Features

Regarding the review of Bonnie Kozek’s Threshold, I had this email exchange with J.M. Reep that I’m printing here.

JMR: I’m wondering why Bonnie Kozek’s book was reviewed for SPR given the following facts:

1. Ms. Kozek is a contributor to the website.
2. Ms. Kozek is also a member of Backword Books, along with Henry Baum and Kristen Tsetsi, who are also contributors to SPR.
3. While there was a hyperlink to Backword Books at the end of the review, there was no mention in the review of Ms. Kozek’s status as a contributor at SPR, nor […]

The terms “vanity press” and “vanity publishing” used to mean that people who wrote books too poorly written to interest a “real” publisher would pay to have their own books printed and bound. The implication, of course, was that “real” publishers published “good” books and authors of “vanity” books were by definition failures who couldn’t write.

I dare you to call Herman Melville a failure. He paid to have Moby Dick published after New York publishers turned up their noses at his crude tale in favor of the fashionable novels written in England. Or call me a failure, and I’ll […]

In 2005, the Naples-born sculptor, Giancarlo Neri, created a work entitled The Writer – a 30 foot tall table and chair made of wood and steel. Exhibited in the middle of a grassy field in London’s Hampstead Heath – as homage to the famed park’s associations with Keats and Coleridge – spectators interacted with the sculpture in a variety of ways. Some viewed it from a distance; others circled its perimeter. Some lay beneath it; others looped the massive legs on bicycle. Its grand scale and curious posturing dwarfed both viewer and nature. At length, the sculpture produced an unsettling […]

On the heels of his well-read and well-commented post, A Publishing Person Self-Publishes (seriously, read the entire discussion), Andrew Kent writes about the important issue that self-published non-fiction must be held to a much higher standard than fiction.

The readers and writers on this blog tend to produce works in fiction genres like mystery, romance, and general literature. My novel, which I self-published and talked about in an earlier post that generated a lively discussion, is a mystery novel.

Self-publishing fiction is entirely fine, in my opinion.

But when it comes to scholarly works, things change.

I work in scholarly […]

In The New Yorker’s current Summer Fiction issue (June 8 & 15, 2009), in an essay that is called “Can You Teach Creative Writing?” on the contents page and titled “Show or Tell: Should Creative Writing be Taught?,” on the page where it begins, the critic Louis Menand makes great claims for the general excellence of contemporary American fiction. His essay springs in part from, and is in part a review of, Mark McGurl’s The Program Era (Harvard, 2009). The resultant double-layered piling on of superlatives from a famous critic and quotes from a book published by a still […]

On the surface, self publishing sounds like a really bad idea.  Despite denials to the contrary, it seems that one of the biggest fears in the back of people’s minds is that of supply and demand.  With self publishing we have more and more books in the marketplace, but most people don’t seem to have very much time to read.  They are on the internet, playing video games, watching television, listening to music, running errands, working, eating, sleeping, possibly having sex occasionally since the species must go on.

But when are they having time to read?  It seems less and […]

People say that I shouldn’t get into these debates online about self-publishing because those who are so vehemently opposed to self-publishing are never going to change their mind. But I like a good debate and I really do believe that for the stigma around self-publishing to fade it’s important to chip away at the criticism in debates like this one. The writer’s basic premise is that self-publishing is deserving of its stigma because:

1. There is no quality control of self-published books so book customers are led to buy inferior work.
2. Self-publishers are naturally bad writers who just couldn’t hack

Read Part 1.

“Jeeves. There’s a strange gentlemen at the door suggesting publishers should stop giving authors advances.”

“Wooster! How ridiculous. The idea is simply preposterous! Send him away and finish preparing my Eggs Benedict and ironing my morning newspaper.”

“Actually, Jeeves, I found the idea rather novel and somewhat intriguing. So much so—I’ve invited the gentleman into the parlour for tea and a light scone with warm butter. I do hope you don’t mind.”

“You invited him into the house of Jeeves Publishing & Sons & Illegitimate Sons!”

“Yes, Jeeves. You seemed wholly perturbed. Am I to be […]