Front Edge
Publishing
Your Ideas Take Flight
Editor David Crumm writes about the power in the community that surrounds a good book. We take seriously these principles in talking with authors about book proposals. It’s true: “Great books welcome readers into worlds they hope to see.”
The answer is: Yes! That is, if you don’t want to wake up as the author of a brand-new book full of embarrassing errors. Our director of production Dmitri Barvinok writes, this week, about the many reasons you’ll sleep sounder and wake up refreshed as an author—if you’ve got talented copy editors on your side!
Why do we emphasize the need to release new books in all of the major eBook formats? Our Director of Production Dmitri Barvinok explains the basics of this important phase of our work, including examples from Kindle to Kobo about the unique reach of various devices and platforms. Yes, eBook sales have declined as an overall share of book sales, but millions of Americans still are buying and reading in these digital formats.
The New Year 2019 dawns with wonderful news in American publishing: Book sales continue to grow each year. There’s not a better time to write and publish a book. However—the “December squeeze” that publishers have experienced in recent years became a December crisis as 2018 drew to a close. In this column, Editor David Crumm writes about nationwide book-production problems at the holidays.
Our Director of Production Dmitri Barvinok continues our Metadata 101 exploration of publishing by explaining the ubiquitous—yet little understood—ISBN. They’re on every book you buy, but the purpose and rules for using ISBNs are among the more arcane mysteries of publishing. Dmitri unlocks that realm to help authors (and readers) understand a lot more about what those numbers can tell us about a book.