When She’s Right, She’s Right

Yesterday, I received an e-mail from a lovely woman named Megan who is connected with the upcoming Wisconsin Book Festival. (I love hearing from readers and new fans.)

Thanks so much for providing a comprehensive list of literary festivals around the US and around the world.  I would like to place a link to your lists on the Wisconsin Book Festival website but I noticed when I was setting up the international link that you have your International Festivals divided by alphabet into Africa-England, France-Wales.  The problem is that Africa is not a country, like England, France, or Wales, and you don’t list any of the other continents that way (Asia, for example, doesn’t get its own listing).  Thanks for hearing me out and thanks again for creating such a great resource.

I do know the difference between a continent and a country, but in setting up BiblioBuffet I made a few decisions that go against . . . would I call it common sense or accuracy? A bit of both, I guess. I made the decision to use this particular continent rather than the country because there were so few festivals. (I also made the decision to use “A” in “A Reading Life” (Nicki Leone’s column title) ahead of “BibliOpinions”—a technically incorrect editorial decision because I did not want a guest column to come ahead of a regular one on the home page—and I can live with it. It is not an error, but a deliberate choice that puts my reason for its choice ahead of Strunk & White’s. In this case.

So it also was with the decision to use “Africa.” However, Megan’s comments made me re-think that, and I decided she was right. Other countries had only one festival so why shouldn’t African countries get the same consideration? Well, now they have. Our International Book Festivals pages are divided into Australia-England and France-Zimbabwe.

I agree with Megan “that Africa and the countries in Africa are misrepresented and lumped together so often, I think it’s important to be careful about it.” And I hereby apologize to South Africa, Kenya and Zimbabwe. They now have their own listings.

In addition, I have updated most of the festival dates (a few even went back to 2009) to reflect the newest information. It took hours yesterday, and I am still not finished. I need to finish the dates, remove defunct festivals, add new ones, and then check every link to be sure it is still live. I hope to finish this afternoon.

If any of you know of a festival I am missing, please let me know. I would like this resource to be useful. And to that end I will be updating as I go. It’s tough because it takes a lot of time—but it’s worth it to know that it can be a reliable source of information for all book lovers. Thanks to Megan for caring. And I promise there will be no September 32 ever again. I still blush at the thought I never caught that.

Remembering

A few days ago, Gillian Polack sent an e-mail to Nicki and me with the ominous subject line: “Bad news.” Something like that always makes my heart shrivel up a bit with terror; what am I going to know?

Do you remember that one of the first things I did for BiblioBuffet was interview a writer called Paul Haines? How we talked at great length about his use of bad language and how it should be handled? How he was fighting cancer? Well, he fought beyond anything I’ve ever seen. He lasted long enough so that he got to see his child have her first day at school. The doctors kept saying “You won’t see Christmas,” “You won’t see New year” and he did. Today, however, he died.

I thought you ought to know.

Thank you both for letting me do that interview, and thank you especially for letting his language shine there on the page, without any cuts or alternates.

The interview to which she referred was her second column for BiblioBuffet. I didn’t remember it until I re-read it and reached the end where an excerpt from Wives, his novella was.

Now I remembered. I remembered the discomfort with which I read it. I remember the struggle within myself as editor and reader, the former arguing that my personal boundaries should not transcend my responsibilities as editor, the latter cringing at the scene depicted and the language used. And I remembered the discussion with Nicki over that discomfort. She had no problem with it, but it wasn’t her personal take on it that mattered. Nor, as we talked it out, was it mine. Ultimately, it came down to editorial accountability. Was BiblioBuffet willing to stand behind its motto of “writing worth reading”? If so, I had to face the fact that this might mean, as it did then, printing material that I personally found offensive.

Nicki and I both eventually won myself over. I didn’t have to like what went up all the time, nor did I need to print everything that came our way, but I did need to be true to the mission statement that I originally wrote for BiblioBuffet. For the first time I had to face, squarely, the fact that running a publication that possessed integrity meant going beyond personal boundaries. I couldn’t control what the contributors chose to write, nor did I want to. I don’t believe in hiring the best and then trying to stifle that excellence. Prior to opening BiblioBuffet I learned a lot of lessons as a writer. This was the beginning of my lessons as an editor.

To Paul and Gillian I owe a great deal of thanks for their contributions to my life—as a person, a writer, a reader, and as an editor.

Advantage: Point

In tennis, there is a term called “advantage.” This happens when the two players have reached a kind of point stalemate called “deuce,” which requires that one of them win two consecutive points in order to win the game. The player who wins the next point after deuce is said to have the advantage. If that player wins the next point the game is hers. If not, the score returns to deuce. This will repeat itself until one player is able to score two points in a row and take the game.

In publishing, the line between vanity houses and trade houses has until quite recently been firmly anchored. In my opinion, as far as books are concerned, it’s still firm. Most self-published and vanity-published titles are godawful things. The rule of thumb is that somewhere around 95% of all manuscripts submitted to trade publishers are un-publishable. (Unsolicited manuscripts are the stuff of which nightmares are made as anyone who has ever worked with them knows painfully well.) Of that remaining five percent, most of those are rejected for various reasons, leaving a mere one percent or so of all manuscripts in the “pubishable” arena.

But with the technological advances in printing those formerly un-publishable manuscripts are now being printed. I’ve mentioned before that nearly three times the number of “non-traditional” books as “traditional” books are being issued but regardless of their classification they are all looking for publicity. That often includes book reviews.

BiblioBuffet is accustomed to receiving press releases, both print and electronic, e-mail requests, and books for our consideration. Some come from authors, but most are from publicists or publishing houses. It doesn’t matter to us. But what does matter is who publishes the book. Even before we opened our virtual doors, we had set a policy in place that precluded consideration of self-published and vanity-published books. In my previous work as books editor for a local newspaper I dealt with vanity-published books as well as with the slush pile in my earlier work as executive assistant for a local publisher. When the concept for BiblioBuffet started to metamorphose into a real site our submission page, one of the first written, was firmly grounded in those experiences. There are far too many excellent books produced by viable commercial and university presses that we’d never be able to get to so why add to that with books that were unlikely to be worthy of anyone’s reading? The answer was obvious. We excluded them from the get-go. It simply wasn’t worth our time to plow through what were sure to be haystacks of books seeking those very few golden needles.

So when I received a large box filled with books recently from Vantage Press I was astounded. Vantage Press is an old-time vanity house, having been around since long before technology made vanity publishing easy and inexpensive. To their credit, they have never been less than honest about their pay-to-play model, and their products are good-looking and durable. But given our policy, I had to politely e-mail the publicist and let her know that due to the nature of their model and our policies that we could not, unfortunately, consider any of their books for review. I wish her luck in her marketing efforts, and I sincerely meant it. And I assumed that was the end of that.

To my surprise she wrote back a couple of days later. Normally this is not a good thing since it is the point at which, in the past, the answer to me reflects an unhappy person with an urge to snark. But not in this case. She was kind and thoughtful, and had obviously read our policies and understood the reasons for them. And then she went on to point out that this old-time vanity house would, in spring 2011, be opening a new “traditional” branch called Vantage Point, one that intended to be a commercial publisher with all the bells and whistles (editorial gatekeepers, author advances, royalties, bookstore distribution, publicity and marketing) of any other commercial press, and that would compete in the public marketplace. They would offer eight books in their first season, she said, and would BiblioBuffet be willing to consider them for review.

The answer is yes. Yes, we will because it matters not that part of their enterprise is a vanity house. (A number of commercial publishers now offer vanity arms, and the two are kept, so to speak, at arm’s length.) It only matters that Vantage Point is going to have a regular trade division staffed with people from the commercial world.

Frankly, no one is more surprised than I. It will certainly be interesting to see how this works out. And who knows . . .  maybe we’ll find some darn fine books.

Writing Worth Reading, Reading Worth Writing About

This is BiblioBuffet’s registered (®) mission statement. It is what underlies and defines the columns and other pieces you read. But what does it really mean for you?

First, that the writing we publish is worth the time you spend reading it. How do we find the writers that you read, that think meet the standard of “writing worth reading”? They come to our site came to us in one of three ways: a query,  a recommendation, or by invitation. Nicki Leone, Lauren Baratz-Logsted, and Laine Farley were invited; I had met Nicki and Lauren on a now-defunct readers’ discussion forum to which we had all belonged. I met Laine when I was researching sites and blogs about bookmarks (a new hobby at the time), came across her blog and sent her an invitation as soon as I finished reading it. Lev Raphael came through a personal recommendation from Nicki. Lindsay Champion, Pete Croatto, David Mitchell, and Gillian Polack queried us with letters that seduced us with their writing and their proposals. In all cases, they proved upfront that they could write well, that they were committed to producing excellent writing and to the editing that would help them achieve that level, and that they had ideas that jump-started our literary pulses. In turn, each of them was attracted to the “playground” BiblioBuffet offers its writers, the freedom to write what they want and how they want (because it isn’t yet, I am sorry  to say, the pay).

Having worked with editors—good, mediocre, even one truly horrific one in the past—I developed a sense of how I believe the relationship between editors and writers should work. I believe that an editor’s work should never been seen in a writer’s column. I also believe that when good writers are provided a respectful and agreeable place where they have the freedom to be themselves and have fun doing it the result will be nothing short of great. And so it has proved.

The second part of the equation that makes up our mission statement is that the books we talk about are ones we believe should be on your reading list. These are for the most part great books that for a reason stood a bit higher with our reviewers than other great books because they choose to write about them. Every reviewer at BiblioBuffet and elsewhere has stacks of books that come in. Sadly, there simply isn’t time or space to take them all on, but we do what we can. We share the books that have touched us, and that we think will be important to you too.

Of course the ones we review or talk about are not the only great books out there. With hundreds of thousands of titles being turned out per year, BiblioBuffet would have to have a couple of hundred reviewers writing daily to cover even a respectful minority. Since we will never have that—and wouldn’t even if we somehow could—you see only a ridiculously tiny number getting attention. It is a problem that has been discussed repeatedly. Ideas for getting more reviews out there have been proposed, but none as yet has met the criterion of “writing worth reading.”  Because we feel that if you are generous enough to give us your time and attention that you deserve our time and attention too. We can’t give you both quality and quantity. BiblioBuffet chooses to offer quality, that is, “writing worth reading” and “reading worth writing about.”

The “Organization”

It would be impossible for me to run BiblioBuffet if I was not both very creative and highly organized. Fortunately, both sides are practiced professionals—I used to own an organizing business—and work in harmony to create a personality that meshes perfectly. Since I tend to be a minimalist in my home and my workspace, I like my computer’s desktop to be minimal as well. If you were to look at my Mac Powerbook, you’d see only four items: Prosperity, which is where every folder and document I use is located in well-organized sub-folders; Peace, which is where all the hardware is and what I mostly stay out of; Trash, which has its own sub-folders, and a folder labeled with Sunday’s date that changes each week because it contains that week’s works in progress.

Prosperity contains  six  sub-folders, one of which is labeled “BiblioBuffet.” Inside that folder are five sub-folders: (1) Columns; (2) Contributors; (3) Convention; (4) Databases; (5) Miscellaneous. Just the Columns folder contains four sub-folders each with, again, sub-folders of their own: Current, Future, Old, Potential .

Current Columns, which is the one I am going to focus on in this post, is the folder where all current and past columns are located. This is where my organizational skills really pay off. In this sub-folder—or is it sub-sub-sub-folder by now?— are more folders, one for each column:

• A Reading Life
• BibliOpinions
• Book Brunch
• Bookish Dreaming
• From the Editor’s Desk
• Literary Amusements
• Memoirama
• On Marking Books
• The Athletic Supporter
• Things Said and Done
• Writer-in-Residence

With the exception of the Literary Amusements one, within those are more folders labeled by year. The number of those depends on when the columnists began writing for BiblioBuffet. Nicki Leone, for example, one of the first contributors to come aboard, has five sub-folders: 2006 through 2010.  And in each are the columns for that year, neatly labeled by date, newest on top.

Sounds exhausting, doesn’t it? Or anal, perhaps. But the truth is that having this kind of detail makes things much easier for me and for the contributors. I never forget a payday or who is owed how much. And if I need to find a column I can go to my databases folder, locate the Columns spreadsheet, and simply do a search. The fact that it contains information on all the columns ever published makes any search a breeze. Once I determine the date, it’s easy to go to the Columns folder and bring up the right piece.

And in order to ensure that those of you who think I might be crazy have real evidence, let me tell you that my Trash also has its BiblioBuffet throwaways organized with folders. Yup, I do. This is where the material I need and use (but don’t keep permanently) for each week’s issue goes. I keep anywhere from three to six folders, all dated,  plus one labeled “Trash-X.” What differentiates  the stuff that goes in the dated folders from the stuff in the can marked “X” is simple: accessibility. Edited versions of what Nicki and the columnists have sent is placed in the dated folders. So are images of the book covers I have created and uploaded to the online parking garage. The original online images of the covers go in the “X” can as do early, now retired versions of the current columns. I know I won’t need to access them, but I don’t want to toss them until the new issue is live. So in order not to distract me they are put here. The other things, which are accessed only rarely, nevertheless need to be readily available. Hence, the dated folders where I can easily find them.

Then, late Sunday night, when I have finally finished getting the new issue up, the last thing I do (as a kind of reward because I love empty trash cans) is to temporarily move out the yet-to-be-used dated trash cans, then empty the main one, watching with satisfaction as the little window rapidly counts down the files that are now gone forever. There’s something truly rewarding about seeing the old work disappear and the new work, fresh, clean, and empty folders neatly put away. It’s there, but it’s out of sight and thus out of mind, a very good thing when that mind is satiated with writing worth reading—and publishing.

An Editor Extraordinaire

This is the first in an occasional series on BiblioBuffet’s contributors. You’ll get to know a bit about who they are and how they came to be part of BiblioBuffet.

I am the luckiest editor-in-chief in the world, and the reason I feel that way is due in large part to Nicki Leone, Managing Editor of BiblioBuffet.

Nicki and I were both members of a now-defunct book discussion group called Readerville. Though I had long admired her erudite and informative posts, I never corresponded privately with her. Then in mid-2005, Nicki posted a comment that made me take special note: the bookstore she had managed for fifteen years was going to close.

Such news is never good when it means the loss of a job, especially a job one loves. Fortunately, Nicki was immediately snapped up by SIBA or the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance to do marketing, programming, and whatever else might need doing. (She also has an alternate persona there as Lady Banks.) Faster even than SIBA was me. I e-mailed her the moment I read her post to ask if she would consider coming aboard the soon-to-be launched BiblioBuffet. She agreed, and six months later began “A Reading Life,” her bi-weekly column which has continued since then. 

Somewhere around the early summer of 2007, an opportunity—otherwise known as an internal crisis—arose that created the need for additional editorial controls, and Nicki accepted my offer to become Managing Editor. As such, she has become my confidante, my partner, my mentor, and the other half of the heart-and-soul of BiblioBuffet.

I find myself impressed and occasionally awed by her critiques of the writers’ submissions. She doesn’t mince words, nor does she patronize or criticize. Rather, Nicki has the ability to combine a critique, additional information, probing questions, thoughts, humor, and resources into one letter that ends up in the writer producing “writing worth reading.” How does she do that?  

There are a couple of guiding principles I seem to have organically developed. I don’t, for example, like it when writers excuse themselves by claiming ignorance . . . I think I almost always make writers revise when they take that tack in their pieces. I’m a great believer in “owning” your opinions!

I also have learned to watch that every statement or opinion is backed up or justified. So no saying “this is a really great book” without saying why. And I’ll occasionally—very occasionally—offer the columnist my opinion if I think they misinterpreted what they read.

Finally, I try to make sure that all three perspectives are given a fair shake—the reviewer’s, the author’s, and the book’s. Especially that last, since ultimately I assume that BiblioBuffet’s readers want to know about the book.

Nicki and David gave me permission to quote from the critique she sent him on his current column, a review of Shambling Towards Hiroshima. David’s initial submission had some problems, which Nicki diagnosed while offering suggestions of the best kind:

I had real trouble with this paragraph, because your initial angle, that you just “don’t get” satire, immediately undercuts your authority in reviewing the book.  I find myself wondering if it is really true? Do you not understand satire? Can you think of no satire that you found effective? Orwell’s Animal Farm comes to mind, as does the television show (and movie) M*A*S*H.

Here is what Webster’s says [about satire]:

1 : a literary work holding up human vices and follies to ridicule or scorn

2 : trenchant wit, irony, or sarcasm used to expose and discredit vice or folly

In both those definitions, the key is that “wit, irony and sarcasm” are being used to EXPOSE folly. That is a very specific form of attack. In general, I think, satire does this by exaggerating something to the point of absurdity to show its folly or hubris. It sounds like, in the case of Morrow—and I’m extrapolating here from what you’ve written—he’s commenting on the idea of weapons of mass destruction being somehow for the greater good. We’re used to the fact of nuclear weapons. We’ve assimilated their existence into our daily lives. But replace them with, say, giant lizards, and it is obvious how crazy it is to live with such a thing.

The problem  with your approach is not that you didn’t like the book, but that you say the reason you didn’t like the book is because you are too dumb to get satire. (Which I’m sure isn’t true!)  The only conclusion a reader can draw from such a statement is that if you don’t understand satire, then your opinion about the book isn’t valid—you’ve admitted that you aren’t capable of understanding the basic premise of the entire story.

Since I am quite positive that isn’t the case, I think what you should be asking yourself is simply whether Morrow’s satire is equal to the task the author set himself—critiquing an event as horrific as Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If you look at it in this light, you can decide whether his satire is able to overcome all our usual horrified reactions to the bombs in order to make his point. I’m guessing that  in your opinion, it isn’t. That the book is only readable when you are “…not thinking about the deeper significance of what [you are] reading.”

That’s a pretty damning statement on the success of the book, and what I think should be your focal point of your review.

It is possible, of course to read a book and find it just doesn’t “click.” But when that happens, as a reviewer you have to stop and tell your readers why, and you have to be specific. There is always a reason a book doesn’t work, and it’s your job to figure out what that is, even if you suspect the issue is your own preferences, not the writer’s talent.

Tell me what you think. I’d like to see you revise your approach somewhat so that its clear to your readers that the problem you had with the book isn’t that you “don’t get” satire, but that in your opinion, Morrow’s satirical approach didn’t overcome your own natural gravity on the subject.

You can see the result here. Her intent and her success at eliciting “writing worth reading” without interjecting her own voice makes her editing, for all of us at BiblioBuffet, “worth listening to.”

Though she has no formal training in content editing, her managerial experience, extensive reading, instinctive people skills, overriding passion for literary excellence, and high ethical standards has imbued our publication with style and elegance because all of us strive to meet her standards.

Not long ago, Lauren Baratz-Logsted called BiblioBuffet the “New Yorker of the Internet,” and Nicki and I both want to live up to that honorable title. It’s our work together along with the contributors that helps us achieve that. I owe more than I can say to Nicki, whose words you will never see except in her column, but whose spirit infuses the site as much as my own.

Note: I sent this off to Nicki for comment prior to posting it. Her response is worth posting too: You say lots of nice things—thank you! And really, thank you because you gave me the opportunity to try my hand at editing and you’ve been so supportive. So really most of the credit is due to you for being the kind of publisher who allows your employees to find their best level. 

Mentioning the Unmentionables

During the last four weeks BiblioBuffet has been in the process of changing its underwear, that is, that platform upon which it runs has been upgraded to the newer version. It’s been . . . shall we say, an enlightening process? Without going into the painful details, I will simply say that anyone who thinks computers can’t be strangled needs to take lessons from me. But what it did to me (or what I did to it) is not important. It’s what it’s doing  for our readers that counts.

Though much has changed to make it better most of it, like good underwear, is hidden. Only a couple of things are readily noticeable—one good and one bad. The good one is that the archived pages have a cleaner, more streamlined appearance. The columns are still chronological (newest on top), but they are not separated out by year as they were before, and they are limited to 100 per page to avoid them being overwhelming. The bad one is that any links that anyone put up to us in our “old” version are now dead. Yup, it’s the dreaded “link rot,” which, as I understand it, is a natural by-product of any and all upgrades. There’s no way around it either. I spent nearly an hour driving my web developer crazy with questions and ideas about circumventing it. No go. All we can do to “fix” it is to create an advanced search page that allows anyone to search for anything on our site by Articles, Contacts, Categories, Sections, or News Feeds.

For someone like me who prefers things streamlined, easy, and logical the upgrade was a nightmare. But now that it has officially come to an end (as of 7:38 pm last night) I am happy. It’s true that I’m still learning how to do things, but I no longer feel crazed and bloated with tech jargon. That’s good for me because it means I am absorbing the information. I hope it will be at least as good for you.    

The Ten Databases of BiblioBuffet

You  may be singing the “Twelve Days of Christmas,” but I tend to favor the “Ten Databases of BiblioBuffet.” And not just at this time of the year.

Running BiblioBuffet actually requires the consistent use of the ten separate Excel databases. Without them, it would be impossible to stay on track because there are so many factors that make up the site. I use every one of these regularly:

• Book Festivals
• Columns
• Contacts
• Contest Winners
• Editor’s Letter Recommendations
• Literaria du Jour
• Publicists
• Publishers
• Quote du Jour
• Requested & Reviewed Books

I’m actually amused at how many I use because when I first got the MS Office program I could not imagine what I would use a spreadsheet for. Accountants use spreadsheets, for god’s sake. I  even asked my computer guy about deleting it, but he advised against it, telling me that even if I never used the program there was more than enough room for it. So I let it be. Until I began BiblioBuffet and realized I needed to stay on top of certain pieces of information.

The first database I set up is still the primary one I use though it has become more sophisticated as BiblioBuffet has grown. “Columns” is what enables me to track the year, the week (running from 1-52 each year), the publication date, column name and frequency, columnist name, payment, and the title of current piece. This is the database I could not live without. And because of that I frequently back it up.

Following closely on the “must have” list are the Literaria du Jour and Quote du Jour databases. These two are places where I stash the bite-sized information I use on our Literary Amusements page. As you may know, this page is updated six days a week. Several months ago, a friend made me laugh by mentioning that she was amazed I would spend so much time online each day looking for tidbits and quotes to use. Uh huh. I simply go to the Word sheet on which are copied approximately two weeks’ worth of tidbits from each database, and copy and paste one piece of Literaria and one quote into the site each night. As of today, the quotations database contains 1,527 quotes to date or four years, two months, and seven days’ worth about books, reading, or related issues like libraries and censorship. Not one of them is a duplicate of another. The literaria database is smaller, possessing not quite two years’ worth of tidbits, and I am constantly on the look out for more material to add to it, actually to both. (In next week’s post I will detail the whys and hows and wherefores of the research that goes into the pieces for Literary Amusements.)

The Book Festivals database came about when I decided to begin listing the upcoming book festivals in my weekly editor’s letter. There are book festival pages on our Table of Contents (or home) page, but these are not always up to date. One of the most frustrating things is their changes that don’t always get recorded in time because of my lack of time. (However, I do go in periodically and make the changes.) The database allows me to update more regularly since it contains the date, state, festival name, link, and city, precise information I need for the letter. As one year’s festival ends, I search out information on the date for the next year. If it is not up yet, I mark the date in red to remind myself to look later for it.

You’d think Contacts and Publicists could be merged into one database, don’t you? Well, I guess they could. Technically. But practically, I prefer to have the publicists separated out since they are most often the people with whom I interact. There’s also the fact that career movement in that area seems . . . busy at times. So having not just their names, titles, e-mail addresses, phone and fax numbers, agency or publisher names, addresses, and important notations, but also the last date of contact is essential. And having them separated out from all my other professional contacts is the only way to keep up with this.

Closely aligned with the publicists’ database is the the newest database, Requested & Reviewed Books. That one incorporates columns for Requested Date, Received Date, and Reviewed Date (each with a checkmark column behind it), Book Title, Company, Publicist, and E-mail. Yes, I actually keep these filled in. It’s essential if a publicist wants to know if we have received a book, and I like knowing I can answer for any book that we received.

Contest Winners is where I keep track of who wins the books we give away. With every new column of “Writer-in-Residence,” Lauren Baratz-Logsted’s bi-weekly column, readers can win one or more of her YA books. And just last week I gave away a lovely hardcover of the book Lindsay Champion reviewed in her column, Memoirama. We even have an upcoming interview with the Penguin Classics staff about their unique imprint, and have several books we will be giving away then. Those winners will be included in this database.

Finally, in my editor’s letter I offer several recommendations. These include Upcoming Book Festivals, The Pub House (“introductions” to smaller publishers and interesting imprints of larger houses and their specialties), Of Interest (anything that catches my eye), and This Week (where I try to talk about and link to literary goings-on). In addition to the Book Festivals database noted above, I have two other databases that keep me on the straight path: Editor’s Letter Recommendations and Publishers. The former is where I keep a running list of publication dates and what recommendation I made for The Pub House, Of Interest, and This Week so I don’t repeat myself. Publishers is a constantly updated database of large publishers with their imprints, university publishers, and medium- and small-sized commercial publishers, a list of what kinds of books they publish, and a link. Here is where I note the date I wrote about them for The Pub House.

Some people are amazed I can keep all the information straight. The truth and the secret is these databases. I could not do it without them. They do take time, more than I’d like, to keep up, but they are my maps, my set of directions, my guides. And believe me, if I didn’t have them BiblioBuffet would end up with all its roads, highways, detours, dead ends, and signs piled up in one huge hole. It wouldn’t be a pretty sight. Nor would it be a pretty site.