The Business of Publishing

We have a friend — let’s call him Peter — who has been trying to get us worked up over the James Frey flap. Other individuals have given up on the goal, but Peter keeps trying. It’s simply not going to happen, but he’s stubborn. He tries little things, like pointing out that he was three chapters into the mess, but now has to give it up. “Return it,” we say. “You kept your receipt, right?” Of course he didn’t. “Here’s someone who’s all worked up,” we say, forwarding endless links to endless articles. He reads them all, only temporarily […]

This is a how to article. It’s about the Gap. Long before there was a store by that name, the Gap slipped into the vernacular, worming its way onto TV. Picture this: in the year 1966, news comes from three sources including Walter Cronkite. TV news is sedate, stentorian, ominous. There was a Missile Gap in the Sixties, a Knowledge Gap after Sputnik. On the fashion scene archival evidence suggests that women of the era bore an odd resemblance to David Bowie, not as he appeared then, as much as he does now. Every squeeze of the aerosol can created

We have reached our threshold on ebook news for the week — three posts is far more than our limited attention span can manage. In fact, we’d give up now if Publisher’s Weekly hadn’t gone and written an inane sentence: Other additions to the list—from the astrology guide by Susan Miller, The Year Ahead (at No. 15) to romance titles like J.W. McKenna’s Office Slave, from Renaissance eBooks (at No. 23), and Fictionwise.com’s Winterfair Gifts by Lois McMaster Bujold (at No. 19)—highlight the fact that more women are reading e-books as well. Okay, we’ll buy the notion the romance is

Hmm, case study sounds so, well, businessy. Let’s say this is more of a case in point. We will use Jennifer Crusie’s Anyone But You as it is a prime example of Pricing Gone Wild. This title was released in paperback in 1996. The retail price, if we’re squinting at the enlarged cover properly was .50, page count was not much. It was a fun read, though. We were happy to learn that Harlequin had rereleased this classic title. We were less happy to learn that it was rereleased as a hardcover with a retail price of, gulp, 16.95 (discounted

Now far be it for us to suggest that a clearly scientific project lead to the wrong conclusions, but, well, we’d like to make a small case for subjectivity. Recently, in the name of Needing Something To Do, The Sunday Times sent opening chapters of V.S. Naipaul’s In a Free State and Stanley Middleton’s Holiday to a group of editors and agents. These timeless classics of great authors (or something like that) were rejected. The exercise by The Sunday Times draws attention to concerns that the industry has become incapable of spotting genuine literary talent. While our first tendency is