Quote of the Week

We know that the book-buying audience is diminishing, and it’s just such a heroic effort to stay alive. We know that the reading audience is diminishing; we know that certainly this generation of kids has a lot more to do to distract them from reading books than one or two generations ago even. So part of it is the changing economics of publishing, and the need to have a healthy bottom line. And commercial work always, in the history of publishing, ensures the bottom line whereas literary work never does. And that’s just the way it is, and that makes […]

Maybe 13 really is unlucky – since that’s the number of cover designs for my new novel that my publisher has already run through, and not one of them works. Few companies would lavish such care on finding just the right image for a single book, and I admire their perfectionism. Yet these hard-working and skillful designers have consistently turned a deaf ear to the author’s entreaties that someone, please, sit down and draft some original art. You would think I was suggesting that they hop aboard the next Nasa shuttle and go collect moon rocks. I fear that, like

If all you want to do is communicate with your readers sans the filthy tiremarks of the Highway of Commerce, write a blog. Filthy Lucre

My bad review was something else again: my writer friends thought it was great. It was an opportunity, a platform, a megaphone, a lemon about to be transmuted into the most ambrosial lemonade. The very things that made it bad made it good: its frivolity displayed my depth, its confusion threw into relief my steely logic, its snark showed all too clearly who the real wit was. Thank You for Hating My Book

It feels like betrayal, to be shut out of the comforts of a traditional, Aristotelian narrative, with its precise storytelling arc. “Now a whole is that which has a beginning, middle and end,” wrote the old philosopher, about the shaping of tragedy in “The Poetics.” It may seem like a truism — of course a story must have a beginning and a middle and an end — but it has cast a long shadow over the making of narrative (and other arts) in the West. Resisting its strictures, and playing with endings, has become almost a genera in itself. The

There is another, more profound way in which research is useful to the fiction writer. Research gives you the courage to make things up. The task of the novelist is not to know. It is to imagine. Like a succubus, one must seduce and possess the character. How this is achieved, I do not know. Except that it is a state that one sinks into, and the rest — not just knowledge, but style and technique — are products that are available if you pay the price of time and dedication to the craft. The Writing Life: The author of

“I do not subscribe to the belief that editors are, by definition, ego-less, unthanked, and all that stuff. I actually get annoyed when I hear that. By and large, [as an editor] you are bringing your own ego, your own mind, your own responses, your own creativity. That’s part of the editorial process.” Inside the editor’s brain – Ellen Seligman

Booksellers believe Mr. Child may have tapped into the same audience that has devoured romance novels over the past 20 years, a genre that in recent years has increasingly included more violence and suspense. They say the 9/11 terrorist attacks, coupled with the war in Iraq, have changed what women are willing to read. From the Wall Street Journal, via Publisher’s Lunch. Article is locked behind the WSJ wall, alas.

A Revenue source said: “The Revenue believes that the law only allows actors, singers, musicians and dancers to claim that agents are a necessary business expense. Therefore, it is seeking to recover tax from other entertainers, sportsmen, authors and anyone else who has written off the expense of their agents. Brown targets celebrities’ tax perk

One solution is simple enough: If you write, read. A lot. If you want a book published and sold in the marketplace, then buy and read and recommend enough books to nourish the system you want to enter. Advocate on behalf of literature. And, most quixotic of all, every MFA program should require all potential graduates to convert at least one eight-year-old into a passionate reader. Otherwise, we’re faced with a bloated “writership” vying for the attention of an anemic readership. Of course, the readers left could start charging for their time. Envision the classified: “Reading group ready to devour