This year! Books! This will be the last “This Week in Books” of our godforsaken year 2020, and I wanted to take a minute to reflect on the year that was in the book world. While I was recovering from COVID in early April, I interviewed publishing industry sage Mike Shatzkin on the effects the […]
Stephen King
This Past Few Weeks in Books 3/14/14
Photo by me. I’m on Instagram here. The! Past! Few! Weeks! In! Books! Lots and lots and lots of good stuff. Let’s get started. Should books come out faster? The idea has long taken hold with self-publishing, but it’s percolating elsewhere. Even traditional publishing imprints are experimenting with releasing series as fast as possible. Are […]
The Temptation of Thinking Someone Has Made It
One of the corollaries of the “if only” game is that there are some writers out there who could not possibly have reason to worry about anything as they have achieved a level of success that is unsurpassed, and who represent the pinnacle of the writerly world. Examples include King, Stephen; Rowling, J.K.; Meyer, Stephenie. […]
Writing vs. Storytelling
In the comments section of last week’s post about the one question writers should never ask themselves when reading (retroactive spoiler: the question is “do I like this?”), some people took the post to mean that I was essentially saying that if a book is popular it must be well-written, ergo the most popular books […]
This Week in Publishing 11/20/09
Lots of links this week, so let’s get to it. First up, there has been a huge controversy sparked by Harlquin’s announcement that they would be forming a self-publishing arm called Harlequin Horizons. Victoria Strauss at Writer Beware wrote a very helpful initial roundup of the plan and controversy, Kristin Nelson wondered if it was […]
The fine art of getting blurbs
By: Lauren Baratz-Logsted What are blurbs? Before we get started, let’s clarify our terms, since I’ve occasionally seen confusion on this issue. A blurb is not the back-jacket description of a book; it’s not the inside-flap description of a book. It is a quote from an established author, the purpose of which is to help […]
