The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Ken Wissoker:

I'm a university press publisher (Duke), and I'm with the WSJ (for maybe the only time). A lot of the public space for reviews in the new york times -- or even in publisher's weekly -- and in chain bookstores that was available to us through the mid-nineties is now gone. As a much less influential publisher at that time, we had NYT books of the year. Look at last year's books of the year list -- all trade publishers. It is a common place in the industry that for real trade, 2% of the books make the money to support the rest -- and thus get 98% of the marketing muscle. Then there is too much at stake with those books for ad-dependent media to ignore them. I'm grateful to be at a non-profit where the point is how smart someone's intervention is, rather than a place where even the okay sellers have to sell about four times as many as the equivalent okay sellers of 1985. Trade publishers are judged by how many of those blockbusters they can bring in. That doesn't mean there aren't okay sellers, but they aren't the point, the blockbusters are.

Comment statistics for Ken Wissoker on the Making Light blog

Total: 1 comments. View all these comments on a single page.