I have held off announcing this until things were certain, but last week I agreed to move to a new publisher in England, Orion. Orion is a terrific house and a good fit for me. Their crime catalog reads like an all-star team: Michael Connelly, George Pelecanos, Ian Rankin, Walter Mosley, Harlan Coben, Joseph Finder [...]
Categories: My Books · Publishing
Tags: bookthree · featured posts · writing life
Fred Wilson is a venture capitalist with a knack for explaining the power of social media in plain English. I am a junkie for the latest developments in the web, and I’ve become addicted to his blog, called A VC. In this interview, he talks at length about the rise of social media — Facebook, [...]
Categories: Internet
Tags: Fred Wilson · social media
“Without a novel I’m empty. I’m empty and not very happy.” From a writer’s point of view, it is touching to hear a giant like Roth confess to a feeling I know well. Here Roth discusses his writing process. I love the brief glimpse of Roth at his stand-up desk (beginning at about 3:23), composing [...]
Categories: Writers · Writing
Tags: How Writers Write · interviews · Philip Roth · video
In a long and interesting interview with Poets & Writers magazine, Jonathan Galassi, president and publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, has an interesting prediction for the future of book-selling: publishers, not online retailers like Amazon, will profit from selling directly to readers. It makes a lot of sense, especially as book-selling transitions more and [...]
Categories: Publishing
Tags: bookselling · ebooks · Jonathan Galassi
The following list was found among the papers of the painter Richard Diebenkorn after his death in 1993. Spelling and capitalization are as in the original. (Via Terry Teachout.) Notes to myself on beginning a painting 1. attempt what is not certain. Certainty may or may not come later. It may then be a valuable [...]
Categories: Art · Creative Process
Tags: quotes · Richard Diebenkorn
Obviously the internet has blown a hole in the business model of the publishing industry, and we have all heard dire predictions that digital will obliterate printed books altogether. The doomsday scenario usually maps to the demise of the music CD: Kindle equals iPod, Amazon equals iTunes, eBook equals MP3. The details may vary, but [...]
Categories: Publishing · Writers
Tags: bookselling · featured posts · Malcolm Gladwell · presenting
In over a dozen years of her “book club,” Oprah has never recommended a straight mystery or crime novel. Now, for the first time, Oprah has published a summer reading list of mystery novels, which is very good news for those of us who till that field. The list is quirky and very interesting. It [...]
Jonah Lehrer examines why the home team tends to win more often. The answer is more complex than you might think. Several years ago, an innovative study compared the performance of two NCAA basketball teams in the presence and absence of spectators. Because of a measles outbreak, the teams played 11 games while the schools [...]
Categories: Sports
Tags: Jonah Lehrer
Kickstarter.com is a cool new web site that provides “a funding platform for artists, designers, filmmakers, musicians, journalists, inventors, bloggers, explorers…” Think of it as DonorsChoose for creative types: artists post descriptions of projects they would like to do; visitors pledge donations to support them. The artists might offer any sort of reward they can [...]
Categories: Internet · Publishing
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After an excruciating three weeks of trying — and failing — to make a difficult chapter work, yesterday morning I woke up at 5:45 with this sentence in my head: “There is so much to tell.” And that was it. Six words, six syllables, and I knew I had it. I wanted to rush out [...]
Categories: My Books · Writing
Tags: bookthree · writing life
