My Take: Professionalism and Ethics in Blogging
Shortly after I started working at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in January, I found out about plans to organize a Book Blogger Convention around the same time as BookExpo America, and I contacted the organizers and offered to take part in any panels they’d like to have me on. Eventually, we decided on a solo presentation about “professionalism and ethics in blogging,” with at least some attention paid somewhere in that hour to best practices for blogger/publisher relations. The idea was that it would be cool to have somebody from the industry side sharing that perspective; as it happened, HMH had discontinued my position four days before my speech—but it didn’t really matter what job I had the day I spoke to that audience. I’d already built up the perspective, and I was ready to share it.
You should watch all 26 minutes for the full argument as I made it that day, but here’s the gist: Paid book critics at newspapers, magazines, and other media outlets who attacked bloggers for being “unprofessional” missed the point; if bloggers failed to live up to a certain “professional” standard, it was mainly because that standard was defined by people who were doing one type of writing about books to champion that way of writing about books. Bloggers not only reaffirmed that there were other ways of writing about books, they proved that a substantial audience existed for that writing—proved it to such an extent, in fact, that just about every major print news publication with an online presence and a books section has launched its own blog, conceding the viability (we won’t say superiority) of the format. That’s what I mean when I say “the war between book critics and bloggers is over, [and] the bloggers won.”
30 May 2010 | uncategorized |
A Few Quick Updates
⇒A few days ago, I mentioned an upcoming workshop led by Naomi Wolf for nonfiction writers in New York City. I’ve since agreed to participate in the second of the three workshops, sharing my perspective on blogging and social media and how they relate to the publishing and media cycles authors experience when their books are acquired and released.
⇒I’m still doing interviews for Getting Right with Tao—over the weekend, I answered five questins at LitKicks, a book website that’s been around about as long as Beatrice has. In it, I make a joke about how this book has almost nothing to do with my last book, and how if I’d paid better attention to Greil Marcus I could tie it all together somehow, but already one of the comments has got me thinking that maybe that’s not such a crazy idea.
⇒It was a little over a year ago that William Dietrich discussed the origins of the Ethan Gage series, and now the fourth and (for now) final adventure, The Barbary Pirates, is out. Apparently, Dietrich’s next project jumps about a century and a half forward in time; Icereich has its narrative roots in a real-life expedition Nazi scientists undertook in the Himalayas looking for the origins of the Aryan race. (Jim Shepard also wrote about this expedition in the short story “Ancestral Legacies,” but we can assume Dietrich’s take on it will be different.)
7 April 2010 | uncategorized |
Our Endless and Proper Work is my new book with Belt Publishing about starting (and sticking to) a productive writing practice. 
