From the category archives:

Publishing

New Yorker: Show Or Tell

June 12, 2009

Should Creative Writing Be Taught?
From The New Yorker, June 8, 2009, by Louis Mendand

The workshop is a process, an unscripted performance space, a regime for forcing people to do two things that are fundamentally contrary to human nature: actually write stuff (as opposed to planning to write stuff very, very soon), and then sit there [...]

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Why Does It Take So Long?

February 2, 2008

The hoary old adage is that publishing a book is like giving birth: It takes nine months.
Nowadays, we have electronic typesetting, high-speed presses, print-on-demand, and oceans of text gushing through fiberoptic pipes onto computer screens all over the planet.
So why does it still take so long to publish a dead-tree edition? [...]

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Rejection, Thy Constant Companion

January 20, 2008

Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.
–Winston Churchill

Most writers worry about rejection, not acceptance. Ray Bradbury says that the successful writer has to deal with both: “You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.”
Several articles on this site (usually in the [...]

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Good Books On Publishing

February 8, 2007

On Writing
Aspiring writers often seek advice about how to find a publisher or a literary agent. Unfortunately, most authors don’t know much about the book business, unless they happen to live and work in the New York publishing world.
For the rest of us, who live in Omaha or Dubuque and don’t know many publishing insiders, [...]

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How To Query A Literary Agent

February 7, 2007

Ye Olde Query Letter
I loathe writing. On the other hand I’m a great believer in money.
–S.J. Perelman
Many large publishing houses accept only manuscripts submitted by agents. Many agents aren’t interested in representing unpublished authors. So now what?
If you are an unpublished novelist, don’t bother a literary agent or anyone else in the book business until [...]

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