This week! Books! Hundreds of Simon & Schuster employees and over 3,500 other supporters signed a letter calling upon S&S CEO Jonathan Karp to stop publishing books by former members of the Trump Administration, including Vice President Mike Pence, who recently received a reported multi-million book deal for his memoir. The letter cited Pence’s advocacy […]
Lincoln Michel
98% of books released in 2020 sold less than 5,000 copies (This week in books)
This week! Books! A factoid this week about the publishing industry certainly got some eyeballs popping. In an article about how the publishing industry is weathering the pandemic, Alexandra Atler and Elizabeth A. Harris noted that 98% of the books newly published in 2020 sold fewer than 5,000 copies. Sales have inexorably drifted to the […]
What’s after the plague? (This week in books)
This week! Books! As we Americans ramp up our vaccinations and the end of the pandemic feels like it could possibly be around the corner, it’s very tempting to wonder what’s next. I really enjoyed this fascinating essay by Jill Lepore about what the end of plague novels say about what could lie ahead. Teens […]
Support our Asian communities (This week in books)
This week! Books! It’s been a seriously dark time in this country with a horrific mass shooting at massage parlors in Atlanta and an uptick in hate crimes against Asian-Americans. Author Alexander Chee talked to poet and critic Cathy Park Hong about how anti-Asian violence must be a bigger part of the anti-racism discourse, and […]
Horton hears a huh? (This week in books)
This week! Books! Your weekly culture war freakout is brought to you by Dr. Seuss. After the Seuss Estate announced that they would let six of his titles with racist caricatures go out of print, quite a few people seemingly lost their freaking minds and opted to stick it to the Seuss Estate by… uh… […]
Watch out for these publishing scams (This week in books)
This week! Books! Well. It was a week. How are we doing out there? Publishing scams are pretty much as old as publishing, and they’re proliferating in our digital and gullible age. Anne. R. Allen has a good roundup of publishing scams to watch out for in 2021, including new ones (manuscript phishing!) and old […]
