Publisher
Matt DeBenedictis and John Carroll interviewed my recently for their excellent podcast, Lit & Bruised, which just finished up its first season. These guys run a great show, and it was fun to go into the studio with them and talk about Publishing Genius, book tours, Milwaukee, and hobbies.
You can listen to the episode here or find it on iTunes.
Kayla Tanenbaum included me in her series of interviews at Columbia Journal, where she talks to writers and people working in publishing. Tt was one of the best conversations about the business of books that I’ve had in a long time.
KT: Why do you think we need indie presses?
AR: Traditional presses aren’t handling literature in the same way that they were historically. The catalog for one of the big five publishers, as they become more and more conglomerated, is focused on the bottom line. That means that they’re publishing more cookbooks, more children’s books, more books that they know are going to be successful. They’re marginalizing literary fiction and poetry. We’ve seeing poetry become completely marginalized in the last 30 to 40 years, and it’s to the point where no poets have an expectation of getting a book published by a traditional publisher. I’d hate to see that same thing happening to literary fiction or creative nonfiction
This week I figured out why, in InDesign, I might want to set my vertical and horizontal units differently. Previously I set them both to inches. Changing that under Preferences > Units & Increments is always the first step in my workflow.
I understand that some graphic designers are trained to think in pixels or picas, but I’m not. Those are basically a foreign language to me; I could get by passably in that country, but I’m not fluent.
Horizontally, inches make a lot more sense to me. When calculating a book’s spine width, for example, I’m very good at setting my vertical guides by inch marks. I even know my fractions.
Vertically, I hardly look at any measurements—until recently, when I decided it was time to finally conquer aligning paragraphs to a grid. Continue reading “Units & Increments and poetry”
