Category: publishing

“Suddenly our important writers seem less like color commentators, sifting through the emotional, sexual and intellectual detritus of how we live today, and more like a mountaintop Moses, handing down the granite tablets every decade or so to a bemused and stooped populace.”

“The decline has led some commentators to embrace demographic determinism — the idea that the verbal scores of disadvantaged students will not significantly rise until we overcome poverty. But that explanation does not account for the huge drop in verbal scores across socioeconomic groups in the 1970s.”

“With books today, I’m not always sure if they’re truthful or faithful to what’s going on with children. … There’s a certain passivity, a going back to childhood innocence that I never quite believed in. We remembered childhood as a very passionate, upsetting, silly, comic business.”

“As Borders closed forever this weekend, one patron snapped a photograph of a bitter bookseller’s manifesto an unidentified store: ‘Things We Never Told You: Ode to a Bookstore Death’.”

Neil Gaiman: “Short stories are the best place for young writers to learn their craft: to try out different voices and techniques, to experiment, to learn. And they’re a wonderful place for old writers, when you have an idea that wouldn’t make it to novel length, one simple, elegant thing that needs to be said. People like reading short stories. And they like ­listening to short stories.”

“I thought that if I were going into old age I would want to do what Verdi did, which is to write extraordinary things, and to really find myself. I’ll be eighty-three shortly, and I want to be renewed. We all want to be renewed, don’t we?”

Barnes & Noble CEO Leonard Riggio has funded an eight-city book tour for a relatively unknown author. “The arrangement is unusual. Publishers usually pay the bills for authors to travel, not the heads of major bookstore chains (the few that are left standing, anyway).”

“To promote its new star title, Doubleday launched a Defcon-1 publicity blitzkrieg. It printed a surfeit of galleys and put them into the grasping hands of underpaid booksellers, and sprayed copies all over the Internet. … It hired six actors, dressed them in tails, top hats, and long red scarves — in Morgenstern’s novel, die-hard circus fans wear red scarves to signal their devotion — and had them pass out beribboned bags of promotional caramel corn.”

“Don’t get me wrong; chick-lit is a worthy sub-genre and there is absolutely a place for it on the shelves. Some publishers, mine included, are very successful at marketing this genre to women. The problem comes when non-chick lit content is shoe-horned into a frilly ‘chick-lit’ package.”

“Suddenly our important writers seem less like color commentators, sifting through the emotional, sexual and intellectual detritus of how we live today, and more like a mountaintop Moses, handing down the granite tablets every decade or so to a bemused and stooped populace.”