This looks perfect
(Source: via http://shopruche.blogspot.com/)
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Poetry at its best is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak.
—Jim Harrison, from his essay “Poetry as Survival” in Just Before Dark: Collected Nonfiction (Clark City Press, 1991)
(via apoetreflects)
Two reasons why not to self-publish your book
Confession: I am an advocate of self-publishing. I have been for years. But my views are changing on the matter due to the glut of poorly written self-published books being released each year. Serendipitously, I found this article in the London Evening Standard that offers two reasons why not to self-publish: 1) publishers and 2) editors.
Authors need publishers more than ever when there are so many voices out there competing for our attention. As Horowitz rightly says, the main raison d’être of a publisher is to provide the author with a skilful editor who can turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse.
Editors are the midwives of great literature. T S Eliot’s The Wasteland wouldn’t have been the masterpiece it is if it hadn’t been edited by Ezra Pound and his wife, Vivien.
The death of publishing is greatly exaggerated. We will still need publishers as long as we read books, just as we still need critics to review those books. It is part of the great filtering process of literature and culture. (link: Self-publishing makes us think we can write)
Any questions?
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My exasperation about the cowardly evasiveness of our mainstream press drives me to think that if people in general knew more about history they’d be more likely to demand more honorable governments.
—Robert Wyatt, BOMB 115, 2011
Judging a book by its cover
For me, every book cover I design begins with pencil sketches that eventually lead to ink drawings. Actually, I suppose it begins prior to that. The author receives a pre-publication questionnaire from me prior to the design process. The questionnaire asks the author what is his/her elevator pitch, what are the pillars of the book (i.e. what are three main concepts/ideas in the book?), and what is the book’s key audience? There are more questions that help me prepare for the design process, but reading through that document helps me form an idea of who the author is, what the book is about and how best to represent the book’s content with an attractive cover.
Then I receive the manuscript a few weeks later and begin reading the author’s work. This helps try to envision in my mind an iconic poster image. For me, a book cover is the equivalence of a film poster. At this stage, I produce some concept drawings (like the one’s pictured) and research color schemes and subject themes that I plan to use in the cover design. After a couple rounds of emails with the author, I proceed to the full-color design phase.
The full-color design is often photographic, as in the case of this sample, but can also feature illustrated work or typographic designs. An illustrated cover is sent to a freelance artist who spends a week or so producing the cover art. The final cover design pulls together all the elements (art, photo, type and copy) to present a cover that, in theory, sells a 1000 to 3000 copies on face value. I know what you’re thinking, but books really are judged by their covers. Just watch people at a bookstore. They’re scanning covers before they even pick up a book to read the back copy blurb or open a book to read the first few chapters. If a book has amateurish art or less than professional photography, the audience will move to the next book cover that has great photography or stunning artwork. Further, if a book has poor quality cover art, it will be represented in poor book sales. Let me say it again: if a book has crappy cover art, the book will have crappy sales. No reader wants a crappy book on their bookshelf or e-reader. Half the battle for a reader’s attention is getting him/her to pick the book from the shelf. The same applies to e-book stores. Readers are scanning covers from the Kindle or Nook e-stores and deciding, based on cover design and book blurb, what title to purchase.
From the time the final cover is approved until the product arrives is six to eight weeks depending on circumstances. That’s when the real test of a book’s cover design and interior content begin. And that’s about the time I begin the next round of cover designs.
Literary reading series continues at Posana Cafe this weekend
Saturday night, March 17, 6:00 p.m. at Posana Cafe in downtown Asheville, NC. The literary reading features writer Elizabeth Lutyens and poet Tina Barr.
From a press release:
Elizabeth Lutyens teaches the Prose Master Class in the Great Smokies Writing Program of UNC Asheville and is Editor of The Great Smokies Review, its online literary journal. A former journalist, she got her MFA in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College, and since has been at work on a novel set in the mid-19th century in Boston and the Port Royal Islands of South Carolina.
Tina Barr has received Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Tennessee Arts Commission and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Her awards include the Editor’s Prize for book publication from Tupelo Press. Her poems are published in anthologies and journals like The Harvard Review, The Southern Review and The Paris Review.
Gen-Yers changing the workplace
Gen-Yers are using their personal networks and profiles as an extension of their professional personality. Even though they are using Facebook to mostly socialize with family and friends, they are inadvertently blending the two. Sixty-four percent of Gen-Y fails to list their employer on their profiles, yet they add an average of 16 co-workers each to their “friend” group.
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As the trend frenzy deepens, we can see that fashion is no longer about style and self-expression: it is primarily about judgement – self-judgement and judgement of others.
(via somethingchanged)2
NOTES:
1) “The Tyranny of Trends,” Etsy, 2011, accessed March 9, 2012, https://www.etsy.com/blog/2011/the-tyranny-of-trends (page no longer available)
2) Something Changed, accessed March 9, 2012, https://www.somethingchanged.com.au/post/8515000829 (page no longer available)
Literature takes a habit of mind that has disappeared. It requires silence, some form of isolation, and sustained concentration in the presence of an enigmatic thing.
Philip Roth (via libraryland)
To elevate the soul, poetry is necessary.
Edgar Allan Poe (via bookoasis)
True Blue quotes artist Vadim Bora.
Combatting Writer’s Block like A Master
Illiteracy in America
44 million adults in the U.S. can’t read well enough to read a simple story to a child.
National Adult Literacy Survey (via firstbook)
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A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others.
~Leo Rosten (via solitudeandsolicitude)
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You can walk the same path every day—most days it’s not especially memorable—but every now and then something happens that’s incredibly memorable.
—Eve Sussman, BOMB 117, 2011
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When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind.
~Michel de Montaigne (via libraryland)
The Origin of Titles
It is amusing that modern readers have been spared the lengthy title of the 1859 first edition:
ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES.
OR THE PRESERVATION OF FAVOURED RACES IN THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE.
hm?
British scientists have found scores of fossils the great evolutionary theorist Charles Darwin and his peers collected but that had been lost for more than 150 years (via libraryland)
Coffeehouse Junkie 