Reports about the demise of book publishing are once again premature. Traditional book acquisition is alive and well. This despite all the free-floating anxiety and doomsday scenarios about money drying up, massive cutbacks and publishing houses closing up shop. I know this from personal experience. I got blown out of the water by aggressive colleagues [...]

“It’s a contact sport.” That’s how one author summed up his experience in a refreshingly frank and illuminating first-person account of what it’s really like to publish your own novel. A minefield with roads forked in every direction David Carnoy started out with a literary agent and high hopes for placing his novel Knife Music [...]

Nothing in the publishing process seems to provoke more conflict than designing the book jacket. Every editor, designer, sales person and publicist in the company can have a different point of view, often causing intense turf battles, expensive start-overs, blown production schedules, and snarky rants hurled between colleagues like: “Sure, go ahead with that pretentious [...]