Hey, folks! We’re again stumped by a cover in the New Yorker covers contest, and we’re again too impatient to wait for the answer! (And by we, I mean me.) Can anyone tell us what #4 is? (And if you know all, go tell the New Yorker and maybe you’ll win yourself a new book!)

-Lauren

UPDATE: The New Yorker has put me out of my misery! I’ll link to rather than posting the answer, in case anyone wants to belatedly play along.

Is there a way in which my architectural history degree assists me in doing my job as a literary agent? Um…no. But two of my favorite things come together in this article about great library staircases in the United States. Off to figure out a good reason to stop by Caltech’s Astronomy library other than just to walk up and down the stairs…

-Jim

It seems to me in these days of publishing’s troubled economy, that authors are suffering more than they should. I know editors are busier than ever as their numbers dwindle and they are asked to do more. But they seem to be forgetting one very important thing about our business. A publisher’s bottom line is directly affected by the quality of the material produced by their authors, and this work is dependent on the communication between editors and authors and the former’s valuable editorial feedback.

My clients often ask me — after their book is sold and their contract signed — when they will hear from their editors. Many don’t until they turn in their completed manuscript. I really think this is a shame as the lack of guidance can diminish the quality of the final book and ultimately the publisher’s bottom line.

My message is a very simple one here – editors need to make it their business to contact their authors immediately upon acquiring their books and be in touch throughout the writing process. These communications needn’t take a lot of time, but they will indicate interest and caring and I am certain they will also improve the quality of the final product.

– Jane

Recently I was poking about on the website for This American Life, the altogether brilliant public radio show and now HBO television show that is one of the only things that tempts me toward faithlessness–in thought if not deed–toward book publishing. (Book publishing and public radio—apparently I don’t even fantasize about career-cheating with a high-paying job). In any case, I happened upon their submission guidelines. Although these are tailored to the demands of a radio show with a very distinctive sensibility (anyone who’s never listened should give it a try) they struck me as pertinent to book projects, especially memoir.

Memoir is a tricky category, one that I love but one in which the bar for writing is high and the demand for platform still higher. If you’re not already famous, or a participant in the Real Housewives/Dancing with Stars/America’s Top Model franchises, persuading a publisher to take a chance on your own story can be challenging. Despite the ubiquity of reality shows, not every person poised to write a personal narrative has a tv deal (yet), which means that for those people brave enough to wade into a sodden market that editors politely call “saturated,” not only had you better write very, very, very well, but do so in service of a story in which the whole is somehow greater than the sum of its parts. So how, exactly, does this mathemagical equation work?

I thought This American Life’s submission guidelines came up with a pretty good answer: They write:

“The material we most often reject is writing that lacks a narrative. A lot of it is good, vivid writing, but without a real story to it. Often it’s recollections about some person the writer knew, or some time in their own lives. Often there are interesting anecdotes, but without any driving question, or real conflict. There’s nothing bigger at issue and nothing surprising revealed. In many of these stories, the characters are all the same at the end of the story as they were at the beginning. No one learns anything. No one changes.”

Why yes, I thought.

Elsewhere on the site, in an amusing essay in which she talks about having her own work rejected repeatedly from This American Life, regular contributor Hilary Frank writes; “Specifically, This American Life is looking for stories with two main elements: the narrative action, or plot (in which one thing happens to the characters, and then another, and then another), and moments of reflection (where someone says something surprising about what the story might mean).”

Yes again.

Like most every piece of writing featured on the show, this is well said. They want work that has drama, that surprises, that toggles between the personal and the universal, and is also very, very well written. The fact that many of their contributors—David Sedaris, Sarah Vowell, Shalom Auslander—are successful published writers seems to indicate that these parameters translate well to the printed page.

Perhaps the model above is not the only one that works for memoirs, but the advice seemed to me well worth sharing. You can check it out in greater (perhaps excruciating) detail at http://www.thislife.org/About_Submissions.aspx.

–Jessica

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Whatever you think about “issues” fiction, here’s an interesting interview with Jodi Picoult.

— Miriam

Kindle fever aside, some authors just don’t want their books published electronically. Here’s an interesting wrap-up of some of the more notable hold-outs.

-Jim

In this week’s PW, publisher Jon Karp wrote a great piece about the 12 things publishing needs to work on. It’s definitely worth reading, and though it’s funny at times, much of the advice is right on.

Even funnier, Dan Menaker’s response, which I found through the HarperStudio blog. Yes, dear readers, these are the sort of things that amuse us.

– Michael

So The New Yorker has posted a contest to identify some book covers from pretty small details. This week’s is a lot harder than last week’s, and we’re a bit shorthanded around here today. Miriam and I are way too impatient to wait for the answers to be revealed, and we’ve only got 2 & 4 down. Head over there, check ’em out–if you think you know them, by all means enter to win–and then come back here and put us out of our misery!

-Lauren

UPDATE: You guys are awesome. We knew we could count on you!

The timing will probably seem odd, what with #AmazonFail and all, but I’ve taken the plunge and ordered a Kindle 2. I managed to not order one on the day of the announcement(impressive self-control on my part, really). I didn’t order one right after I got to play with the samples that the Kindle team brought to our office. But, events in my life conspired to convince me that now is the time. It arrives on Friday, and I have a feeling I’ll spend more on books this weekend than I have in the past 6 months. I’ll let you know.

Speaking of #AmazonFail, I think I’m the only one who didn’t see it as some vast conspiracy to rid the world of gay literature. Amazon likes making money, and it seemed to me that flagging all gay-related books as “adult” and unrankable was a quick way to lose money. Maybe I’m naive, but the whole situation seemed more like a “glitch” (though that’s rather dismissive) than a purge.

Also, can we stop using “Fail?” It drives me nuts!

– Michael

A few evenings ago I was talking with an editor who described, quite beautifully, the plot of a novel that he had recently acquired. In doing so, he used the word “reify,” which is a wonderful word, but one that seldom shows up in flap copy–usual suspects being adjectives like “luminous,” “compelling,” “masterful,” etc. I said as much, and he laughed good-naturedly, and said that as an assistant (at a venerable and highly serious house, mind you) a marketing director had nixed his use of the adjective “Swiftian” in a book description. I could relate. My first week of work as an editorial assistant, I marveled at the erudition of the editors around me who described the project under discussion, a proposal for a book on meditation, as “very much in the vein of Thomas More.” Impressive. In the meeting minutes, which I was taking, I carefully noted the comparison title was the political tract Utopia by the sixteenth century English saint/statesman, which (fortuitously!) I had had to read in service of a survey course. And not, however, Care of the Soul, the New York Times bestseller published a year or so earlier by super-successful spirituality author Thomas Moore. This entry on the widely-circulated minutes earned me some funny looks from my colleagues, plus a gentle but firm recommendation from my boss that I should start updating my comp title frame of reference. Fast.

This was, in fact, not the only moment in which I suspected I might be ill-served by my alternate life as a graduate student in literature. When I had first interviewed for the position assisting an editor who managed the women’s fiction list, I had earnestly expounded on my favorite feminist writers; I cited a veritable Norton anthology of names, which grew longer and more frantic as I noted the editor’s increasingly bemused expression. When she explained that the kind of women’s fiction she was talking about was mostly romance and romantic suspense, I believe I may have mumbled something about reading Gone with the Wind, but probably retreated into stricken silence. How it was that she hired me, I’m not sure. In any case, working in women’s fiction was as good a starting point as any to discover that the business of acquiring books and the business of studying them, did not, apparently, have much to do with one another. As it became obvious that what I had thought would be a felicitous overlap in interdependent fields were in fact two divergent career paths, I took a semester off from the doctoral program, cast my lot with Thomas Moore, and never looked back. Until, that is, the other evening when the editor with whom I was talking used the word “reify.”

Whenever I run across it, in a reaction either Proustian or Pavlovian, I am instantly transported back to the days when, as a distraction from wrestling with the works of theorists whose books appeared to be in English but were not, I kept a running list of words that seldom occur outside of graduate school. My favorite was “reify,” but others included “problematic” when used as a noun, or “problemetize” (a verb); “vexed” (usually describing an idea), e.g.”The narrative is a vexed one…” foreground” but only as a verb, as in “I’d like to foreground the problematic…”and “fraught” but only when unaccompanied by “with,” as in “The text is fraught.”

Proust had his madeleine cakes and I have my grad-school word list. I wonder if anyone else out there has such nostalgic associations with particular words–if so, I’d love to hear them.

Speaking of nostalgia, I just read Joanna Smith Rakoff’s wonderful debut novel, A Fortunate Age. The book, published by Scribner, is an updating of and homage to Mary McCathy’s The Group, set against the rise and resounding “pop” of the dot com bubble in New York–an era when 24-year-old new media millionaires were poster children for an economy freed from antiquated, mellow-harshing rules, and Williamsburg Brooklyn was the locus of a self-conscious hipsterism and attendant abuse of trucker hats. She captures a time and place I remember well with dead-on accuracy. I’m curious to know if folks reading this have their own nominees for books that capture the zeitgeist of a particular time and place.