The Future Of Publishing Blog by Thad McIlroy
September 28th, 2015
In 2008, Heidi Julavits published a marvelous short piece, The Writers in the Silos, a satirical glance at where writing and publishing is headed in “our current conglomerating, lowest-common-denominator, demographically targeted publishing industry.” I fell in love with it and bought the rights to reproduce the article on The Future of Publishing. As it’s buried somewhere at…
September 3rd, 2012
We’ve seen a lot of righteous indignation following David Streitfeld’s recent New York Times article on the occasional practice of paying for positive book reviews on Amazon. I read the story and moved on without giving it much thought: I assumed that everyone knew that the review system on Amazon was rigged.
September 2nd, 2012
Finn Harvor, a Canadian writer and artist living in South Korea, publishes a blog called Conversations in the Book Trade. He’s interviewed Rolf Maurer, publisher of New Star Books, noted journalist Ian Brown, Richard Nash from his Soft Skull days, provocateur Edward Champion and numerous others. Harvor asks each interviewee mostly the same questions and so I found…
May 31st, 2012
Most discussions about the value of metadata move quickly to proclaim that metadata is essential to discoverability. Discoverability is rarely defined: we’re left with the vague sense suggested by its root word “discover”.
May 24th, 2012
I’m moderating a panel tomorrow morning at the annual conference of the Writers’ Union of Canada, being held this year in Vancouver, BC.