While John Thompson’s Merchants of Culture focuses on big trade publishing in the United States and United Kingdom, it provides helpful insight into a wider range of publishing endeavors. (See my first blog in the series here.) He begins with how publishers get things done. And all publishers, regardless of size or category, accomplish their work with five key resources:
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Merchants of Culture 1: Merchant of Candor
When reading John Thompson’s Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century, those of us who have been in publishing thirty-five or twenty-five or even fifteen years will feel like we are reading our own biography. This is history we’ve lived through and a present reality we know all too well.
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Opinionated Me
I don’t often look at stats for my blog, but the last report I got had some dramatic results. While there is a pretty steady readership for Andy Unedited, two posts (here and here) had massive readership spikes. Why? Well, not surprisingly I suppose, they were picked up by a couple very popular bloggers who pointed their readers this way. But I think there is another reason as well.
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Negative Is Positive
Sometimes the positively best way to promote a book is by being negative. Why?
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Is Personality Destiny?
Many writers and editors identify themselves as introverts. Consequently they often become intimidated, in some cases petrified, by the “social” requirements of writing and editing. They think they have limited resources available to them to compete in the often extroverted world of publishing. They absolve themselves from the responsibilities of championing their projects or interacting with readers. They think (or act like) personality is destiny.
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Stupid Things You Learned About the Reformation
As we approach the five hundredth anniversary of the Reformation, we will hear more and more about the movement that has so shaped the Western world since Luther pounded his Ninety-Five Theses to the Wittenberg church door in 1517. And so we should. But we should do so from a solid foundation.
James Payton gives us just that in his excellent Getting the Reformation Wrong, which got my Setting-the-Record-Straight Award for 2011. The book corrects some stupid things people believe (he is much more diplomatic than I am, calling them “common misunderstandings”) about the Reformation. Here’s just a few:
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Giving Advice to Writers
It’s always a delicate matter—this business of editors giving advice to writers. These things must be handled with great diplomacy so as not to ruffle the authorial ego. I give you an example to emulate.
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Please Don’t Use Google!
Do you know how important artichokes are? A Google search generated over 9.8 million hits! Astonishing. But that is nothing compared to crochet, which gives over 20.3 million results. So if you are going to crochet an artichoke, well, you are clearly in the forefront of a massive cultural phenomenon!
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Students Hate/Love Print
Everyone thinks they know where digital publishing is going. Everyone, that is, except for all of us. Take Exhibit A and Exhibit B, brought to my attention by fellow blogger Dan Reid.
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Giving Them Takeaway
How do you keep a reader reading? Inquiring writers and editors of nonfiction want to know. There are many ways to do so. No one single formula should always be employed, but one that many writers and editors use effectively is to provide takeaway.
What’s takeaway?
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