In an article on the Columbia Journalism Review website Ryan Chittum takes on a spate of recent tech posts “arguing that production costs (you know, minor details like advances, editors, etc.) don’t or shouldn’t factor into the end price” of an ebook. He wags his…
There’s a long tradition of scathing notes sent by writers to proofreaders and copy editors. Raymond Chandler, writing to a copy editor at the Atlantic Monthly in 1947, told her that ‘When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will…
“There is no such thing as the literary establishment. I know this because I am part of it,” writes Geoff Dyer in a Guardian essay. But why not just try and define what we mean by “establishment” since we’ve all used the term? (Including, as quoted in the…
Rebecca Swift is the founder of Britain’s first and leading manuscript assessment service, The Literary Consultancy, established in 1996. She talked to MobyLives about the many different paths to publication and changes in publishing over the past 20 years. MOBY: The publishing landscape is very…
It’s a Christmas miracle: Cambridge University Press is allowing us to see what the original manuscript of Great Expectations looked like. As The Guardian reports, it’s a charming, labyrinthine mess of corrections and crossings out: Looking at that thick…
Designer, critic, and painter Peter Campbell, best known for his contributions to the London Review of Books—which included a biweekly watercolor for the magazine’s cover and a review—died October 25 in London from cancer. He was 74. In a tribute, LRB editor Mary-Kay Wilmers writes…
Remember the surprisingly unsurprising news from the New York Times way back in January, that fewer than 15% of Wikipedia contributors were women? Then there was the even more depressing report from the Wikimedia Foundation itself, which confirmed that the figure for editors was less…
According to a report on Discovery.com, male editors of early drafts of the Bible made a rather startling cut, according to several Biblical scholars: They cut almost all mention that God — Yahweh — had a wife. The theory was first proposed by historian Raphael…
One of the saddest stories that took place during our August hiatus was the suicide of The Virginia Quarterly Review managing editor Kevin Morrissey, allegedly as a result of workplace bullying by editor-in-chief Ted Genoways. The story felt even sadder because not so long ago…
One of the mantras of the DIY and cost-cutting forces assaulting publishing these days is that editors are “an unnecessary step in the content process,” observes ibm.com editor in chief James Matthewson in this commentary on Digital Book World. “All they do is make it…
