I congratulate you, my dear Cornelia, on having acquired the valuable art of writing. How delightful to be enabled by it to converse with an absent friend, as if present! —Thomas Jefferson

She hesitated, and then, impulsively, "I wonder if it would be too much to ask you for your autograph?"

Ralph then attached the Telautograph to his Telephot while the girl did the same. When both instruments were connected he signed his name and he saw his signature appear simultaneously on the machine in Switzerland. —Hugo Gernsback, Ralph 124C 41+ (1911)

I.

On February 27th, Toni Morrison took part in an [...]

When I got my first royalty check from Amazon, I went to my boss at the bar and was like, “Mike, I quit, dude,” and he was like why, and I was like “Look at this check, man,” and he said, “I’d quit too.”

This is what I’m doing now. My three stories that are out have now sold in excess of 93,000 copies, and I have another Kindle Single that I’m working on for later this year, and hopefully working on a book.

Don't you love knowing how much money people make? This is actually really admirable that the Kindle Singles folks are encouraging writers to [...]

Let’s say that after a certain amount of time, probably more than a year (and possibly more than a few), you’ve finished your novel and want to find a publisher; or perhaps at the other extreme, five hours ago you started a high-traffic Tumblr, which people are telling you needs to be made into a printed book. Either way, chances are you’re going to need an agent. Agents are the gatekeepers of publishing, which may seem kind of pointless and inefficient until you understand that these days, agents not only negotiate contracts but often also do the lion’s share of the editorial heavy lifting (leaving actual “editors” more [...]

In a 2005 article about hecklers, Stewart Lee related an anecdote about his fellow stand-up comic Daniel Kitson. "Privately, the debate continues amongst comedians, 'what is Daniel Kitson doing?' Why, many wonder, does he do [small Edinburgh venue] The Stand when he could do the big room at Assembly? Why does he insist on shaking off half the following he has established every couple of years by doing a sensitive story show? Why doesn’t he have a nice haircut? Surely he could afford it now. But Kitson once told me, that after his Perrier nomination, he was doing a run at the Soho theatre. Sitting in a toilet cubicle [...]

Hellzapoppin' in the world of intellectual property rights these days. Lawsuits, corporate flim-flamming, the claims of far-sighted academics and developers, furious authors and artists and the conflicting demands of a sprawling Internet culture have created a gargantuan, multi-directional tug-of-war that will inevitably affect what and how we will be able to read online in the future. Recent developments indicate, amazingly, that there are grounds for hope that the public will in time benefit from the results of this epic tussle.

In 2002, Google began scanning the world's 130 million or so books in preparation for the "secret 'books' project" that eventually became Google Books. In 2004, they began offering [...]

If you didn't get enough of author Sam Lipsyte when he made pork buns here on Cooking the Books, he will be appearing live, starting circa 3 p.m. at, oddly enough, insane sports website Deadspin. Deadspin editor "AJ Daulerio" is promising "stars" for all incoming "Awl commenters." (I don't know what that means!)

If you have anything to do with the book industry, you are probably nauseated by the mere mention of that industry's annual tradeshow, which started on Monday and wraps up today.  But not everyone is some sort of book fanatic—some people just read books and are innocent about the disgusting process that brings them into being, like little children who don't know that babies are generated via fucking. I know this because in the comments on every blog post or news story about book publishing ever, there's that person who asks "But if an author's book doesn't earn out its advance, does he have to give the money back?"

To [...]

When food blogger Monica Gaudio complained to editor Judith Griggs of Cooks Source magazine about the theft of her online article about apple pie, she asked for an apology and a small donation to the Columbia School of Journalism in lieu of payment. The incident never would have made national headlines had Griggs not condescendingly countered that Gaudio should pay her for cleaning up her article. "But honestly Monica," she wrote, in what has turned into a widely mocked meme, "the web is considered 'public domain' and you should be happy we didn’t just 'lift' your whole article and put someone else’s name on it!"

While Griggs' [...]

Oh, so this is what falling in love is like. Lev Grossman, author of The Magicians, which I am now going to buy and read during Tropical Storm Danny this weekend: "There was also a whole chapter about a dragon that I cut out. I didn't cut it out; my editor did. I was like, 'What makes you think the novel is going to be better with less dragons in it?' I guess it didn't advance the plot or some other thing."