Dystel, Goderich & Bourret » organizing

Back to School!

sharon — Tue, 06 Sep 2016 18:46:03 +0000

The week after Labor Day has a bit of a back-to-school feeling in publishing. Agents and editors are settling back into their desks after the long weekend, saying goodbye to Summer Fridays and getting going on submissions again after the quiet, vacation-heavy month of August. There’s excitement in the air about all the big fall books coming out—DGLM has seven books out today alone!—and everyone is looking forward to the busy, productive three months between now and the winter holidays. My inbox is full of manuscripts from clients who’ve been busy bees over the summer!

As an aspiring Kathleen Kelly, back-to-school season also gets me hankering after new pens and pencils, new notebooks and binders. Even if I don’t strictly neeeeeeeed them, it’s fun to kick off fall with a trip to the office store—convincing myself, of course, that new post-its will be the key to staying organized and efficient during the busy weeks to come. And DGLM is lucky enough to be located directly above a Staples, so this is an easy whim to indulge!

Anyone else find themselves picking out new office supplies long after their school days are over? What are your favorite tools for staying organized when you hit your busy season?

The bookshelf project: part 2

Stacey — Wed, 08 Jun 2016 19:53:07 +0000

After posting about the recent arrival of my long awaited built-in bookshelves, and getting some great feedback from our readers, family, and friends, I finally embarked upon the multi-hour project and wanted to share the end result (still a work-in-progress) here:

To give you some more information about the strategy (and it was discussed extensively before the project began as well as throughout the endeavor!), I’ll share how it all played out. We started by unpacking books from boxes as well as taking off of shelves from my office one copy of each of the books I’ve sold during my almost eighteen years at DGLM.

We then labeled the shelves with post-its indicating which category of books would go into which shelves. The broad sections include adult fiction, cookbooks, illustrated/craft, practical nonfiction, narrative nonfiction, and children’s. For categories where we had more books, we used more shelves. For the cookbooks, we divided them into sections: general, vegetarian/vegan, and baking and then alphabetized them within the section. Then we filled in the two top shelves with foreign editions of my titles.

We mixed the style of display with horizontal and vertical and left a few books standing up and facing out, and then filled in some blank spaces with decorative touches and picture frames. At that point, we’d filled ten of the fourteen sections, and the other four sections we used for additional cookbooks, miscellaneous awesome books (Hamilton!), and my beloved large and growing collection of books signed by the author, which includes mostly children’s books (I’m that person who will go to an author event with or without my children to get a signed book!) and a few celebrity titles.

I have a lot more books that I’ve read and collected over the years, but I didn’t want to pack the shelves too tight so I could leave room for more of my own titles to fill in. At some point I’ll get another large bookcase which I’ll put in a different room to house the others, but for now I’m happy my living room bookshelf project is finally complete.

Please let me know what you think and if you have any suggestions for changes or improvements!

The New Year’s purge

John — Thu, 14 Jan 2016 21:48:29 +0000

It’s a new year, and in the Rudolph house that means it’s time to get rid of clutter. I think we do a January cleaning, rather than Spring or Fall Cleaning, because we’ve just come back from the holidays in Maine crammed into a car that’s inevitably jam-packed with oversized kids’ presents and new clothes from the Freeport outlets, and all we want to do is find room for the new stuff in our too-small New York apartment–the only solution for which is to purge the old stuff.

So, for the past two weeks, we’ve been clearing out every closet, cabinet, and bookcase, bagging clothes for Goodwill, bringing books to schools, and scrubbing down the general grunge in the kitchen. I can’t really say it’s been fun, particularly getting rid of the old clothes that I know I’ll never wear but liked to see in my closet just because… But the results are worth it–it’s nice to be able to actually see the back of my closet for a change, and not have a 3-foot pile of books on my desk, either.

And coincidentally or not, recently I feel like I’ve been asking a bunch of my authors to do a lot of purging in their manuscripts as well. I know I’ve used the phrase “kill your darlings” at least three times in recent weeks, and I’ve had conversations with writers about getting out of the corners they’ve written themselves into. Now, darling killing and getting out of corners are always necessary, no matter what time of year. But I wonder–do writers have seasons or preferred times of the year when they feel more inclined to trim the fat and solve lingering problems?

Well… do you?

Winter cleaning

mhoogland — Tue, 24 Nov 2015 18:06:28 +0000

If you’re anything like me, you have too many books—a disappointing number of which remain unread. Books fill my apartment. They are on my coffee table. Spilling out of a floor-to-ceiling bookcase (because the last one couldn’t cut it and literally collapsed from the weight). Littered across my bedroom and on my desk. So when I came across Jessica Pryde’s Book Riot blog post about cleaning up her bookshelves it really struck a chord.

Usually around this time of year I like to set aside time to do a little housecleaning. And I don’t think I can overemphasize “little” enough. I simply take a few boxes and fill them with all the books I’ve never read and have admitted to myself that I will never read, plus those books which I’ve read and don’t feel the intense need to keep. Then off they go to friends and/or charity. There’s no labeling or organizing involved. My method is a lot less ritualistic than Jessica’s, but her process sounds a lot more effective and fun than my own. I might very well keep it mind this year. Plus, drunk weeding sounds awfully tempting.

How do our readers manage their book collections? Any tips?

Confessions of a digital hoarder

Stacey — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 21:46:34 +0000

Years ago I represented a memoir by a man writing about his mother who had a habit of stealing rocks from famous places around the world. Think Stonehenge. She was a compulsive collector of things, and might today be described as a hoarder. This is a topic of interest, as evidenced by a book Jane represented called The Secret Lives of Hoarders by Matt Paxton, as well as the successful TLC show Hoarding: Buried Alive.

I was intrigued by this recent piece in a Publisher’s Weekly blog by Barbara Vey that talks about digital hoarding. We are all immersed in technology, even those of us who fight against it, and it does threaten at times to take over our life (my client Dr. Larry Rosen talks about these things in his books like iDisorder about the “psychology of technology”).

Just last night, I was trying to share pictures from our vacation in Maine and was so frustrated that we have over 11,000 pictures on our new computer and no way to easily organize them. At last glance, I had over 50,000 e-mails in my in-box!

So, how do you writers handle digital storage when you’re writing? Do you save each draft of a novel, or just the current one? Do you organize by book so you have all your drafts and notes in one place? Do you back it up so you don’t risk deleting or losing your work? I imagine that this is a fear that keeps many writers up at night, the thought of losing your life’s work! And how does it all compare to the days of writing by hand? I recently talked about writers who still work that way, hard copies only, which can lead to a whole other kind of hoarding, not to mention all those trees that give their life for the paper trail.

Please do share your thoughts on digital hoarding, as well as any suggestions you have on organizing your work electronically to avoid it. I, for one, could use some advice!