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Penelope Trunk’s Farewell to Publishing
photo: PenelopeTrunk.com When Penelope Trunk decided to release her latest book, The New American Dream, through an independent, digital-only publishing company called Hyperink (“working directly with...
View ArticleThe Story Behind Penelope Trunk’s Last Book Deal
When I learned about Penelope Trunk’s bitter farewell to traditional publishing, there were several key aspects to her story that contradicted my own experience of the publishing industry, but one...
View ArticleWhen Anti-Bully Bullies Go Mainsteam
I haven’t written anything about the “Stop the Goodreads Bullies” phenomenon, because (1) I haven’t really wanted to give them that extra little bit of exposure, and (2) people like Stacia Kane, Foz...
View ArticleLet the Hate Flow Through You
Slate has run an article by Jacob Silverman bemoaning “the mutual admiration society that is today’s literary culture, particularly online,” because authors connecting with their readers, and with each...
View ArticleBeing a Book Critic Is Nothing Special
Since I first wrote about the call for less niceness in literary criticism, there have been a few more rounds in the argument, most noticeably after a particularly nasty review of Alix Ohlin’s most...
View ArticleThink Before You Answer Your Critics
I recently attended a conference that Digital Book World put on about “discoverability and marketing” for the publishing industry, where one of the speakers was novelist Elle Lothlorien, who was there...
View ArticleAmazon’s Deleting Customer Reviews: So?
The New York Times had a story about Amazon.com’s purge of thousands of customer reviews from its website. Apparently, an author’s relatives lack the disinterest necessary for a valid evaluation of a...
View ArticleDid the National Book Awards Need Fixing?
In recent years, the National Book Awards have come under a heavy amount of public criticism for the books they’ve proposed as the most outstanding in American letters in a given year. The criticism is...
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I Have Nothing to Say About Bookish
So Bookish.com finally launched in early 2013, only a year and a half or so behind its original target date, and various people have been weighing in with their judgments of how it turned out. I took a...
View ArticleThe Writers Who Aren’t Getting Paid
The argument over people writing for online media outlets without compensation has been going on for a long time, but it recently became more pronounced thanks to a highly publicized email exchange...
View ArticleTrigger Warnings Will Not Destroy Literature
You might have seen the recent New York Times story about proposals that “trigger warnings,” a popular term for descriptions of potentially disturbing subject matter, be added to college syllabi to...
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