Publishers and Editors

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 […]

We have followed the explosion of manga in the publishing industry with great interest*. While we love jumping on bandwagons as much as the next person, we wondered how much manga the market could sustain (also, we wondered how the word was spreading — Jill Monroe, also known as our correspondent in Oklahoma, has recently peppered us with questions along the lines of “just what is this manga thing” and “do I need to get a shot for it?”). All of this wondering is our justification for perpetuating a rumor we encountered on FishbowlLA — were there really layoffs at

The fine folks over at MediaBistro have fulfilled their promise to add exciting new features. The latest is a series looking into the minds of editors (and, for a short time only, this feature is free to everyone; eventually it will be part of the Avant Guild subscription only). First up is Asya Muchnick of Little, Brown. We liked this thought: I think it’s inevitable, it’s a shorthand that people use within the industry and then it becomes a shorthand within the marketplace to communicate quickly. For the most part, those comparisons don’t hold true. When an agent sends a

First, we need to get something off our chest: would a major newspaper print a photo of a man picking his teeth? Combing his hair? Adjusting parts that need adjusting? Only if they want to diminish the man in question. While we do not believe in the concept of “liberal media”, we do believe that the New York Times tends to diminish women involved with writing and publishing. Hence the ridiculous shot of Judith Regan and her lipstick. Love her, hate her, think whatever you like, but the bottom line is that Regan is doing something right from a business

You can’t walk around Booksquare headquarters without hearing something about niches. For a change, we’re not talking about the places where dust collects — these are genuine niches where a need years to be filled. A recent study has shown that publishers are realizing these niches exist. Oh, not those publishers. The study has revealed that the great democratizer (sorry, it’s going to be one of those posts), the Internet, has allowed small publishers to do something they hadn’t done before: make money. It is easier to find bookstore space, to reach wider audiences, advertise. Even shipping seems to be

We simply cannot, will not, reveal the punch line. Suffice to say verifying sources is a good thing. Max Mira(ge)

Our personal nails-on-chalkboard phrase is “the first time since…”; it is almost inevitable that this phrase will be used in a sentence like this: This is the first time we’ve celebrated Wednesday since last week. In our never humble view, the only appropriate use of this construction when the event is truly extraordinary: This is the first time dinosaurs have been spotted walking the canyons of North America since the last Ice Age. We live in a era where everything must be an event. Or maybe it truly is that publishers suffer a lack of confidence. Hard to tell. It

Nothing gets us more excited than new buzzwords, unless it’s a good guessing game. Please try to guess the phrase-of-the moment in this announcement about Amazon’s acquisition of BookSurge: BookSurge offers its inventory-free book fulfillment network to publishers through BookSurge Publisher Services and to authors through BookSurge Publishing. In addition, retailers, wholesalers and distributors can leverage the BookSurge Direct wholesale platform. Other than that, we’re quite excited about the possibilities of the activity formerly known as print on demand. Amazon.com Acquires BookSurge LLC

Michael Cader follows up his previous thoughts on the Expanding The Market: survey: But take a look at today’s NYT arts section, where publishers have invested a considerable amount of money in six different display ads. None of those ads describes the book at all — not even a single line or clause. All but one employs exactly the same technique — a wall of quotes, mostly from reviews (which we don’t believe sell books), saying the book is good. Only one provides even the slightest identification of who the author is, other than a “bestseller.” If you’ll recall, potential