Writers Mix Movies and Memoir
It can sometimes feel like films narrate our lives. “Everyone has a movie that has mattered to them in their life,” says writer and editor Ryan W. Bradley, who selfishly “wanted…
The Sad Tale of the Soft Sale: How Book Returns Work and Why You Should Care
Publishers that use print on demand (POD), meanwhile, see lower financial impacts from book returns. Ingram’s POD services, IngramSpark and Lightning Source, for instance, allow publishers to opt for returned…
Agents & Editors: Nicole Aragi
From the May/June 2025 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine
Dismantling the Mother Shelf: Expanding Our Thinking About Women’s Stories of Parenthood
When it comes to the Mother Shelf, it’s tempting to shrug our collective shoulders and say, Well, that’s just how book marketing works. But the uncomfortable truth is that publishers,…
AI Threatens Literary Translation
The etymology of the word translation—“to carry across”—conjures an image of physical labor. It is deeply relational, requiring at least two bodies, those of an author and of the person…
What’s Left Out: The Poems That Haunt a Collection From the Outside
At a dinner table packed with writers and book people at the 2024 Western Carolina University Spring Literary Festival, held in April in Cullowhee, North Carolina, the cofounder of Gold…
HarperCollins is selling their authors’ work to AI tech.
We’re not going to be able to rely on the courts to protect us, seeing as the Authors Guild suit against OpenAI has already been partially defanged by a California…
It’s Time We Added Full Credit Pages to Books
There is an enormous amount of invisible work that is done in publishing. Adding a standard credit page would not be an answer to the various and copious labor problems…
Sell This Book!
Corporate publishing wants to turn all readers into renters. We’re trying to stop them. Maybe you’ve noticed how things keep disappearing—or stop working—when you “buy” them online from big platforms…
Diversity Efforts Lead to Salary Hikes
While professionals of color are hopeful about the wage increases as one step toward addressing these various issues in their workplaces, they remain cautious. “I just want a comfortable working…