Booksquare

“[Because the hiring process for reviewers] emphasizes writing as if it were a monolithic skill, editors often end up with reviewers who write well but may not be good critics, and authors whose skills may be entirely inappropriate… Fiction writers don’t necessarily have a good analytical sense of why a piece of literature succeeds or fails, which is the most useful aspect of the review for the reader…. In hiring authors because they are authors, review editors are turning to writers whose main interest isn’t likely to be reviewing; most fiction writers, poets and biographers are primarily interested in writing fiction, poetry and biography, not devoting the best of their energy and attention to criticism. Still worse, editors run the risk of hiring writers whose motive for reviewing is not to evaluate the books at hand but to promote their own names and their latest works.”

• Gail Pool: Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America via BookDaddy (Hosannah in the lowest: An essay on book reviewing)

Still, editors and editing will be more important than ever as the Internet age rockets forward. The online world is not just about millions of newborn writers exulting in their powers. It’s also about millions of readers who need to sort through this endless universe and figure out which writers are worth reading. Who is going to sort out the exceptional ones? Editors, of some type. Some smart group of people is going to have to separate the wheat from the chaff. And the more refined that separation process is, the more talent — and perhaps more training — will be required.

• Let us now praise editors

Even Bloomsbury has Harry headaches. The huge profits that the novels generate lead the City – in many ways, a stupid organism – to expect the company to make high margins in the Potter-less future. But publishing is publishing: a risky, low-margin business. Harry’s wizardry can alter that law only for the books in which he stars.

• Is the Potter-less future bright for the industry?

Is there still something disreputable about it? I continue to find the crime novel the perfect vehicle for an unflinching discussion of contemporary issues. After all, the detective has an “all-areas pass” to every aspect of the contemporary urban scene, and this is a way for the crime writer to take the reader into forbidden territory; for instance, it was always my mission in the Rebus books to show people an Edinburgh that the tourist doesn’t see. And crime fiction has always been good at articulating the fears that society has harboured at all moments of history – such as the stranger who will casually take your life. Equally, the genre is able to deal with high moral purpose in quite as rigorous a fashion as did Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment and Dickens in Bleak House.

• Bang to writes

What Twain did was to stop policing the boundaries between book language and the kind used by regular folks in day-to-day life. It was a decision that opened the door to the vigorous life and invention of vernacular and oral English. It has given American novels a cocky swagger that survives still: the energy of Philip Roth’s prose, the sweet spin that George Saunders gives to his tales of McWorld, the tragic passions of Toni Morrison. And so on – and on and on.

English literary language is a pitifully genteel thing by contrast. It’s not like there aren’t great novels written on this side of the Atlantic; of course there are. But the number of English writers that can accommodate the full register of the language are few indeed. Martin Amis has a go – aping his mentor Saul Bellow – but the result is cartoon Nabokov that never really gets out of the library.

• Writing the American Way

To whom, then? And how do you say it? It’s an almost impossible choice for, aside from the chosen one, every person you hold dear is going to be disappointed. Put it another way: writing a dedication to a novel is a bit like composing an email to your closest friends and family, explaining that you don’t like them as much as you have been pretending, hitting “send all” and cc-ing the rest of the world. Where to start?

• To whom it may concern

Everybody has a novel in progress. I hate to be left out of these trends. I have an idea that could not — despite herculean efforts — be squeezed into the 40 pages of a picture book. And once I train myself to write a page of text without immediately running off to paint the action, like a monkey reflexively jumping to an organ grinder, I shall begin.

• Opus day! – Interview with Berkeley Breathed

Writers get obsessed with a project and lock the doors and sit and work at it, like animals in a leg trap trying to chew through the leg, which is not good strategy. My advice is to get out of the house and take a walk, a good first cure for the depression that hits after you’ve been working for a year and it dawns on you that your book is not “Huckleberry Finn” but you must finish it anyway because the publisher’s generous advance has been spent on a new pair of shoes for the baby and she has worn a hole in them already, so you press on — on — on — though it strikes you that the world has a great many books already and does it need yours? And the readers you most want (youth) are fixated on screens, not on paper. This is so depressing you want to tie a rock to your ankle and jump in the Mississippi, and if you remembered how to tie the knots that could hold a rock you might, but a long walk can bring you around.

• Author at work

Paul Bogaards, an executive for rival publisher Bertelsmann AG’s Alfred A. Knopf, says he took a copy home to his eight-year-old son, Michael, whom he describes as “junked up on Nick, Disney and Club Penguin,” a Web site. Mr. Bogaards says Michael took to it immediately, demanding that his dad test paper airplanes into the night, even missing “American Idol.” He adds: “That’s the good news. The bad news is that he now expects me to build him a treehouse.” He concludes: “Million-copy-plus seller easy, with the shelf life of Hormel Spam.”

• ‘Dangerous Book for Boys’
  Soars to Dizzying Heights

“We need much more of a direct relationship with our readers,” said Susan Rabiner, an agent and a former editorial director. Bloggers have a much more interactive relationship with their readers than publishers do, she said. “Before Amazon, we didn’t even know what people thought of the books,” she said.
. . .
“It’s the way this business has run since 1640,” he [Al Greco, a professor of marketing at Fordham University] says. That is when 1,700 copies of the Bay Psalm Book were published in the colonies. “It was a gamble, and they guessed right because it sold out of the print run. And ever since then, it has been a crap shoot,” Professor Greco said.

• The Greatest Mystery: Making a Best Seller