As readers of this blog know, I’ve been on the “vertical” trail for a long time and I try to stay abreast of book publishers’ efforts to realize the advantages of subject specialization and community building. I wrote a whole post about the Sourcebooks initiative, Poetry Speaks, when it launched last Fall. I have often […]
What I Would Have Said in London, Part 3
This is the third of four posts covering the subject matter of an address I had hoped to make to the Publishers Association in London on April 28 but which was cancelled by the Iceland volcano. In the first post, we explored the nature of change in publishing and I tried to underscore how much disruption […]
Two more Len Shatzkin anecdotes on publishing practice
Elisabeth Sifton has a long and thoughtful piece in the current issue of The Nation. I disagree with the fundamental premise — that the woes of the book business are primarily due to bad decisions or judgments by the leaders of the business rather than large forces that are changing the ground on which the […]