Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has asked its editors to stop buying manuscripts. From Pubisher’s Weekly: Josef Blumenfeld, v-p of communications for HMH, confirmed that the publisher has “temporarily stopped acquiring manuscripts” across its trade and reference divisions. The directive was given verbally to a handful of executives and, according to Blumenfeld, is Read more…
Joe the Plumber has written a book, or has had a book written for him. Now I have no gripe with the guy, and I bear him no ill will, but I will say that the details of the book “deal” seem sort of, well, odd. First off, I’d think Read more…
About those counters I have in the sidebar here: In one sense they tell you (and me) how close to completion a given project is. In another sense, they’re a lie. I am tracking, essentially, the progress of a first draft. A worthy achievement, but nowhere near actually done. My Read more…
Perhaps you remember my post about this wonderful website brought to my attention by the Smart Bitches. That post was well intentioned, if completely clueless. Now the Smart Bitches have highlighted an equally craptastic post of a bit more sinister bent. I present to you “Got The Thing In Becoming Read more…
I wanted to write a follow-up to two other blog posts I wrote back last summer. The story at that point was as follows: Sherry Jones writes The Jewel of Medina, a historical novel that features one of Mohammad’s wives. She sells it to Random House. Random House sends an Read more…
To all the aspiring writers out there who want to make a bad impression and leave a permanently sour taste in the mouths of not only your readers but with anyone who’s ever heard of you, Victoria Laurie has some tips for you. (Original post is gone, but once released Read more…
According to Gallycat, the students riled up by the threat of Random House’s publication of the Jewel of Medina were planning little more than a publicity campaign to e-mail the publisher and news outlets and so on. Perfectly innocuous stuff in a pluralistic society. Which makes Random House look like Read more…
From the “this surprises you why?” department: Random House was going to publish a book titled The Jewel of Medina by Sherry Jones, a historical novel that features one of Mohammad’s wives, and has decided “oops, bad idea.” Quoth Random House in the Washington Post Op-Ed, “after sending out advance Read more…
As the whole Cassie Edwards story pointed out, it is hard to be a plagiarist these days. Anyone with just a little suspicion can use the internet to correctly attribute just about anything, so it is a stupid, stupid, thing to do. The kind of thing you really only expect Read more…
Still a-novelling, so my blogging is minimal, but I thought I’d post link to some deconstructions of good query letters (query 1, query 2) posted some time ago by Nathan Bransford of Curtis Brown Ltd. both showing impressive examples of what a good query should look like. The more examples Read more…