Happy new year! I cannot believe how fast the Fall 2017 academic term went by. So fast that I didn’t even get to share this article I wrote for T8N magazine . It’s about the gap between what men earn and what women earn, an issue that continues to be relevant (and has been topical since I was a young, young feminist). If you’re interested, here’s a link to the article .
In Smoke Proofs, Andrew Steeves offers a series of essays to ask critical questions about contemporary printing and publishing practices that most people in the industry take for granted. The essay “Why We Accept Shoddy Books” challenges literary publishers to think about how — and how badly — we deploy our limited financial resources in the making of cultural objects:
Strangely, the giant, profit-driven multinational publishers—those firms which are by their very structure and mandate most likely to become estranged from the literary and cultural values of the books they publish—tend to field more skilfully- and interestingly-made books than many of the grassroots, mission-driven and publicly-subsidized literary publishers.
Last year I heard Richard Nash speak about publishing and learning to manage abundance. Several times in my teaching this year, I have quoted his memorable comment “Abundance breaks more things than scarcity does.” The excerpt below, from Giles Clark and Angus Phillips, amplifies Nash’s idea and sets it into the specific relationships among publishers, authors, and readers.
However, scarcity is still present and comes in different guises, especially in respect of the resources needed to publish.
