Some Poet
Tough times in the publishing industry, according to this New York Times article, Puttin’ Off the Ritz: The New Austerity in Publishing. Long lunches and annual retreats to Bermuda are out, replaced by web-cam meetings and (shudder) teleconferences.
Amanda Urban, an agent for Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy, makes a valid point about the price point of books in general. “It’s not like you have books that can be Manolo Blahniks and books that can be Cole Haan. Books are books. A book by James Patterson costs the same as a book by some poet.”
The end of this statement is simply hilarious, though, and defies further comment from me.
And this quote from the same story:
“Everybody is trying to look at acquisitions in the prism of a reduced and a hurting retail market,” said David Rosenthal, publisher of Simon & Schuster. “You used to buy some books and you paid X because you figured it would sell 100,000 copies. Now you have to do the math saying this book may sell only 50,000 copies.”
Talk about lazy talking and lazy thinking. These people come off as doofuses. Did publishing companies not "do the math" before September of this year? I seriously doubt that. I'm sure their corporate parents and bean-counters never let them fling around huge contracts willy-nilly.
Amanda Urban, an agent for Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy, makes a valid point about the price point of books in general. “It’s not like you have books that can be Manolo Blahniks and books that can be Cole Haan. Books are books. A book by James Patterson costs the same as a book by some poet.”
The end of this statement is simply hilarious, though, and defies further comment from me.
And this quote from the same story:
“Everybody is trying to look at acquisitions in the prism of a reduced and a hurting retail market,” said David Rosenthal, publisher of Simon & Schuster. “You used to buy some books and you paid X because you figured it would sell 100,000 copies. Now you have to do the math saying this book may sell only 50,000 copies.”
Talk about lazy talking and lazy thinking. These people come off as doofuses. Did publishing companies not "do the math" before September of this year? I seriously doubt that. I'm sure their corporate parents and bean-counters never let them fling around huge contracts willy-nilly.
posted by Hallovian at 6:52 AM
2 Comments:
You should have a chat with my friend Simon Barrett (the reviewer, not the kick-ass mile and a quarter sniper rifle company (see; zombie apocalypse/tools/gun) He has written extensively and well on the subject of self-publishing and accompanying perils of self-edit. Anyway, check out the Bloggers News Network.
As the industry in which Jackie O deigned to work until her death, I am unsurprised by the gravy train the upper-echelon publishing types have been on. On the other hand, I'm happy to see intellectuals living large and getting paid well for being really smart and enforcing high standards of literariness (some of them, anyway), and I worry that editors' and journalists' "semi-charmed kinds of lives of the mind," as Michael Hirschorn wrote in his recent Atlantic article on the demise of the New York Times, is going away for the rest of us intellectuals, too.
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