The bestselling young adult author wrote her first published novel on a BlackBerry while commuting. Now she has a fan base ardent enough to complain about the way she ended one bookLauren Oliver, a bestselling young adult writer whose latest book, Vanishing Girls, was published in the US last week, did not set out to write for teenagers – not originally. In fact, when she started out she wrote more than one novel for adults that she simply couldn’t sell to publishers. Talking about that early work, she is her own toughest critic: she calls the manuscripts “long” and “plotless”. “I kept getting the same feedback,” she said, “which was the writing was very good and the characters were great, but there was no story whatsoever.”Oliver is the daughter of English professors, and she’d attended the MFA program in creative writing at New York University. But, she says, for a long time, publishers’ feedback on her early work puzzled her: “It was honestly a criticism I didn’t totally understand.” Nothing in her background, she said, had prepared her to wield the mechanics of story. It took a job in a young adult division of Penguin to teach her that, where training under editors she learned the basics of structure. And it taught her “to tell a story, not just write character description and pretty sentences and stuff”. Continue reading... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'
[ The Guardian | 2015-03-19 00:00:00 UTC ]
At a gala awards ceremony at New York University's Kimmel Center on Wednesday, the Independent Book Publishers Association named the Gold winners for the 2014 Benjamin Franklin Awards, which recognize “excellence in book editorial and design.” Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2014-05-31 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Norwegian author of The Bookseller of Kabul turns her attention home for 'the hardest book I have ever written'The award-winning Norwegian journalist Åsne Seierstad, best known for her account of an Afghan family living under the Taliban, The Bookseller of Kabul, has turned her attention to a... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2014-02-07 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Robert Gates’ Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War, is the most peculiar book of its kind that I’ve read in a long time, maybe ever. It’s a fascinating, briskly honest account of one dyspeptic yet steely man’s journey through the cutthroat corridors of Washington and world politics, with shrewd,... Continue reading at Slate
[ Slate | 2014-01-15 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Last week, Adweek wrote about a Dartmouth study on mobile advertising (Top 7 Reasons Why Mobile Ads Don't Work). Curt Hecht, chief global revenue at Weather, came back with a few reason why they do. Adweek: People often knock mobile ads, particularly display ads. It seems tough for the average... Continue reading at AdWeek
[ AdWeek | 2013-10-24 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Are digital sellers undermining the move to automated buying? For a long time, online publishers have worried that the shift to programmatic would undercut their premium business. Some have even created their own private exchanges and are c ... Continue reading at Editor & Publisher
[ Editor & Publisher | 2013-10-15 00:00:00 UTC ]
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The Internet can often feel like a cesspool of bad intentions, casual cruelty, and hopeless ignorance. Which is why a social networking site like CaringBridge, which allows sick people and their families to give their communities updates on their illnesses, gives us hope for humanity. The site... Continue reading at Fast Company
[ Fast Company | 2013-10-11 00:00:00 UTC ]
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For the first time in a long time some optimism is returning to the publishing industry. Circulation numbers and revenues were decimated by the rise of the internet and while the future for print still looks shaky, the companies behind newspapers and ... Continue reading at Editor & Publisher
[ Editor & Publisher | 2013-05-28 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Can we exploit the fact that life is unpredictable, chaotic, full of shocks and disasters? Trader-turned-scholar Nassim Nicholas Taleb is based at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University and the University of Oxford. His latest book is Antifragile: How To Live in a World We Don't... Continue reading at Slate
[ Slate | 2012-12-02 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Written By: Charlotte Williams Publication Date: Fri, 19/08/2011 - 10:20 Allison & Busby has acquired two books by Swedish crime-writer Kjell Eriksson, both featuring his series' heroine Inspector Ann Lindell. Publishing director Susie Dunlop bought UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-08-19 00:00:00 UTC ]
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