I’ve attended the Writers’ Institute, a three-day annual conference run by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Division of Continuing Studies, on several occasions, and found the information really useful. The speakers are informative, and the writers I took classes with were also sources of both information and inspiration. In the first part of this interview, conference [...]
The New York Times reports on the growing strength in self-publishing compared to the difficulties in the traditional publishing industry.
The NYT also reports on the demise of Washington Post’s Book World, leaving only two stand-alone weekly book review sections, published by NYT and the San Francisco Chronicle. Frances Dinkelspiel, blogging at Ghost Word, has some [...]
I’ve attended the Writers’ Institute, a three-day annual conference run by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Division of Continuing Studies, on several occasions, and found the information really useful. The speakers are informative, and the writers I took classes with were also sources of both information and inspiration. In the first part of our interview, conference [...]
Well, I did it! I asked, and Writers’ Institute Director Christine DeSmet granted me an interview, which I will share with you starting Thursday. Look for a two-part interview outlining what’s new at Writer’s Institute this year, as well as what workshops will be most helpful to beginners, intermediate and advanced writers. This is a [...]
According to my Baptist Sunday-school teachers, a child is denied entrance to heaven merely for being born in the Congo rather than, say, north Georgia, where she could attend church regularly. This was the sticking point in my own little lame march to salvation: admission to heaven is gained by the luck of the draw. [...]
One of the useful articles on Publishers Lunch recently included a link to a really thought-provoking article on the future of publishing by Lev Grossman in the online edition of Time magazine. Grossman predicts that self-publishing will become the respectable route to “real” publication, and that what we currently consider real publication (by a publishing [...]
Anyone interested in understanding publishing can learn a lot, for free, by subscribing to the daily e-mail Publishers Lunch. And if you’re at all interested in being published, you should be interested in understanding publishing, according to Marcela Landres, a former editor at Simon & Schuster who now coaches writers through her website, workshops and [...]
I first saw this tongue-in-cheek explanation of the publishing process, produced by the digital marketing group at Macmillan, on a fabulous writing blog I just discovered, Ghost Word by Frances Dinkelspiel, author of Towers of Gold: How One Jewish Immigrant Named Isaias Hellman Created California (St. Martin’s Press, 2008).
Dinkelspiel is a journalist with publishing credentials [...]
Bookselling was and is for me a cultural and political expression, an expression of progressive change, of challenge to oppressive authority, of a search for a community of values which can act as an underpinning of a better world. The true profit in bookselling is the social profit; the bottom line, the measure of the [...]
When you’ve been involved in something like this, no matter how long ago it happened, no matter how long it’s been absent from the news, you’re fated, nonetheless, to always search it out. To be on alert for it, somehow, every day of your life. For the small item at the back of the newspaper. [...]