How to be a Disaster
I’ve always believed it’s imperative that a book publisher grow. Not everyone agrees. Some houses seem quite happy to hold at a certain...
Living with Live Wires
I sometimes wish I’d grown up in a more interesting family, the kind with ancestors shot at dawn for their roles in the insurgency, or...
Ted Lasso, Meet Your Father
Last week Jason Gay of the Wall Street Journal had this to say about “Ted Lasso,” an AppleTV comedy he resisted, as did I, until well...
History and le Carré
I’ve long believed the Nobel committee should bestow its laurel, at least once, on a genre novelist. Someone like Agatha Christie,...
This Dangerous Business
One of the things they never tell you about the book business is how much sitting is involved. Reading and writing demand immobility, and...
Canada's Non-Fiction Crisis
Newspaper companies across Canada are starting to book revenue from Canadian government initiatives to prop up journalism and save our...
Do You Ever Need An Editor!
This week in Ask a Publisher: “Do I really need a book editor?” Well. We haven’t read all of the 320,000 books published in North America...
Back When People Lived Lives
We are seeing a lot of the big publishers (and some of the independents) pushing their spring non-fiction releases toward the fall. There...
The New Goldrush
Publishers, like movie producers, spend a lot of time repeating themselves, following tried and true formulas in search of commercial...
Daniel Defoe on Covid-19
We are now deep in the year of Covid-19. Victims have been quarantined and hospitalized, and a small percentage have died. Governments...
