Exploring Books, Life, and Writing
“We used to do that with a slide rule.”
Blank stare. “What’s a slide rule?”
“It’s a device they used before calculators to do division, multiplication, square roots, squares and trig functions.”
Blank stare.
Continue reading “Slide Rules and Blank Stares”
Massive box office smash. Best selling books. What’s the appeal of The Hunger Games? My take is that boys love the action. The girls love it as a romance. The guys love it as a video game/reality show mashup with not-so-virtual violence. The girls love the idea of being torn between and pursed by two courageous, honorable hunks, especially as that is played out more in the second and third books.
Continue reading “Hungry for The Hunger Games?”
Postmodernism tells us there is no purely objective observer. We all have a bias when we come to a subject, no matter how well trained we might be in science or law or history. This would seem to be a rather difficult problem to overcome. How do we say something is true when it will inevitably be colored by our own perspectives?
Continue reading “Not a Straight Story Line”
Kitty Genovese was murdered in Kew Gardens in Queens, New York, forty-eight years ago today. It rocked the nation. The New York Times article about the incident famously began, “For more than half an hour 38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens.”
Continue reading “Murder, Apathy and Urban Legends”
Would you join me in a thought experiment? What if you had to answer the following questions?
Continue reading “What If You Wanted to Publish?”
I call them preacher stories–those tales that pass from church to church, book to book, blog to blog. Sometimes corny, sometimes profound, they can inspire, accuse, challenge, amuse, surprise or inform.
I recently came across the same story three times, and it made me wonder.
Continue reading “Pastor Beware (and Writer Too)”
It was over a dozen years ago that I spoke with Jeff Bezos at a conference in Washington, D.C. In the early years of Amazon, the company was losing money hand over fist (losing $125 million in 1998 alone) in its all-out effort to gain market share. I told him I understood the strategy, but realistically, how long could they keep it up? With his famous Jeff Bezos smile he told me, “I appreciate your concern. But there’s no need to worry about Amazon.”
Continue reading “My Conversation with Jeff Bezos”
Book publishers are desperate for new business models. While standing in line at the airport recently, I thought maybe we could look to the airline industry for inspiration. If we did, here are some things you might see from publishers:
Continue reading “What Publishers Can Learn from the Airlines”
With all the options and advantages for self-publishing print and ebooks, authors are weighing their options these days, wondering what traditional publishers really have to offer. One consideration is selling rights.
Do I, as the editorial director for a traditional print publisher, encourage and support self-publishing–even self-ebook publishing? Yes. I do. Here’s why.
Continue reading “Self Publish? You Bet.”