Midge Raymond's Blog, page 56

How the Apple tablet will affect publishing

Today is the big day: Apple will unveil its new tablet, which will be interesting not only for those who love Apple toys but for everyone involved in publishing as well. As this NY Times article observes, "Apple may be giving the media industry a kind of time machine — a chance to undo mistakes of the past."

That is, whereas print media has been suffering as more and more readers resist paying for content, the Apple tablet will introduce new ways to market — and charge for — digital content...

Author, Inc.

I found this NYT article about James Patterson fascinating: the story of this author's spectacularly successful career, from the struggle to get published in the 1970s, when he sold 10,000 copies of his first book, to today (last year he sold 14 million, outselling Stephen King, John Grisham, and Dan Brown). It also shows how, depressingly, the publishing industry has changed: "Thirty years ago, the industry defined a 'hit' novel as a book that sold a couple of hundred thousand copies in...

Goodbye to the slush pile

Even when I worked in publishing back in nineties, the slush pile (i.e., that pile of unsolicited manuscripts sent in directly by authors and put aside while agented manuscripts were given priority) was rapidly becoming a thing of the past. (And yes, it literally is a "slush pile": towering stacks of manuscripts all leaning and falling into one another until you can barely tell where one ends and the next one begins). In fact, as this Wall St. Journal article notes, the last time Random...

Writing exercise: review your own work

As many of you know, I send out a writing exercise in each issue of my free e-newsletter for writers.

In the spirit of the new year — looking back, looking ahead — here it is:

Write a review of your current project (i.e., your novel, a poem, a story, etc.).

Take a step back from the work and try to see it objectively. Write the review as if the piece is already published, and be honest in terms of what works and what doesn't (adopt the style of your favorite book reviewer if this helps you get ...

When in doubt, hit "send"

I enjoyed this NYT piece, "The Perils of 'Contact Me,'" on authors being all-too-accessible to their readers. Ben Yagoda writes that for him, being contacted by a reader is "flattering, and it's actually kind of fun" — though some authors get stranger messages and are a little more wary (Mary Karr, for example, says, "I get a handful of jailhouse marriage proposals every time I publish a book").

These days, it's hard to imagine a time when, as Yagoda notes via this excerpt from Catcher in the...

Will it be a happy new year for writers?

Here we are in 2010, and with that comes more predictions about the publishing industry.

The IdeaLogical Blog's Mike Shatzkin has posted twelve predictions for publishing this year, much related to digital content as well as a couple interesting predictions about authors and retail.

The Huffington Post offers 10 more predictions, and these too focus on e-books as well as on the publishing houses and what's likely in store for editors as well as authors in the new year and beyond. A few...

Looking back at 2009 and ahead at 2010…

Okay, it's now that time of year when we look ahead (and make New Year's Resolutions) and look back (at all the things we accomplished — or not, hence the New Year's Resolutions).

On the publishing front, literary agent Nathan Bransford looks back at 2009 in his blog … while this Booksquare post looks ahead by forecasting publishing trends in 2010. It's going to be another interesting year in publishing — and this post covers everything from rights to pricing to independent booksellers. And...

Found in Translation

The New York Times recently profiled Open Letter Books, a small press affiliated with the University of Rochester that has found itself a nice niche in translation.

Open Letter Books has published only sixteen titles so far, but some have made it onto the 2009 Best Of lists, and Amazon recently awarded the publisher a $20,000 grant for a new anthology by East European writers.

Like any small press, Open Letter focuses on quality, not marketability, when it comes to what it publishes. As...

More stuff for writers…

So I have a few more things to share with you.

One is Letters of Note, a site of "correspondence deserving of a wider audience." So true. Here you'll find reproductions of letters from Clyde Barrow (of Bonnie & Clyde) and Bill Watterson (of Calvin & Hobbes) as well as treasures from J. D. Salinger (on why he wouldn't sell the film rights to Catcher in the Rye) and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (writing home during the war).

I've recently tuned in to Betsy Lerner's blog on writing. An editor, literary...

Forgetting English (literally)

As some of you know, I have another life as a globalization editor/writer — and right now I'm working on a report that takes a look at what's new in globalization and languages over the past year. This, plus my fascination with Facebook, inspired me to check out my Forgetting English page in several different languages.

Here it is in Spanish:

And Chinese…

And, my favorite, "Pirate English":

Thanks largely to volunteer translators, Facebook has localized from one to 70 languages in two years...