Is celebrity more important than fighting racism?
Sometimes pop culture just breaks your heart. I like to believe that I’m not an old fogey who spends all his time on the porch bitching about kids today. I’m also not an art snob who rants about the dirty influence of commerce. I get it. It’s hard to sell books and anything that gives…
continue readingWould You Sell a Letter?
The news of a completed auction for a 1990 Harper Lee letter about Donald Trump made me contemplate the whole notion of selling correspondence. Maybe after decades have passed, maybe after I die and heirs and Sackville-Baggins type looters pick through the Slushpile library, then possibly some pieces of correspondence might hit the market. But…
continue readingBiggs Says DRM Sucks
Well, I’m probably exaggerating a bit with that “sucks” choice of words. But suffice it to say, Slushpile’s John Biggs isn’t a fan of digital rights management (DRM) technology used by publishers. He doesn’t employ DRM with his own book Mytro and suggests that the paradigm shift so that indie writers “think in terms of…
continue readingThe Rants of Gordon Lish
Under normal circumstances, I would be ecstatic that the great Barry Hannah gets a mention — any mention — in Newsweek magazine. But this article of Gordon Lish in decline just rubs me the wrong way. I know a number of people who took Lish’s workshop and a couple who were edited by him. So…
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Conservative Book Publishing on the Wane, So Cruz Gets $1.5M
Little more than two weeks after a widely circulated article on the fading of a genre, “Killing Conservative Books: The Shocking End of a Publishing Gold Rush that discussed “the gutting of the conservative book market” and that too many books and too many publishers “made the economics of their genre much tougher, with an…
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