Roy Miller's Blog, page 203
April 30, 2017
2017 April PAD Challenge: Day 30
This content was originally published by Robert Lee Brewer on 30 April 2017 | 6:00 am.
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For today’s prompt, take the phrase “The (blank),” replace the blank with a word or phrase, make the new phrase the title of your poem, and then, write your poem. Possible titles could include: “The Poets,” “The Good Guys,” “The Bad Guys,” “The Last Thing She Said,” and so on.
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Revision doesn’t have to be a chore–something that should be done after the excitement of composing the first draft. Rather, it’s an extension of the creation process!
In the 48-minute tutorial video Re-creating Poetry: How to Revise Poems, poets will be inspired with several ways to re-create their poems with the help of seven revision filters that they can turn to again and again.
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Here’s my attempt at a The Blank Poem:
“the end”
there is only one end
& i have yet
to find it
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Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Content Editor of the Writer’s Digest Writing Community and author of Solving the World’s Problems (Press 53). He’s content with continuing on and on without end.
Follow him on Twitter @RobertLeeBrewer.
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About Robert Lee Brewer
Senior Content Editor, Writer's Digest Community.
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April 29, 2017
Marie Kondo Goes Graphic with ‘Life-Changing Manga of Tidying Up’
This content was originally published by on 27 April 2017 | 4:00 am.
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Marie Kondo, the Japanese professional home organizer and author of the worldwide bestseller, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, will release The Life-Changing Manga of Tidying Up this summer. The Japanese-style graphic novel will be published by Ten Speed Press this summer.
Ten Speed executive editor Lisa Westmoreland said the manga will be released June 27 with a 50,000 copy first printing. The book is illustrated by Yuko Uramoto, a renowned manga artist who was awarded the grand prize at the 2011 Shueisha Aoharu Manga Awards.
An imprint of Penguin Random House's Crown Publishing Group, Ten Speed has more than 2.6 million copies of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up in print over 42 printings. The book has turned Kondo--her fans refer to her by her nickname (a registered trademark), KonMari--into an international lifestyle icon.
Westmoreland said offering a manga version of Kondo’s bestseller is “a natural step in Japan. KonMari and her editor [at Japanese publisher Sunmark] love manga and they’re excited.”
The book was originally published in Japan in February. It is being translated into English and published to be read left to right to appeal to American readers unfamiliar with manga. (Most popular English language manga is published in its original form, with the words running right to left, to appeal to American manga fans who demand Japanese authenticity.)
Westmoreland described The Life-Changing Manga of Tidying Up as a fictional case study that shows off the Kondo method of discarding items that do not “spark joy.” She also emphasizes folding garments, rather than hanging them. In the manga, Kondo acts as a personal consultant to Chiaki, a young professional woman whose apartment, and life, is wildly disorganized.
“You can see [how KonMari works] from beginning to end,” Westmoreland said. “Chiaki struggles with her messy apartment and gets KonMari to help her get rid of old stuff.”
Although there are no plans for Kondo to appear at comics shows, Westmoreland said that Ten Speed will have materials to promote the book at the Comic Cons in both San Diego and New York. Ten Speed is planning to promote the title through digital advertising and social media promotions, as well as an animated book trailer. Kondo is also set to appear on the Rachael Ray Show on May 16.
Corrections: in an earlier version of this story the illustrator's name was misspelled, the number of copies in print of The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up was misstated to be numbers sold, and Kondo will not make personal appearances at the comics conventions.
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Health Scare, Trump Jokes Mark 2017 Edgars
This content was originally published by on 27 April 2017 | 4:00 am.
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Marked by a bit of a drama—Mystery Writers of America president Jeffery Deaver passed out during his introductory remarks (but was later found to be fine)—the annual Edgars banquet celebrated Noah Hawley, who won the Best Novel award for 'Before the Fall.'
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Patterson to Pen True Crime Story About Aaron Hernandez
This content was originally published by on 28 April 2017 | 4:00 am.
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Little, Brown will publish a true crime story written by James Patterson and based on the life and recent suicide of former NFL player Aaron Hernandez. The scheduled for early 2018.
Patterson said of Hernandez: "While his life was marred by controversy, he had incredible potential and undisputed talent. ... I hope that this book helps shed some light on the events that led to his all too public and heartbreaking demise.”
The nonfiction work will, according to the publisher, investigate the rise and fall of the former Patriots tight end, who left behind both a murder sentence and a young daughter. The book will chart Hernandez through his childhood, in a crime-heavy neighborhood in Connecticut, through his college career at the University of Florida. It will also explore his performance in the 2012 Super Bowl, his 2015 sentencing to life in prison for first-degree murder, and his suicide, by hanging, in prison.
Reagan Arthur, publisher of Little, Brown, acquired the book from Robert Barnett and Deneen Howell of Williams & Connolly. The publisher noted that, as it is still working out publication details, any potential coauthor, should there be one, is to be announced. A portion of the proceeds from the book will go toward education and pro-reading initiatives.
The book is Patterson's first nonfiction work since 2016's Filthy Rich, which profiled the disgraced hedge-fund billionaire Jeffrey Epstein. Patterson will also release a collection of true crime stories, in partnership with the TV network Investigation Discovery; TV shows built around the stories will air on the network and publish simultaneously in January 2018.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates’s ‘Between the World and Me’ Is Coming to the Apollo
This content was originally published by ANDREW R. CHOW on 26 April 2017 | 7:00 pm.
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“It was hard for me to read the book — because of my personal connection, but even just broader,” Ms. Forbes said. “Prince was a huge tragedy and loss to us all. Now we’re living in a world where we’re fearing. I think about my brothers, my nephews, my husband, and I fear for their lives. So it’s an even bigger discussion.”
Continue reading the main story
Mr. Coates will be involved with the project going forward to give “creative guidance,” Ms. Forbes said, and may appear in the production.
Mr. Moran, meanwhile, has composed music for two recent Ava DuVernay films addressing civil rights, “Selma” and the documentary “13th.”
Casting has yet to be announced, but will be fluid over the show’s short run. (Exact dates have not been specified.) “There’s a mix of everyday folks and celebrity voices,” Ms. Forbes said. “One night is going to be vastly different from the next.”
Continue reading the main story
The Apollo’s coming season, which was announced on Wednesday, will also include “We Shall Not Be Moved,” a genre-crossing opera directed by Bill T. Jones inspired by a 1985 standoff between police and the black liberation group MOVE in Philadelphia, running Oct. 6-7. The Breakin’ Convention, a hip-hop dance festival, will return Oct. 27-29. And of course, Amateur Night will continue every Wednesday. A full schedule can be found at apollotheater.org.
Continue reading the main story
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Sales at Mass Merchandisers Continue to Bounce Back
This content was originally published by on 28 April 2017 | 4:00 am.
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The mass merchandiser channel, which had struggled before the runup to Easter, continued its rebound in late April. At outlets that report to NPD BookScan, unit sales through mass merchandisers were 8% higher in the week ended Apr. 23, 2017, than in the comparable week in 2016. Despite the recent gains, however, sales through the channel were still 7% lower in the period through Apr. 23, 2017, than in the same period in 2016. The gains in the mass merchandiser channel have been accompanied by big increases in sales of board books. Sales of the format jumped 42% higher than the week ended Apr. 24, 2016. Board books continued to place high on both the juvenile fiction and nonfiction bestseller lists, helping unit sales to increase 11% in fiction and 10% in nonfiction. Four board books published by DK landed in the fourth through eighth spots on the juvenile nonfiction bestseller list, selling more than 18,000 copies. In addition to board books, sales of juvenile fiction benefited from continued strong sales of Jay Asher’s Thirteen Reasons Why and the Netflix tie-in edition, 13 Reasons Why, which together sold more than 56,000 copies in the week. A second author had one title do well in two editions: Nicola Yoon’s Everything, Everything sold about 21,000 copies total in its original and movie tie-in editions. Unit sales were 3% higher in the adult nonfiction category than in the comparable week in 2016. Six books landed in the top 10 in their first week on sale. This Is Our Fight by Elizabeth Warren was #3 on the category bestsellers list, selling more than 18,000 copies. In first place was Make Your Bed by William McRaven, which sold almost 26,000 copies in the week. Despite a good showing in its first week on sale (about 41,000 copies), David Baldacci’s The Fix couldn’t prevent unit sales in the adult fiction segment from falling 2% in the week from the comparable week in 2016.
Unit Sales of Print Books by Channel (in thousands)
Apr. 24, 2016
Apr. 23, 2017
Chge Week
Chge YTD
Total
10,406
10,803
4%
2%
Retail & Club
8,957
9,244
3%
4%
Mass Merch./Others
1,449
1,559
8%
-7%
Unit Sales of Print Books by Category (in thousands)
Apr. 24, 2016
Apr. 23, 2017
Chge Week
Chge YTD
Adult Nonfiction
4,499
4,624
3%
2%
Adult Fiction
2,306
2,250
-2%
2%
Juvenile Nonfiction
816
896
10%
1%
Juvenile Fiction
2,472
2,754
11%
9%
Unit Sales of Print Books by Format (in thousands)
Apr. 24, 2016
Apr. 23, 2017
Chge Week
Chge YTD
Hardcover
2,746
2,941
7%
5%
Trade Paperback
5,967
6,063
1%
1%
Mass Market Paperback
1,003
909
-9%
-6%
Board Books
446
635
42%
9%
Audio
67
57
-15%
-5%
A version of this article appeared in the 05/01/2017 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Sales at Mass Merchandisers Continue to Bounce Back
The post Sales at Mass Merchandisers Continue to Bounce Back appeared first on Art of Conversation.
The Indie Publishing Feminist Revolution
This content was originally published by on 28 April 2017 | 4:00 am.
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In sheer number, women—primarily straight white women—are the backbone of the publishing industry. PW’s annual salary survey showed that women represented 74% of the publishing workforce in both 2015 and 2016, a figure in line with the Lee & Low Diversity Baseline Survey of 2015, which found that 78% of those working in publishing are cis women, of whom 88% are heterosexual and 79% are white.
But there is a persistent pay gap between publishing’s men and women: in 2015, men earned an average of $96,000, and women an average of $61,000. One reason for the gap is that men often hold higher positions than women in many of the biggest publishers, particularly in management, where salaries are the highest. That combination of factors—the salary disparity and difficulty climbing the corporate ranks—is one reason a growing number of women have moved on to independent publishing, in many cases starting their own publishing houses.
Brooke Warner, publisher of She Writes Press and SparkPress, says her frustration with mainstream publishing is that “the executive level is usually [mostly] men, and the decisions handed down from the top and certainly financial decisions are largely made by men, while the underlings—the editors and most of the marketing team—are women. The pay gap is also embarrassing.” She considers the industry to have serious gender problems.
Warner got her start in publishing at North Atlantic Books and at Seal Press, where she had a “feminist awakening.” She describes herself as having been “one of those women who didn’t think I needed to be a feminist because we have equality. What a total joke. I was just young and naïve. Through all the books I worked on at Seal, I became a full-blown feminist.” Once Seal was acquired by Perseus, the mandate shifted from being “a very feminist, mission-driven experience to a much more commercial one.” Warner says that, working in a women’s press, “you can’t deny [gender discrimination] anymore. You see it everywhere you go. Seal Press has since been acquired by Hachette, and they laid off the female publisher and rolled it into an imprint with a male publisher. I just think that’s emblematic of what happens in traditional publishing. It’s all about the bottom line. We want to make money too, but not at the sacrifice of some of the core principles on which we were founded.” Warner left to start She Writes Press with Kamy Wicoff, founder of shewrites.com, an online community salon space for women writers. In 2014, She Writes was acquired by SparkPoint, whose CEO is Crystal Patriarche. Both She Writes and SparkPoint’s SparkPress imprint use an author-subsidized model that allows Warner to keep to a content-driven mission.
Dominique Raccah—founder of Sourcebooks, one of the largest woman-owned independent publishers in North America, and 2016’s PW Person of the Year—points out that gender disparity spans the entire book industry, noting that, among booksellers as well as publishers, the workforce is “largely female, but ownership is not always female. You’ve got that problem in publishing where the management will become less and less female the higher up the hierarchy you go. And I said that out loud—that probably won’t make me popular,” Raccah says. On being PW Person of the Year, Raccah says that she was “surprised that they would think of me, and that is partly because I still think that for women it takes us a long time to get an idea of who we are.”
Graywolf publisher Fiona McCrae remembers that, when she worked in editorial at Faber and Faber, there was one female director at that time, in charge of thrillers and cookbooks even though she “was very smart and literary.” When McCrae joined Graywolf in 1994, the staff was four employees putting out around eight books a year, and now the publisher has 13 staff members and publishes 33 titles a year. Was it hard for McCrae to work her way up? “In retrospect there were elements of a glass ceiling. It was so glassy I didn’t necessarily see it at the time. I think it’s gotten better and better over time. I remember in the early 1990s my friend left publishing altogether, because she didn’t think she could get a job that didn’t involve being bullied by an egotistical male. I do think things have changed, and I do think publishing has been good to me.” She believes that, in terms of gender representation, “publishing is better than other professions. Women on an individual basis are treated very well, and I think there are a lot of women running literary agencies. I don’t know enough about statistics, but there are many very powerful women in publishing. That’s been the case for a while now. You hear them being talked about in revered tones—not dismissed or reviled.”
Striking Out on Their Own, Together
Some women PW spoke with said they felt they had to start their own businesses because they didn’t see an opportunity to rise up the ranks in the companies where they worked, both inside and outside of publishing. Rhonda Hughes, founder of Print Vision and Hawthorne Books, remembers when she was 27, working as a sales rep for an overseas print broker, whose owner she approached about being a partner. He told her he’d consider it; yet soon after, he brought in a young man and made him partner. “I realized then that it was just not going to happen. So I went to Oahu, sat on the beach, and came up with this business called Print Vision, which I still own. I left because I realized I wouldn’t get what I wanted unless I left and did it myself. The same thing with publishing: I realized I could move to New York and be an assistant editor and get paid nothing and be really poor, which I didn’t want to do, or I could do this on my own.”
C. Spike Trotman, founder of Chicago’s Iron Circus Comics, notes that running her own business as a woman relieves her from having to trust the big publishers to make changes. “I don’t trust the intentions and motivations of a lot of large publishers. I think a lot of people at the top especially are extremely resistant to change. They have to be dragged kicking and screaming to expand the scope of their publishing even slightly.”
Amy King, a founding member of VIDA—a nonprofit feminist organization that has worked to create transparency around the lack of gender parity, the marginalization of people of color, writers with disabilities, and queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming people—points out that change is almost always small-scale and often among nonprofits. “The problem with the big publishers is that they are just so beholden to the profit margin. There’s not a lot of incentive, and not one figurehead saying, ‘Hey, we need to change the face of publishing.’ They’re all about making money. The problem is you don’t see an immediate turnaround on your investment because you’re investing in people.”
Trotman says of starting her own business, “Every time I hear a news story about how so-and-so did something terrible at a party or a conference, I know I’ve made the right decision by starting my own publishing company,” because those are the types of people she would have had to deal with on a daily basis if she had not moved on. “Quite frankly, speaking for myself, I do just fine by myself out here.”
Many women in publishing who came from other male-dominated industries think those experiences helped them when starting their own presses. Publisher Georgia McBride of Month9Books got into publishing by accident when she decided to put together an anthology with authors she knew through her popular tweetchat under the hashtag #YALitChat. Previously, she had worked in “very male-dominated industries: the music industry, the internet business, technology, product development, and software development. There weren’t really a whole lot of female influences at the time. It was also very difficult for me personally because you’re constantly being challenged and questioned and constantly having to be more and do more. You’re not expected to succeed and not expected to do well.”
Laura Stanfill, publisher of Forest Avenue Press in Portland, Ore., recalls getting “so much flack” when she ran the local newspaper. “I was the gatekeeper, and yet I learned to expect dubious gazes when I walked into Chamber of Commerce meetings, because they didn’t think I was qualified,” Stanfill says. Spending years in a male-dominated career, she adds, “played into my fearlessness when I was starting a press as a woman. So the transition [to publishing] wasn’t so shocking.”
In starting new businesses, many women reached out to other women for support. When McBride founded Month9Books, she contacted women she had known from the business side of publishing to be mentors to her. Without their support, she says, she doesn’t think she would have been able to achieve the things she has “in the time frame that I have.” Stanfill cites Hawthorne Books publisher Hughes as a role model. “While I met with a lot of male publishers too, Rhonda’s persistence in encouraging me to follow my heart and taste really shaped the early years of the press and who I became as a publisher.” Stanfill also joined Women in Portland Publishing (WIPP), and she says that attending monthly socials with other women in publishing helped her find her voice as a publisher.
Raccah emphasizes that collaboration is an important factor in success. “I do believe we’re at a moment when there’s an opportunity for lots of different peoples to work together.” She cites her work with Little Pickle Press as an example; Sourcebooks recently acquired the publishing rights to Little Pickle’s titles. “I think that successful female entrepreneurs working together is going to be more and more of a trend as we go forward. We have to help each other to succeed.”
Rana D’Orio, CEO of March 4th and founder of Little Pickle Press, says the relationship with Sourcebooks is “very synergistic” and cites Raccah as one of her biggest inspirations. “She just breaks the rules, she doesn’t take no for an answer, she asks why and what if.” D’Orio—who came up in investment banking, where “there were no women at the top echelons, and it was so competitive that there wasn’t a supportive nexus”— welcomes “women helping one another. Unlike other industries, in publishing, women leaders support women leaders.”
But, says Raccah—a member of the Committee of 200, a group of the largest women-owned and women-run businesses in the country—large women-built businesses are still thin on the ground though there are many women-led startups. At Women 2.0, a network for female founders of technology ventures, Raccah notices that “they still have the same problems we had 20 years ago. Women are still having problems getting funding and growing bigger companies.”
Women Authors
Raccah points out that gender disparities in publishing also affect authors: “Women authors do not get reviewed at the same level as guys; it’s just a fact. There’s been a lot of data about it. Women are not winning prizes at the same level as men are. We even have data that says a book is more likely to be reviewed and garner good reviews with a man’s name on it. You’ve got great authors who get rid of their women’s names. They become J.K. Rowling. Women-oriented genres are less valuable and less valued than male-oriented genres.” It is, she says, “mission-critical that we continue to work hard at helping all people tell their stories. I particularly love helping women tell their stories, helping tell the stories we don’t know, and helping girls to identify bigger visions for their lives.”
Amy King of VIDA says that, in schools, “syllabi are stacked to promote male voices. We are conditioned to prioritizing those voices.” King recalls an adage: “Boys grow up reading books by boys, and girls grow up reading books by everybody.” She pointed out that, while a certain book written by a man might be classified as nonfiction, the same book, written by a woman, will end up in lifestyle or memoir. A good example would be journalist Suki Kim’s 2014 book, Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea’s Elite; Kim wrote about the experience of having her book packaged as memoir despite her intention for it to be serious nonfiction.
Emily Gould, who co-runs the Emily Books imprint at Coffee House Press with Ruth Curry, adds that there is an “outsized reverence” that is reserved mostly for male authors “and a scant handful of women who are mostly really old. You have to be so old to finally deserve to be taken as seriously as mid-career male novelists are. You basically have to be Ursula K. Le Guin or dead—those are your only options. That’s what we are trying to chip away at.”
Rosalie Morales Kearns founded Shade Mountain Press in 2013 partly because she noticed a gender disparity in the journals and presses to which she submitted her own work. “For decades I would just look at the contents pages of the very important literary journals, and sometimes they were 100% male. I would think to myself, am I the only one that feels really burned by this?” After VIDA published its first count in 2010, Kearns says she noticed that “editors started being more self-conscious about their lists being so male-heavy.”
Trotman of Iron Circus has seen a shift in the comics industry, where the accomplishments of women have been “underappreciated” and, until recently, women as a market were simply ignored. Trotman says that, while the mainstream comics industry has taken steps to look for more women writers and creators, “the gender disparity is still ridiculous, and the focus of mainstream comics hasn’t changed from superheroes.” Comics, she says, are still associated with stereotypical “teenage-boy interests” and “definitely not written with a potential female audience in mind.” According to Trotman, it’s in the indie and underground scenes where women readers and creators are finding a home.
Stanfill of Forest Avenue is also looking to empower women by providing them opportunities. “So far I’ve only given anthology collections to other women because I feel like those opportunities are hard to find,” Stanfill explains. While Stanfill does accept manuscripts from male writers, they must have feminist sensibilities. If they don’t, she will send detailed response letters. “If men are putting things into the world that I don’t want to forward, I will say that we are a women-run press, I’m not interested, and here’s why. I don’t know if that changes their perspectives on submitting to a women-run press, but it’s an opportunity I have to use my voice and say, ‘This is not okay with me.’ ”
Diversity Issues
Publishing is not only fairly male in its leadership, but also blindingly white overall. Gigi Ishmael, president and publisher of family-owned and -operated Ishmael Tree, says that, while both her mother and grandmother were businesswomen, serving as role models to her, she still had “a lot of issues breaking in. There were times that people just didn’t want to talk to me. Not only am I a woman, I’m a brown woman too. I get looked at kind of strangely.” Because she’s Muslim, she adds, there’s additional discrimination in getting into certain stores and libraries. “They will automatically think that we’re terrorists or that our entire catalogue is about national security. [People] jump to that even at the book fairs.”
Issues of diversity extend, of course, beyond gender and race to sexual orientation, class, able-bodiedness, and gender conformity, among other things. “Publishing has a bigger diversity problems than [just] gender,” says Warner. “If publishing is so white, then acquisitions editors are buying things that are basically cultivating their own interests.”
Stanfill of Forest Avenue realized that, by limiting her press to Oregon writers, she was “perpetuating the lack of diversity in my slush pile.” The latest census data shows that Oregon is nearly 80% white. “Now,” she says, “I wish I had been more activated five years ago to figure out who to reach out to.” She opened her press to national submissions, which immediately increased their diversity.
Rhonda Hughes is also focusing on finding writers of color, citing Roxane Gay’s speech at the ABA’s 2017 Winter Institute as having “really jolted” her. “I realized that I have not done enough to find writers of color. It’s easy for me to say I’d love to find them, but I haven’t done enough outreach.” After author Lidia Yuknavitch recently gave a $10,000 award to a writer of color in Oregon, Hughes obtained the list of finalists and sent each one a congratulatory email with an open invitation to submit work.
For Kearns of Shade Mountain, her mission has always been to exclusively publish work by women, especially those from marginalized or underrepresented groups. “I’m half Puerto Rican, half white,” she says, “so I think that has certainly made me more sensitive and aware of how women from racialized ethnic groups and nationalities are marginalized.” She cites the press’s 2015 novel White Light by Vanessa Garcia as an example: Kearns says Garcia had been turned down by publishers and agents for four years despite having a blurb from Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka. According to Kearns, Garcia was being told that, because the narrator was a Miami-born Cuban-American, readers wouldn’t relate to her. “The question of who can relate is being made by a mostly white publishing industry, so they are missing out on these books by women of color.”
Trotman of Iron Circus says she sees “an astonishing amount of ignorance” in comics publishing. “I don’t even think it’s necessarily malicious, but there’s this expectation that women and nonbinary people and brown people and queer people identify with characters and stories that are written by white cis straight men,” adding that it’s been that way for decades. “If it’s a story about a brown woman it’s for brown women, but if it’s a story about a white man it’s for everyone, and that’s the dynamic they’ve internalized and how they’ve approached pretty much anything they might be brought as editors.” Trotman, who identifies as a straight black woman, is a “firm believer in intersectionality. I think a rising tide lifts all boats. I think we all do better when we all do better.”
Climbing the Ladder
Raccah offers a strategy for how women can move up the publishing ranks: diversify their skill sets. “When you’re looking at where the management comes from in publishing firms, it rarely comes out of editorial,” she points out. She says it’s important to ask questions about where women are in publishing. “Are they running business? Are they running finance? Are they running accounting ops? Are they running tech? Are they running sales? We’ve got to diversity our own skill sets. I come out of tech and marketing. That’s turned out to be a really big advantage. That’s one of the things I really learned as I was building Sourcebooks.”
Gould of Emily Books feels that change begins with “more women in actual decision-making roles. Unfortunately for me, most of my skills are in editorial. Editors don’t have a ton of power. The way you ascend in publishing is to develop skills on the business side.” With the exception of people like Reagan Arthur at Little, Brown, she says, “to be in a position of real power you’re going to eventually move away from editing.”
D’Orio says, “What I’ve noticed is that a lot of the disruptive change in the publishing industry is originated by women. What women have done is step outside of the legacy rubric and innovate by doing their own thing.” D’Orio cites She Writes Press as one example of this kind of innovation: “Brooke Warner is in the vanguard of hybrid publishing. Before She Writes Press, that kind of publishing didn’t exist, so these are innovative solutions to an industry where inertia was the most powerful force.”
King of VIDA sees a number of positive changes overall with respect to diversity, one being that even if editors still don’t care about gender and racial diversity, “they aren’t saying it out loud anymore.” She adds that the outpouring of support for VIDA, “despite the climate we’re in right now, is very encouraging.”
Raccah says she is “slightly more optimistic today than I was 10 years ago, because I believe we have experienced in our lifetime, particularly in the last decade, an expansion in readership.” She cites more types of people demanding a wider range of titles, adding that the “interface between readers and publishers is a more permeable membrane. There’s more stuff going between those two groups, and because of that I believe you’re going to start seeing a broader range of people entering the field. This story isn’t sad—I think it’s really important that we acknowledge that. There are parts of the story that are unfinished and challenging. But we’re going someplace, and journeys are always fraught.”
A version of this article appeared in the 05/01/2017 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Head of the House
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Alone at Emily Dickinson’s Desk
This content was originally published by on 29 April 2017 | 9:00 am.
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What happens when a reporter for The New York Times spends one hour in Emily Dickinson’s former bedroom? Hear about Sarah Lyall’s experience and explore the room yourself in this 360 video.
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This Week's Bestsellers: May 1, 2017
This content was originally published by on 28 April 2017 | 4:00 am.
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Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s latest debuts at #5 in the country overall, her best first-week showing to date. Plus retired Navy admiral William H. McRaven’s commencement speech is the #3 book in the country, and YouTuber Connor Franta returns to our lists with the #10 book in the U.S.
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2017 April PAD Challenge: Day 29
This content was originally published by Robert Lee Brewer on 29 April 2017 | 6:00 am.
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For today’s prompt, write a metric poem. Most of the world uses the metric system to measure things out; not so much in the States. But there are meters and liters, and the occasional millimeters. Also, poetry uses metrics (the study of meter in poetry). And metrics, in a general sense, can measure various things by a common denominator–even inches and/or teaspoons.
*****
Revision doesn’t have to be a chore–something that should be done after the excitement of composing the first draft. Rather, it’s an extension of the creation process!
In the 48-minute tutorial video Re-creating Poetry: How to Revise Poems, poets will be inspired with several ways to re-create their poems with the help of seven revision filters that they can turn to again and again.
*****
Here’s my attempt at a Metric Poem:
“when”
when i run
i run eight
hundred meters
when i drink
i drink one
& two liters
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Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Content Editor of the Writer’s Digest Writing Community and author of Solving the World’s Problems (Press 53). Ironically, he strained his hamstring earlier this month and is currently not running, and he’s also sworn off soda, which is what he used to guzzle (as one and two liters).
Follow him on Twitter @RobertLeeBrewer.
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Poetry Challenge 2017, Robert Lee Brewer's Poetic Asides Blog, What's New
About Robert Lee Brewer
Senior Content Editor, Writer's Digest Community.
The post 2017 April PAD Challenge: Day 29 appeared first on Art of Conversation.
