Month: March 2013

The Silver Lining on Doom and Gloom

Here’s a doom-and-gloom article about the publishing industry with a twist: it might not all be doom and gloom.

Despite the continual stream of stories about authors making $10,000 a month or more on self-published ebooks and in the process crushing traditional publishing out of existence, Evan Hughes in Wired magazine (April 2013) says there’s another side of the story.
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Good Prose 4: Being Edited

Once I was harassing (in a good-natured way, of course) an editor I knew well from another publisher about a book she had put out. It was a biography that was overwritten and frequently lapsed into a sentimentalized caricature of the main subject. How could she have let that go through? “Oh,” she said, smiling. “You should have seen it before we edited it!” I knew exactly what she was talking about.

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Good Prose 3: The Business of Writing

Writers and publishers have always had a love-hate relationship. Mark Twain once offered “the perfect recipe for a modern American publisher” as follows: “Take an idiot from a lunatic asylum and marry him to an idiot woman and the fourth generation of this connection should be a good publisher.”*
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