A good interior design is almost never the reason someone decides to buy a book. But, a bad interior design may be why a certain book doesn’t get finished.
Read MoreIf you want to understand the pre-Depression 1920’s, the lifestyle of old money, and the prevailing belief in the fountain of youth—The Great Gatsby will be your best textbook. You can sound smart and cultured and you won’t even have to read 400 pages.
Read MoreEvery publisher worth their weight in dust jackets has a system for deciding what to publish. They usually look something like these three “buckets”:
Read MoreMost conversations that involve more than three people and that last longer than five minutes experience a notable lull.
Read MoreReaders assume authors have a certain amount of credibility. With few exceptions, authors must be experts on the topics they write about. By “expert” I mean that they have put in the time/energy/effort to know whereof they speak.
Read MoreRead any of the Pigeon books and you will laugh. Guaranteed. It’s impossible to read them only in your head. The 2-dimensional drawings somehow have personalities and inflection that jump right off the page and out of your mouth.
Read MoreBooks are your SCUBA equipment for diving deep into ideas. They are the 4-hour, or 6-hour, or 10-hour commitment to a single enterprise. They often represent years of work culminating in a powerful biography or a masterpiece of personal development.
Read MoreRare is the work that merits owning multiple copies just in case one must be given away in a pinch. Even rarer still is a work that comprises old language from 200 and even 300 years ago, which still speaks immediately to today.
Read MoreSome books beg to be underlined. In what might be the most efficient biography I’ve ever read, Paul Johnson re-introduces the preeminent leader of the 20th Century to the 21st—in only 166 pages.
Read MoreLast week someone asked me: “Randall, what would you say an acquisitions editor does?” I gave an off-the-cuff five minute answer… here’s my more thought-out version.
Read More