Happy Colonial Oppression Day, America! Or is that Columbus Day? I can’t keep up with you crazy kids.
My editorial note for today: just as we have to stop thinking that other people in our business are our friends (they’re just our colleagues, which you find out pretty quickly when you try to be actual friends with 99% of them), we also have to stop thinking of the even-more-distant publishers (or employers for many of us) as reflective of our views. They are not our pals, no matter how many free books and nice cards your editors send you. The publisher will go where the money goes. PRH may be made up of left-leaning, art-focused do-gooders like us, at least at the bottom, but up there on 12, the boardroom is answering to shareholders and a bottom line. And that’s why we have a giant amoeba that wants to publish a piece of bacterial shit like Peterson, and we’re the ones who will end up with The Scoots.
- Story of the day: totally unsurprising thing happens! Well, that’s what amoebae do: then envelop. Publishing’s The Blob, coming through!
- Speaking of PRH gobbling up everything: Jordan Peterson is back, like herpes, and it looks like his publisher is a tool, too:
- Staff are upset this was hidden from them;
- PRH has fingers in ears going: LALALALALA!;
- The Age in Oz covers the dilemma publishers face when they sign douchebag authors;
- Audio book news:
- British Library apologizes to Ted Hughes… No word if he’s accepted;
- All PRH all the time? They’re going full-hog with Spanish publishing;
- Aw… Let’s publish all wee the kiddie’s lockdown stories so they get a sense of how easy it is to live as a writer;
- BookRiot confesses their bad reading habits to make us all feel better;
- LitHub offers a decent primer of Yeats quotes in pop culture;
- When romance novelists attack;
Bookninja 