite Linda’s skepticism of such a thing). The concept surrounds us in the hallways and on the elevators. It’s not that romance is dead; it’s just that romance…needs to evolve like any other living creature. Tastes change and readers grow. And while it seemed like a cute fad in the early

As we are still orienting ourselves in the city known as Dallas, we find ourselves relying on the wisdom of others to see us through. Plus we find others can be far more succinct on certain matters, especially when it comes to matters near and dear to us. Thus we allow Maud Newton to cut to the chase on the (to us) mind-boggling sales of the 9/11 Commission’s report: I wonder if publishers will notice that making the full text of the book available online hasn’t seemed to hurt sales. Cow, milk, September 11th Commission’s report

We like a good play on words, which we presume was the goal of the Chicago Sun-Times‘s headline. Nothing else makes sense. The article discusses the topic du week: the number of books flooding the market. As noted previously, there are a lot. And there are a lot of theories behind this, including our favorite: For some reason, everybody thinks they can write a book, and book publishing seems glamorous to them. We don’t necessarily see that as the real problem, but what the heck, we’ll go with it. So we continue through the article, the discussions from industry professionals,

Two years ago, at a conference, we listened as a publisher spoke about acquiring two previously self-published titles. Since then, we’ve written about this idea as it relates to various concepts (which we won’t bore you with today). The Literary Saloon offer thoughts on the subject while discussing recent reviews of two books on Abraham Lincoln (with amazingly similar titles), one of which was self-published. We were pleased to see them skate the edge of the judging a book by its cover meme before leaping back into the game: The cover a book is published under should have nothing to

Yesterday, we talked about censorship. There was some disagreement about whether what happened to Whoopi Goldberg and Linda Ronstadt constituted true censorship, and while we understood the arguments being made, we also felt that an underlying message was being sent. Censorship doesn’t have to be a pile of books serving as a bonfire; sometimes a subtle message is far more effective: To watch the dictators and political operatives and religious zealots go at it, censorship might seem like a tough business. The so-called experts create the impression you have to burn books, pass censorial laws, or openly express a ruthless

Finally a Bill Clinton story we can get behind: piracy and the human spirit. In our former life, we were a bit of anti-piracy maven (not that we are opposed to pirates, per se, but we’ve never been big on stealing). We could discuss (for hours) the issues of selling fake DVDs and camcorders smuggled into movie theaters. In fact, when Seinfeld had the episode when Jerry became a pirate with an artistic bent, we were happy to use that example to explain concepts to people. It’s nice when you have a visual aid. All of this really has nothing

We admit it: we once bought laundry detergent that promised to change our life. As so often happens, things remained exactly the same (until we bought the dishwasher that would change our life…and it, amazingly, did). As it turns out, readers are hungry for books that describe the world-altering moments, those precious days when our little planet up and starts turning in another direction (apparently, mauve was one such event — that we find this terrifying should go without saying). We can’t tell you what to call your work, but it’s something to think about. An Article That Explains Bookselling