John Edgar Wideman—author of about two dozen books, MacArthur genius grant recipient and winner of PEN/Faulker, O. Henry and James Fennimore Cooper awards—is publishing another book. No news there … until one notices that the publisher is Lulu, the self-publishing service.

From Wideman’s statement in a Lulu press release:

“Lulu seems to represent a very live possibility as the publishing industry mutates. I like the idea of being in charge. I have more control over what happens to my book. And I have more control over whom I reach.

“I have a very personal distaste for the blockbuster syndrome,” Wideman continued. “The blockbuster syndrome is a feature of our social landscape that has gotten out of hand. Unless you become a blockbuster, your book disappears quickly. It becomes not only publish or perish, but sell or perish.”

(Read on …)

The Brow Beat blog over at Slate looked at every poem in the New Yorker over the last few years and found that 27 percent of them were about writing poetry. How meta! Is it furtive pandering, since it’s likely that only poets read the poems in the New Yorker? (Ugh, why does criticizing the New Yorker make me feel guilty? Damn you, venerable magazine, for making me feel this way!)

I like poetry that evokes an emotional response, plays with language and challenges how I see things by showing me a unique vision. It’s possible that a poem about words and writing could do that, of course. But I think this figure, if true, points to an insular poetry editor.

To be fair, I can be a bit churlish about writers writing about writing in their fiction writing. I did, after all, throw “The Human Stain” across the room and yell “Whhhhy?” as soon as I realized someone in the book was writing a book about the characters I was reading a book about. (Criticizing Philip Roth to make a disclaimer about criticizing the New Yorker … that has to require at least a a dozen Hail Marys.)

Bonus: How to win the New Yorker cartoon caption contest

Harper’s Magazine is struggling. They are seeing drops in newsstand sales, advertisers, and subscriptions rates, among other things. That’s sad because the magazine has been around since 1850 and has published some of our most brilliant writers. So, aside from being a little dense–who has time for 10,000-word Harper’s article these days?–what is the problem here?

While mismanagement, the economy, and the overall state of publishing seem to be contributing to the issue, as Slate points out, Harper’s real problem is that it doesn’t have an online presence because it hides its content behind a paywall. Says Slate, “Because its stories are trapped behind that paywall, no one talks about them and the magazine has fallen out of the conversation.”

One has only to look at competitors like The New Yorker to see that this is true. The New Yorker offers some free content online, and people are interested. They link to the articles, they go to the website, they click on the advertising links, and they generally remember that the magazine exists. Harper’s, meanwhile, is ignored, despite the fact that it has some brilliant writing.

So the best thing Harper’s could do would be to get with the times and put free content online. That doesn’t mean that the magazine has to stop publishing in paper–clearly it has an older readership that would hate that. It does mean, however, that it should bring down at least part of the paywall so that the magazine can gain a younger readership. It may seem counter-intuitive, but that’s how Harper’s will survive. Being “part of the conversation” is how publications gain relevance, and relevance means money.

By the way, this doesn’t bode well for the New York Times’s website. The venerable newspaper is going to start charging for some of its online content. I think this is an idiotic move. You can fight it all you want, New York Times, but the fact remains: people don’t like paying to read articles on the web, and they especially don’t like it if they used to get the articles for free, but now are expected to pay for them.

Yes. Hilarious. True.

For years as a fiction writer, I have felt pressured to write creative nonfiction, even though I’m not that into the genre and don’t really like talking about myself. But everyone was making such a big deal out of the memoir that I felt it was something I should be doing. There was something going on in the culture where the idea of something being literally true (as opposed to metaphorically true, which is what you see in fiction) made it more worth reading.

Of course, James Frey and Herman Rosenblat show that truth and the memoir can be a very fuzzy thing. Maybe that’s part of why nonfiction sales are dropping while fiction is rising. “Sales of this year’s top 10 non-fiction books in October were down 52% year on year, while sales of hardback fiction titles have soared by 90%,” says Bookseller.com.

Finally, a trend in publishing that I like.

So Publishers Weekly put out a list of the top 10 books for 2009 and didn’t include any women writers on it. Everyone is in an uproar, at least according to some sources.

As I have written before on here, I am torn about this issue. I don’t want women to get special treatment, and yet lists like these clearly show that there is a bias against women writers in the publishing industry. And since gender has nothing to do with whether writing is good or bad, it suggests that the people who control these lists either ignore anything written by a woman or they don’t like the subjects women tend to write about.

Troublesome indeed. Still, in this case, I just can’t bring myself to care that much. Why? Well, it’s Publishers Weekly.

Here’s James Ellroy talking about writing. To him, publishing is a matter of extreme persistence. It’s interesting to hear what he got paid for his early novels. (Via GalleyCat)

First Amish Romance, now angels. Publishers Weekly says that this fall, publishers are introducing more than a dozen titles about angels:

… good ones, funny ones and especially fallen ones, kicked out of heaven. “We’ve kind of exhausted where we can go with vampires,” said Heather Doss, children’s merchandise manager for Bookazine. “Now we’re taking the safe characters and making them the bad guys. We’re turning that stereotypical angel image upside down.”

Sounds like the books range from your typical guardian angel story to comedic stories about angels to the angel-as-romantic-lead. Apparently, angels, especially the fallen kind, “are the new hotties. Like modern vampires, they can be gorgeous, immortal and otherworldly heartthrobs, unlike, say, zombies.”

I don’t know about this last idea. First of all, fallen angels are demons, according to the Bible, so it’s kind of weird they are playing with angels and ignoring that part of their make-up. Secondly, unlike vampires, a lot of people sincerely believe in angels and see them as religious icons, so this idea could backfire on publishers.

On the other hand, remember that TV show where that Irish lady was an angel? And there was a black lady who was also an angel? And for some reason they both helped people, maybe because they were friends? It was on the Family Channel or something. Anyway, people seemed to really like it, so maybe this trend will be like that.

As part of its quest to be involved in absolutely everything in my entire life, Google is going to provide on-demand printing of books the company has already scanned and made available online. The way it will work is that stores and libraries will have high-speed printing and binding machines that charge people about $8 to print out a public domain, out-of-print book from Google’s collection. The machine can print a 300 page book in under five minutes. Part of the money goes to Google and part of it goes to OnDemand, the maker of the Espresso printing machine. And the rest ($3) goes to the bookstore or library hosting the machine.

There’s been a lot of hubbub in the publishing industry–and the courts–about Google’s digital library and the copyright and royalties problems. So this printing project only includes books with expired copyrights that are no longer in print. However, I’d guess that if it takes off it will soon include authors who opt in to have their works included. This takes it from Google providing information online for free to the company making a profit from it.

I really am quite annoyed that Google has to mark its territory on anything it considers information. It’s creepy. It may very well be the basis of several sci-fi novels already in the works. Think technological singularity, dystopic future, lots of shiny chrome … the usual stuff. (Read on …)

You know, it’s all well and good that this guy can teach me how to write a novel in 7 minutes a day. I buy his guarantees that he can help me “monetize” my work so that my “inbox is overflowing with an avalanche of success.”

However.

Seven minutes? Seven whole minutes?

A day?

Wow. That’s a commitment. I’m pretty busy, you know. I mean, let’s face it, I couldn’t spare the 7 minutes a day it takes to get a flat stomach or read the Bible or clean my bathroom, so what makes him think I have 7 minutes a day to spend writing and publishing a best-selling novel?

Nope, he’s going to have to do better than that.

I want a pill.

Here’s how it would work: I would take it and it would write the book for me. I wouldn’t even have to know what it’s about. When it is done, I would just take my novel and cash it in for millions of dollars and fame. Just like Dan Brown.

So let’s get going on that, Author 101 University. (Via Mediabistro)