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Guilt, failure, negative reviews… We dig into the good stuff and the hard stuff with the wonderful Brian Hurley, a publisher, editor and passionate reviewer of books, including what authors need to know going into publishing. We discuss why, when a book wins an award, it’s Amazon ratings will actually go down! Big publishers operated on a “Hollywood model” where a few successes support many “failures,” and Brian looks at the alternative small presses supply, plus the importance of knowing what you want out of publishing. We also talked about book reviewing as a creative and intellectual and exciting activity, what makes a strong review and the process of writing one, and the broad and deep and eclectic way Brian immersed himself in the art of the book review until he understood the form and its patterns. Brian is knee-deep in forthcoming book. What’s that like? How does he choose which books to review? Hint: “Henry James is going to have to wait.” We got into how editing impacts his writing. He writes the marketing copy as he writes his book, again and again, sometimes letting the marketing copy lead the plot. In addition to running Fiction Advocate, a small press and online publication interested in the cross-pollinations of criticism, personal essay and fiction, he works for Callisto Media, a start-up book publisher, that uses an SEO model with a high rate of success: “we don’t publish any splashy books, but they rarely, rarely fail.” We discuss both these ventures as well as who should not review books, father-son relationships, dead dads, and more.
Links Discussed:
Maria Bustillos on Isaac Fitzgerald
The Scientists By Marco Roth
Ethan Canin interview on Terri Gross
Brian Hurley
Brian Hurley is Books Editor at The Rumpus and an Editor at Fiction Advocate. His literary criticism has appeared in The Millions, Electric Literature, and Full Stop. Formerly the linguistics editor at Oxford University Press, he is now a Senior Managing Editor at Callisto Media in Berkeley, CA.
Story Makers is a podcast that features in-depth conversations with accomplished writers, filmmakers and industry experts about story craft, technique, habit and survival–everything you need to know to stay inspired, connect to your creativity, find others’ wonderful stories and your own success.
The hosts:
Elizabeth Stark is a published, agented novelist and distributed filmmaker who teaches and mentors writers at BookWritingWorld.com.
Angie Powers is a distributed filmmaker and published short story writer with an MFA in creative writing and a certificate in screenwriting from UCLA who teaches story structure at BookWritingWorld.com.