Morning Coffee – 21 December 2020
Here are a few stories to read this Monday morning.
- AP tried to do an end of year overview of the book publishing industry, but neglected to venture outside of Manhattan.
- Alan Dean Foster isn’t the only author who is being cheated by Disney. The juicy details are paywalled, but the authors who wrote the novelizations for the original Star Wars trilogy have come forward with similar stories.
- I wrote a post on how to write the Q&A part of a Twitter chat.
- LitHub has a great deep dive into why the book publishing industry is so white.
P.S. If you need a tech VA or help with your website, email me at [email protected]. Got a story that I should include in next week’s list? Shoot me an email.
Comments
Disgusting Dude December 21, 2020 um 4:35 pm
The LitHub piece is amusing in that it talks about "NYC publishing culture" without actually talking about NYC publishing *culture*.
Xavier Basora December 22, 2020 um 9:31 pm
Which is the problem right there. It’s so white because all the employees and interns come from a handful of schools located close to each other working in 1 city.
If publishing were more decentralized then it wouldn’t be so homogenous.
xavier
Disgusting Dude December 23, 2020 um 6:32 am
Actually, US publishing is very decentralized.
But the media and academia don’t look at publishers outside Manhattan, who only make a fraction of Trade Publishing, which only makes a slice of US print publishing, which is actually a minority of all US publishing, print and digital.
More, reports like this only look at BPH outputs without looking at inputs (do minorities submit to NYC corporate tradpub at the same rate as the pasties?) or what genres they submit in, or even what part of the BPH process is the problem.
Try this: a few years back when the Author Earnings reports were current, a look at urban black litfic (the favorite of activists) was some 90% Indie published. So, was this because the authirs were rejected by tradpub or because they saw no reason to go with tradpub’s 15% royalties twice a year when 70% every 30 days is available?
Reports like this exist to maintain a narrative, not to illuminate which changes are needed, or even if there are changes possible.
Meaningless for anything except political posturing.