In 2002, I worked for a publisher that occupied the second floor of a converted warehouse in a part of town that nobody would call fashionable. The elevator was broken more often than it wasn’t. Our “conference room” was a… Read more →

Every publisher says they know their readers. I’m skeptical of most of those claims, including, on bad days, my own. The truth is that publishers know their market. They know the demographics, the buying patterns, the genre preferences, the price… Read more →

A few months ago, I was in a used bookstore in Vermont, the kind of place where the shelves go floor to ceiling and the owner’s cat sleeps on the counter. I was there for an hour, maybe longer. I… Read more →

I don’t usually talk about this book. The title has been out of print for eight years. Most of our current authors and readers have never heard of it. But I’ve been thinking about it lately, because the lessons we… Read more →

I didn’t always care about book indexes. For years, I treated them the way most readers do: as that dense block of tiny text at the back, something to flip past on the way to confirming I’d actually finished the… Read more →

I own too many books. This is not a confession so much as a statement of fact, like saying I have brown hair or that I live in a house with insufficient shelf space. The books have taken over the… Read more →

One of the questions I get asked most often, usually by authors who are new to publishing, is how many copies of their book we plan to print. It sounds like a simple question with a numerical answer. It is… Read more →

Books have been banned, burned, confiscated, hidden, smuggled, and suppressed for as long as books have existed. The specific reasons change with the times, but the impulse doesn’t. Somewhere, right now, someone in a position of authority is deciding that… Read more →

I get asked this question a lot, usually at industry events or in emails from aspiring authors. “What’s the difference between a publishing house and a printing press?” Sometimes the question comes with a slightly embarrassed tone, as if the… Read more →

I spend a lot of time in my car, which means I spend a lot of time listening to things. Music, obviously, but increasingly podcasts. And because I work in publishing, my podcast queue has gradually shifted from general-interest shows… Read more →