There’s a particular kind of reader, and if you’re reading a blog post on a publishing company’s website, you’re probably one, who loves books about books. Books about reading, about writing, about libraries, about the publishing industry, about the physical… Read more →

The worst part of being an editor is the cutting. Not the mechanical kind, where you trim a wordy sentence or remove a redundant paragraph. That is satisfying, like pruning a plant. I mean the big cuts. The ones where… Read more →

The paperback book is so ordinary now that it’s hard to imagine a time when it was controversial. You pick one up at the airport, toss it in your bag, dog-ear the pages, leave it on the beach. Nobody thinks… Read more →

Some cities have literature in their soil. You walk down a street and feel the ghost of a novel you once read. You turn a corner and recognize it from a poem. The best literary cities are not simply places… Read more →

Last year, we received a manuscript that was, by any editorial standard, excellent. The writing was sharp, the research was thorough, and the story at its center was genuinely compelling. A family’s decades-long involvement in a small-town political scandal, told… Read more →

I read a lot of book reviews. Hundreds a year, probably. As a publisher, reviews are part of my professional diet, and I have opinions about them. Strong opinions, actually. Because after years of watching reviews help (or fail to… Read more →

I read about seventy books a year. That sounds like a lot, but I know people who read twice that, and I know people who work in publishing and barely read ten. The number itself doesn’t matter much. What matters… Read more →

Every few months, someone sends me an article predicting that AI will make human writers obsolete. The articles vary in tone, from breathless excitement to existential dread, but they share a common assumption: that writing is primarily about generating text,… Read more →

I’ll be honest with you: I was an audiobook skeptic for a long time. I’m the kind of reader who underlines passages, who flips back to check a detail from chapter three, who needs to see the words on the… Read more →

There is a box in our shipping room right now with forty-two copies of a book that will not be published for three months. Each copy has a letter tucked inside the front cover. Each letter is slightly different, personalized… Read more →