Exploring Books, Life, and Writing
I’d better write this blog very carefully, omitting all needless words.
Today we celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the release of The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White, affectionally shorthanded by its disciples as Strunk & White. In an age of chronic blogging, constant Facebook updating and compulsive Twittering, we need fewer words more than ever. No doubt Strunk and White have saved us from millions.
Continue reading “Strunk and White at 50”
Back in the day I was a competitive, wide-ranging, young trivia nerd. (Now I’m a competitive, wide-ranging, old trivia nerd.) So I became a contestant on a local TV quiz show for area high school teams based on the then popular TV show College Bowl. Creatively enough, our competition was called High School Bowl.
Continue reading “Leading by Listening”
He was livid.
I hadn’t been on the phone for thirty seconds before the president of the firm we had been working with was giving me a generous piece of his mind. I had been unresponsive and unprofessional, he said . . . and more. Much more.
I was trying to get a word in, but he didn’t let up. He kept going at me for at least another five minutes without adding any new information. This actually worked to my advantage. It gave me time to think.
Continue reading “Forced Empathy”
By now we all know that 2009 is the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of both Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin (both born on February 12). Book publishers have taken full advantage of this by issuing dozens of new books on these gentlemen. But no book is being published about a man whose two hundredth birthday we will celebrate on May 1, who has also had a profound effect on society. His name is Benjamin T. Babbitt. What did he do?
Continue reading “The Legacy of Benjamin Babbitt”
I’ve heard it said with the visionary breathlessness of a true believer: “Information wants to be free.”
My response? “Labor wants to be free.” If free information is a good idea, free labor is even better. So maybe you’d like to work for nothing?
Continue reading “Labor Wants to Be Free”
“Publishing by its very nature changes your value system.”
I was struck when my publishing friend Roy Carlisle suggested this might be the case. It set me thinking. Instinctively I felt he must be right. At the same time, I felt like such a proverbial fish immersed in the waters of publishing culture that I hadn’t the faintest notion what those changes might be.
Continue reading “How Publishing Shapes Us”
Of all the shticks on NBC’s The Office, one of my favorites is the rivalry between Dwight and Jim. The pranks Jim plays on Dwight are priceless–and perhaps a bit too reminiscent of actual jokes played by some of my colleagues on other colleagues (never by me, of course).
Linda Doll and I included one of my favorite stories in our anecdotal history of InterVarsity Press, Heart. Soul. Mind. Strength. It highlights the friendly rivalry between the staff of Campus Life magazine (some thirty-plus years ago when it was run by Youth for Christ) and the staff of InterVarsity’s HIS magazine.
Continue reading “Abercrombie & Fitch, Attorneys at Law”
Do you have a favorite book title? One that is memorable and interesting, all the while telling you just what the book is about?
Here’s another perspective on what makes an ideal nonfiction book title. Previously I wrote that the ideal title employed two elements: content and creativity. You can also think of them as the familiar and the unfamiliar.
Continue reading “The Familiar and the Unfamiliar”
What’s the ideal nonfiction book title? In my mind it has two elements.
Continue reading “The Ideal Book Title”
If one of the most difficult tasks in publishing is coming up with a good concept for a book, surely a close second is coming up with a good nonfiction book title. It’s so hard that even when you are trying to do a good job you often end up making a baboon out of yourself. I’ll be saying more about titling in upcoming posts. For now, here are two opposite and equally bad directions to go in titling a book.
Continue reading “Bad Title Strategies”