The Publishing This Week
Almost forgot to announce: CONTEST NEXT WEEK. Stay tuned.
BookEnds hit the hot button issues this past week and I couldn’t be happier. First up, the ever-popular question from those outside of publishing looking in: How Do Bad Books Get Published? Jessica Faust confesses that the question makes her mad and tires her out, and I will confess that I agree with Jessica’s confession, but she nevertheless makes a stab at guessing why people feel this way (hint: it’s a subjective business, people!).
Jessica also invited her readers to vent, and boy did they ever! #1 peeve expressed: agents not responding to queries.
In other agent blog news, Kristin Nelson explains why agents sometimes rely on vagueness and stock phrases when responding to partials and manuscripts. It’s not because we’re lazy, sometimes we really just don’t know what to say.
Remember when Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize in literature and she let out an exasperated “Oh, Christ” and it was really awesome? Well, her mood hasn’t improved much since then. Via Shelf Awareness, the BBC reports that Lessing has called her win “a bloody disaster” and says, “All I do is give interviews and spend time being photographed.” Best Nobel Prize Winner ever??
Via Publishers Lunch, if you want to know why the publishing industry is, um, unique, look no further than this article about publishers considering doing away with printed catalogs in favor of electronic catalogs that would, you know, save money and the environment. A bookseller sums up the mood in response to this proposal: “Booksellers like to sit around the table with the catalogs. They thumb through them and make notes. It’s a real interactive kind of experience, so there is an emotional attachment to the current kind of catalog.” And there you have it.
And finally, let me just say that I’m really proud of my state today.
California here we come. Right back where we started from. Califorrrrrrrniiiaaaaa… Califoooooooorniaaaaa… Here we coooommmmmmmmeee..
Um. Sorry.
Have a great weekend!
Anonymous says
How long will I have to wait for a reply to my query?
Nathan Bransford says
anon-
If you send it on a weekday, usually not more than 24 hours.
Anonymous says
Okay. Thanks.
But do you answer all queries, or just the ones you’re interested in?
Nathan Bransford says
I respond to every query I receive. If you have been waiting more than two weeks for a response please feel free to re-query.