I have a confession that might sound strange coming from a publisher: I sometimes buy books because of their covers, before I know anything about the content. I’m not alone in this. Despite the old saying about not judging books… Read more →

A few months ago, I found myself in a conversation at a book fair with a publisher from South Korea. We were comparing notes on what sells in our respective markets, and I was struck by how different our experiences… Read more →

If you work in publishing long enough, you learn that the bestseller list is a lousy indicator of what actually keeps a publishing house alive. The books that get the most attention, the buzzy new releases, the prize winners, the… Read more →

I read a lot of book reviews. It’s part of my job, obviously, but it’s also a habit I’ve had since college, when I started paying attention to what critics said about books and why. Over the years, I’ve developed… Read more →

I dragged two boxes of books into the back of a rented minivan at 6:15 on a Saturday morning last November, and I remember thinking: is this worth it? The local book fair didn’t start until nine. We’d be setting… Read more →

Someone declares the book dead about once every eighteen months. It’s become a kind of cultural ritual, like predicting the end of the world or announcing that rock music is finished. A think piece appears. It cites declining attention spans,… Read more →

My home library almost killed my marriage. That’s an exaggeration, but only slightly. About five years ago, I had somewhere north of 800 books spread across every room in our house. Stacked on nightstands. Piled on the dining table. Crammed… Read more →

I read about 200 manuscripts a year. Most of them don’t get published. That sentence sounds brutal, and I don’t mean it to be, but it’s the truth, and I think aspiring authors deserve the truth more than they deserve… Read more →

I was twenty-two years old, fresh out of college with an English degree and a conviction that publishing was where I belonged. My internship at a small literary press started on a Tuesday in September. By Friday, I had paper… Read more →

We published a book last year that took its author eleven years to write. Eleven years. That’s longer than most marriages, longer than the entire run of some television series, longer than some of our interns have been alive. When… Read more →