A valuable companion for aspiring writers.
A seasoned writer offers advice on “the professionalization of creativity.”
Novelist and founder of the learning collaborative The Cabins, Maum (Costalegre, 2019, etc.) mines her own experiences as an author, as well as advice and anecdotes from editors, publicists, literary agents, and other writers, to offer a sensible and brightly encouraging guide to publishing. Maum covers just about everything a first-time author needs to know: how to make time to write, learn to revise, deal with rejection, find an agent, choose a publisher, and juggle the many tasks involved in promotion. With warmth and candor, she addresses the emotional stresses and “existential ups and downs” that buffet many writers and responds to myriad questions that novice writers ask, from whether to go to book parties to whether to enroll in an MFA program. What about multiple submissions? Or self-publishing? Or deciding if an advance is fair? How crucial is it to have an agent? “It is very, very hard to get a book published,” admits the author, but getting a contract is not the end of the process: There are editorial revisions to consider, a publishing team (designer, publicist, copy editor, sales and marketing departments) to work with, blurbs to request, social media connections to make, and a publicity campaign to get rolling. Maum offers useful information about the different kinds of publishing houses, including micropresses, nonprofit independent presses, for-profit independent houses, midhouse publishers, and the Big Five. “Many writers—myself included,” Maum writes, “toggle between commercial and independent houses based on the nature of the book that’s up to bat.” Once a book is published, pressures don’t abate. For example, anticipating and reading reviews can generate "elation, doubt, despair, pervasive unease, and bolts of white-hot pride." Maum cautions writers to tamp down their expectations of having a “break out” book that sells tens of thousands of copies. Most debuts, she reveals, perform conservatively (under 5,000 copies). She also advises authors to read only professional reviews, not “the reviews of overcaffeinated strangers who just want to vent online.”
A valuable companion for aspiring writers.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-948226-40-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Catapult
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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