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Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week:
Reading Kevin Kelly’s “Everything I Know About Self-Publishing,” I kept thinking about my agent’s first principle: “All publishing is self-publishing.” No matter what route you take, you always have to think like a self-publisher. (If you look at Kevin’s flowchart, you’ll notice the first question is: “Do you have an audience?” If you don’t have one, you have to find one. How do you do that? Show your work! )
Some fun publishing stories: The Onion’s bet on print is paying off, David Epstein’s new book about how constraints make us better (I loved his last book, Range), a book of portraits of artist lofts, a book of people guilty about stealing rocks (via), and cartoonist Box Brown is Kickstartering a graphic novel about the history of the podcast WTF with Marc Maron. (I told you how great Brown’s work is in my letter about nostalgia, “These are the good ol’ days.”)
You can find just as much publishing inspiration in the past as in the present, which is one reason I like reading Anne Trubek’s newsletter Notes From A Small Press. Anne often shares interesting stuff from the history of publishing, like the origins of copyright law in the US, how American publishing is based upon stealing books, and whether you own the book you wrote.
I’m working on the copyedits for my book that isn’t coming out until next summer, thinking about how glacially slow the publishing process can be, and how grateful I am for this newsletter, where I can have an idea, share it with y’all, and get instant feedback. Somehow this weekly missive has over 300,000 readers?!? Amazing. Because I’m often asked, here are my 3 tips for writing a newsletter:
My 3 tips for self-editing: the best editor is you… tomorrow, print your work out and edit it by hand, and record the audiobook before you finish the manuscript!
I’m a pretty big Bob Dylan fan, so it took a while to work up to watching A Complete Unknown. You know what? It’s pretty good. (Chased it with Don’t Look Back, which is one of my all-time favorites.) Something I think gets a little overlooked in the story of Dylan going electric: his first albums didn’t sell all that much, but the covers of his songs by people like The Byrds and Peter, Paul, and Mary made him a millionaire. One could argue that his publishing gave him a bit of “screw you” money to do what he wanted to do. (More on the subject in Dylan Goes Electric!)
How to read like Terry Gross. (I do a bit of dog-earing myself, but as I noted in Read Like an Artist, I prefer to read with a dark, soft pencil like a Musgrave 600 News, not a pen.)
Edward Gorey in Texas?!? My 10-year-old is one of the world’s biggest Edward Gorey fans, so it turns out we’re driving to Colle