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Randall Stephens Over at the Religion in American History blog I have a short piece on publishing.  Here's an exce rpt and link to the full piece. Few could have accused Ernest Hemingway of being too subtle. “The first draft of anything is shit,” he once quipped.  True.  And still we plod on, hoping to spin that dross into gold. We spend hour upon hour crafting, redrafting, proofing, worrying, and rewriting. Several years back the historian Stephen Pyne wrote in a forum I put together for Historically Speaking that "History is a book culture. We read books, we write books, we promote and award tenure on the basis of books, and at national meetings we gather around book exhibits. We’re a book-based discipline." *   But figuring out how to land a publisher, what press to go with, and answering a range of other questions can be daunting.  And so, I was happy when my colleague Brian Ward at Northumbria University organized an afternoon session on publishing las...

Philip White . Philip White signing copies of his book, Our Supreme Task , at Well Read, March 2012 The commonly accepted narrative about bookstores is that they’re doomed. People simply won’t go to bricks-and-mortar spaces to buy hardbacks and softcovers when they can pull up a web browser, click or tap a couple of times, and boom! Either an e-book is on their screen or that supposedly archaic bundle of paper is on its way. But while certain undeniable facts—the closing of Borders and the rise of Amazon as the alpha dog in the bookselling industry among them—prove this impression to be true-ish, there are other signs that cast doubt on it. Some of these are factual and some anecdotal. In the case of the latter, Half Price Books is always jam packed when I go into one of the four Kansas City locations to buy more books I probably don’t need. Also, I recently read The Atlantic ’s feature on Ann Patchett , who is not only bankrolling a bookstore in Nashville but also got a spot on the Co...