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Midweek Miscellany, Nov 5, 2008

Konigi has posted a ‘small’ sampling of international front page newspaper coverage of the US Presidential Election (pictured) .   The US Sources are here. It’s hard not to be swept up in the excitement today. Breathtaking. (via SwissMiss)

“Publishing: Media’s Last Diehard?”: James Bridle (apt/booktwo)  has posts his v. interesting notes from a talk at the London School of Economics given by HarperCollins CEO Victoria Barnsley. More at The Bookseller.

“Seven hundred friends, and I was drinking alone”: Toronto author Hal Niedzviecki discovers the fickleness of Facebook friends in the New York Times (via DesignNotes).

Doubleday Dismissals Were Self-Inflicted: The New York Observer examines the recent lay-offs at Random House’s DoubleDay division and looks at the career of their publisher Steve Rubin (via Sarah Weinman).

Science Fiction and Fantasy editor Lou Anders interviewed on the Amazon blog Omnivoracious. What’s the hardest part of his job?

“Saying no to a piece of sheer brilliance because I know that the audience for it is about 200 people. I don’t for a minute believe that commercial and literary concerns are mutually exclusive … But not every worthy work has commercial potential. Trying to find books that fire on all cylinders means saying no to a lot of competent fiction that only fires on one or two. Being determined not to compromise on quality while still being commercially viable means that I am hunting in a very narrow bandwidth and have to read hundreds upon hundreds of submissions to find a very few prizes. I worry that a lifetime of saying no is bad for my karma, and have to remind myself that its the yes that the readers see and they are who I am serving.”

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  1. […] of Victoria Barnsley’s speech ‘Media’s Last Die Hard?’ (mentioned yesterday) is now available on The Bookseller website: “the pivotal question for publishers, as we […]

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