be working in publishing, or
"Hire Me, I Can Read."
I do not approve of newspapers' playing little tricks on the rest of the world such as when a New Times Media monthly publishes phony escort service ads to aid local police in "finding" people who use them.
I read that the Sunday Times of London sent manuscripts out to unsuspecting publishers and agents. The reporters were not looking to get their own masterpieces published, but to make a point about how even "good" books can be overlooked by the powers-that-print-on-paper.
The submissions were the first two chapters of two books. Rejection letters numbered 20; acceptance, 1.
So, have you read these 1970s Booker Prize winners?
Stanley Middleton's "Holiday"
and Sir V.S. Naipaul's "In a Free State" (which caught the Nobel Prize in 2001)
The writers' quotes are typical and make them sound rather pompous. The article's writer didn't include anything about whether people in the 70s were perhaps reading bad novels.
Middleton: "People don't seem to know what a good novel is nowadays."
Naipaul: "To see something is well written and appetizingly written takes a lot of talent, and there is not a great deal of that around. With all the other forms of entertainment today, there are very few people around who would understand what a good paragraph is."
Curb Girl: what an urban-based accidental journalist accidentally thinks when she's falling face-first on figurative pavement
1 comment:
yes, you should be in publishing. he is right, though, that many people don't know a good book from a hole in their a**. That's why so many books that are crap get published. I wish that Grove Press was still publishing the stuff it was publishing in the 1960s. They took risks, darnit!
Look at the Oprah scandal, for f's sake. She coos over a book and everyone runs out to buy it, and oh no, it's not a "true" memoir. it's actually fiction. oh my, heavens me, we were duped into believing it was true. and why did Frey change it? because his agent/publisher said it wouldn't sell in fiction, only in biography. what is the world coming to? publish on demand, i think is the way to go.
i will keep my eyes open for pub house jobs. until then, can you babysit? :)
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