Saturday 20 June 2009

Editors And Publishers

Just about every publishing company has its own website, which you can find without too much trouble: the ones that I've listed here are those which seem particularly useful to me, or particularly interesting. If you have your own personal favourites and don't see them here, do let me know so that I can add them to the list.

The Abbeville Manual of Style is exquisite. Read it every day.

Behler Publications is an independent publishing house founded and run by Lynn Price, who comments frequently here. Behler used to have a Blogspot blog but has now turned to the dark side and gone over to Wordpress. Both blogs are worth trawling through, as they're dense with information.

Bluechrome, independent publisher of lovely literary fiction, short stories and poetry, blogs. Which is just as well because lovely though Bluechrome is, I can barely read its website because of the colours of the text.

Ebury Publishing has a blog, a balcony garden, and a lot of lovely books. Each time I see pictures of the balcony garden I wonder how long it'll be before the whole thing plunges off the face of the building, ripped away by the weight of all those sodden grow-bags. But the strawberries do look wonderful.

Editorial Anonymous is the blog of an American children's book editor who blogs almost daily about the publishing business, what editors and agents want to see from writers, or cake. It's a winning combination.

Editorial Ass is the blog of a New York-based editorial assistant who writes about her work and her life. It's funny, informative and insightful. Lovely.

Little, Brown's blog is little more than a catalogue of its forthcoming titles and various author events: I would do so much more with it, and I'm afraid it's a missed opportunity for them.

Me And My Big Mouth is Scott Pack's blog. You'll find lots of reviews there, lots of talk, and a fair amount of publishing information and gossip too. Mr Pack used to run Waterstone's, and now he runs The Friday Project, which is an imprint of HarperCollins.

Monday Books publishes mostly non-fiction with a slant towards politics, satire and memoir, and all of the Monday Books titles that I've read have been bloody brilliant.

The Penguin Blog has some interesting content related to its books and I like it: but I found little there concerned with writing or publishing.

Picador, which is part of Pan Macmillan, blogs.

Salt Publishing specialises in publishing anthologies of short stories and poems, and I've not yet read a bad collection from them. Gorgeous books, the lot of them.

Snowbooks. Beautiful books, lovely people, and a great blog.

Two Ravens Press publishes lovely literary fiction, and has a very interesting blog.

13 comments:

Administrator said...

Thanks, Jane, really interesting list - off to have a surf...

Chris Stovell said...

Thanks, very informative (as usual).

j purdie said...

Got a lot of these on my favourites already and I intend to have a look at those I don't know about. Not strictly Editorial or Publishing but I always found Query Shark great fun, and informative in the way the query letters are ripped apart and the sound reasons for doing so explained succinctly.

Incidentally, WordPress is not the dark side, it's very bright over there. As with most things to do with computing Microsoft is the dark side, and I'm glad to say I now use Microsoft Live Writer for blogging. All hail the dark side!

catdownunder said...

Oooohhh - more to read? Are you trying to stop me writing Jane? :-)

Katie said...

Ha! Joe Swift did warn us about making sure that it was structurally sound enough to hold the garden, so don't worry! Hopefully it won't be plunging off the fourth floor any time soon...

Jane Smith said...

I know there are more blogs out there that I could add: give me time. And Query Shark is going to be included in a similar list in future, J, as it's an excellent blog.

Meanwhile, Katie, what can I say? I'm married to a Chartered Surveyor, and his concerns have become mine by some sort of married-person's osmosis. You should have seen him the time I suggested turning our flat roof into a garden: he nearly went into orbit.

Jane Smith said...

(Incidentally, I love the look of the backlist book you've got on your blog at the moment, Katie: Cracking The Freemason's Code. Years ago I edited a small book about freemasonry and in the process discovered that my grandfather had been a Grand Master. I now have his ceremonial aprons and handbooks: fascinating stuff.)

Kathryn Magendie said...

I'll have to go check some of those out - thank you! :)

R.R.Jones said...

Great, some new addresses ready for my next rejection.
I REALLY hope I don't have to use them, lol.

pierre l said...

The only problem with that great list, Jane, is that I follow most of those blogs already and I have 798 unread item in my Google Reader list. :-) Fortunately, I am only a reader, not a writer.

Austin said...

On behalf of The Abbeville Manual of Style, thanks for the kind words! I'm a fan and follower of HPRW as well. Will be scoping out some of the other blogs you mention...

Austin said...

P.S. I've added you to our sidebar links, redressing a longstanding omission. Cheers!

James Chapman said...

Jane, if you could take a look at my website, A Passion For Writing (Helping Writers To Succeed), at http://www.squidoo.com/awriterswriter, I think that you might want to recommend it to your readers as a writers resource.

Thanking you in advance for taking the time to review my site.

Warm regards,

James Chapman