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 at other publishing [...]

“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 with a traditional [...]

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 Picasso rip [...]

This hard-working writer has been on the road selling his novel The Art of Racing in the Rain since before it was a Starbucks pick for Spring 2008.
I caught up with Garth during a recent stop in here in Berkeley for the 75th public reading of his New York Times best-seller. Earlier that day, [...]

Being called “America’s Worst Mom” after letting your 9-year-old son ride home alone on the NYC subway from Bloomingdale’s is not the usual way to get a six-figure book deal for a first time author.
Media fire storm
But when the mom in question, Lenore Skenazy, a columnist and feature writer for the New York Sun, wrote [...]

The secret to getting more up-front money is persuading your publisher to project higher book sales. Every publisher I know has an internal “advance offer calculation” process, based on a formula for estimating first year sales, revenues, and royalties.
The formula for book advances
It’s not a shot-in-the-dark but a scientific data dump that projects a precise [...]

“There are definite advantages for me operating in Manhattan. I can visit editors at their offices and schmooze over lunch,” says top literary agent Nat Sobel.
“It’s terrific. Two or three days a week, I’m talking to an editor about projects I’ve already sold them and are now in publication, or new projects I’m pitching that [...]

By Contributor Lisa Haneberg ~ I wobbled into the Kennewick, Washington, Barnes & Noble after a 300 mile motorcycle ride from Boise, Idaho. This was to be my 30th and last signing on a 9,400 mile solo motorcycle cross-country publicity tour for my book Two Weeks to a Breakthrough, and most of the earlier [...]

What’s it like for a writer to work at the elbow of legendary filmmaker George Lucas?
For the answer, I turned to my son Jonathan, an executive editor and writer at LucasBooks.
He’s worked closely with the boss and other staff for the past seven years to write and produce dozens of titles related to the Star [...]

Business is booming at the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency. Eleven new major book deals nailed down and that was while Sandy was vacationing in Europe.
So look out, now that she’s back!
Widely considered the most powerful agent on the West Coast, Dijkstra has been called “tough” and “abrasive” with a keen nose for new talent.
A [...]

Many successful books are written by ghost writers, co-authors, and other, often uncredited, collaborators.
If I sign up an author who’s a highly regarded expert in the field but not a professional writer, I bring in a ghost who’s a pro at getting under someone else’s skin and producing a seamless work in the author’s voice.
It’s [...]

B ook publishers expect authors to take charge of their own online marketing. That means writers need to create their own clever websites and build active blogs and hopefully they’re also out there whirling on the social networks.
Cold hard reality
The cold hard reality is that many authors haven’t the foggiest idea how to do [...]

“Reading and writing go on, in new forms, forever!”
That’s the rallying cry at Stanford this week, where book and magazine publishers from around the globe have gathered for the 33rd annual Professional Publishing Course.
It’s my 12th year on the faculty, and I’m witnessing a new level of excitement, stimulating ideas, and heartwarming determination.
A very smart [...]

Editors pray for the perfect book title: a tight high-concept combination of words that crystallizes the content and intention of the work. A title so scintillating and irresistible that millions of readers want to run out and buy this book immediately.
Eureka! It happens.
Think of Chicken Soup for the Soul, or Men are from [...]

Like many authors, Guy Kawasaki has struggled with his publishers to get the cover designs he wants for his books. But unlike anyone else before him, he decided to take matters into his own hands and hold an online contest to recruit and select the best possible jacket for his book The Art of the [...]

The sad demise of Cody’s Books, the iconic independent bookstore in Berkeley that closed this week, is a loss for readers, authors, booksellers and publishers everywhere. The reasons for this unfortunate event are many and complex – Amazon, over-expansion, fiscal mismanagement, the negative impact of digital publishing, the usual suspects – but I’ll leave that [...]

As an acquiring editor, one of the first things I look for in an author’s proposal is the “platform”, that is, the writer’s reputation and public visibility – and the ability, willingness, and experience to promote themselves in the marketplace.
What we publishers all hope for when opening a proposal from a literary agent is not [...]

Jeff Bezos has a new vision: books that go on and on with continuing updates in the plot, characterization and world events.
The founder and chairman of Amazon, in an on-stage conversation with Chris Anderson (The Long Tail) at the opening of the annual publishing industry’s BookExpo in Los Angeles today, suggested that digital technology [...]

W
ho says print is dead? The book industry reported a colossal 514 percent surge last year in print-on-demand titles, giving a much needed boost to traditional publishing which was flat overall in numbers of books produced in 2007.
Print on demand (POD) is a digital technology and business model in which new copies of a [...]

Garth Stein’s new book The Art of Racing in the Rain posted extraordinary sales of 15,215 copies the first week out. Of these, 3,515 flew out the door of retail bookstores, 2,217 were ordered on Amazon, and a whopping 9,483 sold at Starbucks stores throughout the country.
The relatively unknown writer’s book made a big [...]