Publishers have been taking some rather unpopular stands lately. The agency model for e-books raised the price for many e-books, they have removed e-books from libraries, and they spend millions of dollars on the latest celebrity memoir even as great midlist authors go unsupported or get dropped entirely. Accordingly, I see a whole lot of […]
Archives for February 2012
DRM Isn’t the Answer, But It’s Not Not the Answer Either
In a recent column in Publishers Weekly, Joe Wikert made the case for a unified e-book market and suggests that publishers consider getting rid of DRM, those digital pesky restrictions that, among other things, prevent you from easily taking your Kindle book collection over to a Nook. He also references Steve Jobs’ famous letter to […]
This Week in Books 2/25/12
Books! This week! Lots of heads were shaking about a story in the New York Times this week: Veteran author gets rejected by 13 publishers, then she adopts a pen name and the book sells in three days. Now, it’s easy to chalk this one up to the fickleness/stupidity of publishers, as lots of people […]
Writers aren’t painters they’re magicians
When someone writes well people often say it’s like they painted a picture. And of course, there’s that old phrase a picture is worth a thousand words. But painting with words really isn’t what a writer does. A painting can be many things. It can be pretty or thought-provoking or disturbing or haunting or anything […]
Can You Write With Noise?
I’m not the only writer who has found that a low level of noise can be very conducive for productivity. A few months back in The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf had an entire roundup devoted to exploring why so many people find themselves more productive in coffee shops. His reasons jive with mine, including there being […]
This Week in Books 2/17/12
This week! In the books! Amanda Knox got a $4 million book deal. Let’s move on. No, on second thought, let’s not move on. $4 million?!?! To put that in perspective, that is somewhere in between what Dick Cheney got for his memoir and what George W. Bush got for his. While selling foreign and […]
