Writers and Editors

You can now order the new 16th edition of the The Chicago Manual of Style , the style bible for books and some magazines. This time it is simultaneously releasing a subscription to an online edition)  Read More 

Poynter's Mallary Jean Tenore's column on what happens when newspapers make big mistakes (such as the Chicago Tribute's "Dewey Defeats Truman") and how "the provisional nature and accelerated pace of journalism can lead to error" and why "news organizations don't correct most of their mistakes -- and what they can learn from them." Her essay Read More 

"It seems a certain Swedish hacker heroine with a dragon tattoo has paved the way for a surge of international crime fiction," writes Alexandra Alter in Fiction's Global Crime Wave (WSJ 7-2-10). "Spurred by the popularity of Swedish writer Stieg Larsson's  Read More 

The Massachusetts Independent Contractor Law was created to prevent worker exploitation, writes Andrea Shea for WBUR radio, and employers who "get busted classifying incorrectly — say, giving a worker a 1099 form at tax time rather than a W-2 — [will] face hefty fines." But writers and artists in Massachusetts are victims of  Read More 

Lara Logan, You Suck (Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone, 6-28-10).
< by going on television and, without any evidence at all, accusing the guy who beat him of cheating. That's happened to me so often, I've come to expect it. If there's a lower form of life on the planet earth than a "reputable" journalist protecting his territory, I haven't seen it.<<

Publishers are cutting back on how much they publish, brick and mortar bookstores are declining in importance, and media companies that succeed will do so only by finding how to reach a niche audience, writes Jane Friedman in There Are No Rules:An Exciting Future for Authors (That Can Succeed Without Publishers or Agents) Read More 

Radically changing business practices were hard for publishing executives to talk about at the debut annual conference of Digital Book World, writes Mike Shatzkin in his Shatzkin Report on the conference. One topic "that is very tough to talk about is ebook royalties,  Read More 

“Mothers: Don’t let your babies grow up to be freelancers,” cracks one journalist, freelancing after leaving a staff job, as quoted by Rebecca Rosen Lum in California Progress Report story Freelance Journalists Suffering in Second Wave of News Media Collapse  Read More 

How do you find something good to read in a brave new self-published world? asks Laura Miller in When anyone can be a published author (Salon, 6-22-10). Those of us who have worked in book publishing know how much really bad writing comes through slush  Read More 

Publishers have to change the way they do business, because digital delivery increases supply even more than it increases demand, so prices have to go down, blogs Mike Shatzkin. He writes that "getting from today (selling content) to tomorrow (selling audiences) depends on using today’s asset to build tomorrow’s." Doing this will require using "content as bait," monetizing "the eyeballs you own," not "the copyrights you own." In A roadmap for the future: 6 suggestions for today’s publishers that many can’t follow he recommends that publishers  Read More