Tag: publishing

Remaking itself from a little leftie newspaper to a powerhouse of internet journalism required experimentation, transparency, and embracing uncertainty.

The history of England’s fertile music press reveals as much about the opinionated English youth who created it as it does the music they covered in the second half of the 20th century.

At 63, Michael Musto reveals how he keeps managing to add new chapters to the consistently unfolding story of his career.

Rookie is the latest publication for young women to shut down. How do you survive a system set up for you to fail?

Musician Emily Rose Epstein talks about her dual life as a rock drummer and writer.

How ’90s webzines heralded the best — and worst — of today’s online media landscape.

Fresh off Watergate, Carl Bernstein next turned to expose the connection between the CIA and newspapers. For his efforts, he was paid $28,000. Inside one of publishing’s biggest boondoggles.

“If you’re doing something small, something that’s mostly your labor and vision, then stick to what makes you satisfied.”

Ken Layne designs, edits, and distributes his independent magazine Desert Oracle from tiny Joshua Tree, California.

Judith Jones, the legendary Knopf editor, has died at the age of 93.

On Monocle’s tenth anniversary, one writer analyzes the magazine’s vision, business model, and what place this globalist outlet has in an age of increasing nationalism.

Publishing asks women — but not men — to be nice, as well as talented. Should we ask men to be more nice, or give women the leeway to be less so?

Twenty-five years after its debut, here is the story of an independent newspaper in Seattle that spawned Dan Savage and won a Pulitzer Prize.

“A new book is like a new brand of detergent,” Jacqueline Susann famously said. “You have to let the public know about it. What’s wrong with that?”

Over at New York magazine, Boris Kachka has a piece looking at how the tiny, Minnesota-based Graywolf Press became a major player in book publishing. As the publisher of books like Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (read the first chapter here!) and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Graywolf Press has helped turn “the previously unprepossessing genre of the ‘lyric essay’ into a major […]

In 1987, a young Nikki Finke profiled the “Literary Brat Pack” (choice Brat Pack members included Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney, of Less Than Zero and Bright Lights, Big City fame, respectively) for The Los Angeles Times.

Subject matter can be almost self-consciously esoteric. The latest issue of Ernest includes a piece by Queen guitarist Brian May on diableries (19th-century stereoscopic photographs of clay model demons). Cereal has 10 pages on Anglepoise lamps; Avaunt has a feature headlined “Politics of map projections”. The new magazines also move away from the traditional “colonial” […]

Here are pieces I’ve enjoyed, new and old, about the art and business of book cover design.

The magazine was concerned about leaks and took security measures “every step of the way,” including on the photo shoot [where they hired security and confiscated cellphones], in the VF editorial office and at the printing plant for the upcoming issue. The story and pictures were done on a single computer that was never connected […]

“Though Alice said that her sister had never written the book, for years Harper told Tom Radney that it was near completion. In 1997, Radney told a newspaper reporter, “I still talk to Nelle twice a year, and every time we talk, she says she’s still working on it.” Madolyn Radney told me that while […]

Dear Thief is, without a doubt, stronger and more raw, the book her fans knew she could write. But just when the world should have behaved as if it had been waiting for that very novel to arrive, Harvey’s career seemed to lose momentum. Her editor Dan Franklin explains, a little despairingly, that “the really […]

She published a short story in The New Yorker in 1992, then seemed to all but disappear. How author Katherine Heiny took her sweet time on the path toward publishing her new story collection.

You know who else loved Shakespeare and Company and who wasn’t a writer with skin in the game? Frank Sinatra—according, that is, to Ed Walters, a former pit boss at the Sands, in Las Vegas, who was taken under Sinatra’s wing in the 1960s and offered this account for a forthcoming history the store plans […]

The iOS app, pending improvements, still might catch on, but if it doesn’t, we’ll have to figure out how to try to keep those subscribers as we fold them back into the original distribution system. We’re also in talks with an established indie publishing house, trying to figure out whether doing a handful of print […]

Cheri Lucas Rowlands | Longreads | Oct. 2 2014 | 10 minutes (2,399 words)   Three years ago, Sarah Menkedick launched Vela Magazine in response to the byline gender gap in the publishing industry, and to create a space that highlights excellent nonfiction written by women. Last week, Menkedick and her team of editors launched a Kickstarter campaign to grow […]

My boss when I worked in London—someone who’d published Booker Prize winners, remember—used to say that two-thirds of publishing is about failure. I agree with that: it’s the nature of the business. And yet publishing is an industry that keeps attracting to it, in various ways, people who want it to be two-thirds about success. […]

Entitlement operates at a more basic and often unconscious level. It’s a kind of defensive snobbery, a delusion that the world and its constituent parts—whether a product or a piece of art or a loved one—exist to please you. This is why I often find it disheartening to eavesdrop on people at the annual Association […]

Emily Gould | Friendship | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | July 2014 | 8 minutes (1,893 words)   Below is the opening chapter of Friendship, the new novel by Emily Gould, who we’ve featured often on Longreads in the past. Thanks to Gould and FSG for sharing it with the Longreads community. You can purchase the full book […]

In 2008 I sold a book-in-progress for $200,000 ($170,000 after commission, to be paid in four installments), which still seems to me like a lot of money. At the time, though, it seemed infinite. The resulting book—a “paperback original,” as they’re called—has sold around 8,000 copies, which is about a fifth of what it needed […]

Several editors, agents, and authors told me that the money for serious fiction and nonfiction has eroded dramatically in recent years; advances on mid-list titles—books that are expected to sell modestly but whose quality gives them a strong chance of enduring—have declined by a quarter. These are the kinds of book that particularly benefit from […]