Square Pegs

We have yet to note a scenario where an publisher fails to over-anticipate demand for books. Scholastic, apparently, got a little giddy after the first day of sales for the latest Harry Potter title and went and started the printing presses. Now they have approximately 2.5 million more copies of the book than they need. Stacks of unsold copies are collecting dust in bookstores and warehouses across the US, and Scholastic – the world’s largest distributor of children’s books, and best known in the UK for Clifford the Big Red Dog – is bracing itself for an avalanche of returned […]

It is a fact that most of our history, as noted in textbooks, is men’s history. We know about the wars, the politics, the conquering of nations — we do not know so much about how people, regular people, survived. That, after all, is the story of women, and our history books cannot be bothered with such mundane information. It was only sometime in the late 18th century that women worked around the problem that men decided what merited recording for posterity: women wrote novels. We often talk about the subversive nature of women’s fiction, and Rebecca Traister of Salon

We can’t recall: is Halloween the one with the practical jokes? And if so, what makes a joke practical? While we puzzle over this problem, the husband thought our readers would jump all over his latest find. Yeah, we know, he doesn’t actually read Booksquare. That’s never stopped him from assuming he knows what happens here. A sample of what he read out loud to us: “Follow These Simple, Step by Step Instructions And You Can Instantly Become A Well Known Author…Without Writing A Word, And You Get To Keep 100% Of the Profits!” Yes, it’s true: you can take

We once confessed to a friend that, in moments of difficulty, that we sit down and write essays. Not about what we did last summer, but about whatever we need to work through. It is amazing how the act of writing can clear the mind, make the untenable feel, well, tenable. We certainly don’t have the hubris to compare our work to Joan Didion’s (but hey, it turns out that we outline better than she does!), but we understand how writing through the pain is often the first and only choice. Didion’s new book The Year of Magical Thinking is

Today, we were given the day off. Well, really, it was the afternoon off. Or, as we clearly recall, it was the afternoon off after we drove 50 miles. Snowstorms and molasses may have been involved, we can’t recall. All we know is that email never stops coming, cool stories are written every minute, and we are devotees of Short Attention Span Theater. An afternoon off is really just another afternoon once you’ve caught up on the world. Author Paul Ford is no stranger to the world of distractions. He’s not what we like to call a Luddite (said with

We begin this post with a question: is it really a quiet move when it was announced in advance? We ask because, despite various announcements over the past year about publishers selling books directly to consumers, the news somehow bypassed the media. It’s like they’ve found fresh meat. Since the online bookselling idea is old news to our readers, we will direct you to what we consider a positive step in the industry, or, if you will, enlightenment. Considering all the news about Frankfurt, it’s sort of a bummer that this is only news that captured our attention, if only

M.J. Rose takes a look at recent statistics from AdWeek and sees the future: Today’s AdAge.com reports that in 2005 U.S. workers will waste the equivalent of 551,000 years reading blogs. Well, one man’s waste is the publishing industry’s opportunity. If people are reading blogs, publishers and authors need to figure out effective ways of utilizing blogs. And that doesn’t mean sending them ARCs they may never look at. It means connecting to the right bloggers. Offering them excerpts. Taking out ads (yes there’s that dirty word again) on blog sites that accept them. While the reader trajectory described by

According to our official biography, we have a great fondness for the underdog, the man on the street, the little engine who could. We are so into the triumph of the spirit, it overwhelms our existence. Except when it brings us down, and we are down. Thomas Shess is in Week Sixteen (like Week Fourteen, only closer to Christmas) and still hasn’t found an agent or a publisher or anything. Maybe it’s us, but it’s starting to feel like this is one of those sad stories. Or one of those stories where it ends just great, but we were so

The Association of American Publishers has also filed suit against Google over the Google library project. The suit notes, among other things, that there is “continuing, irreparable and imminent harm publishers are suffering … due to Google’s willful (copyright) infringement to further its own commercial purposes.” If we were the type to read carefully (rather than being the type rushing this post because we should have been showered and shampooed by now), we would note that, technically, there hasn’t been continuing and irreparable harm to the publishers as of yet (the jury is still out on the imminent — such

Susan Gable, who, between us, spends a lot of time seeking out the weird of the world, tells us about yet another case where fear overrides common sense. Again, we will note that lots of people write about things they never plan to do. And sometimes it’s healthy to express uncomfortable thoughts — much better than letting them fester until they seem like good ideas. We will avoid noting that kids also, sometimes, deliberately do things to shock and provoke adults. Arresting kids for merely writing about violent actions is, how shall we say it, a bit of an overreaction.