The Life Cycle of the Book

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From Shelf Awareness:

A story titled “The Life Cycle of the Book,” even if it is set at a Wi12 panel, should have a great opening line, and Elizabeth Strout provided a fine one when she remarked at the start of Saturday’s session: “I’m the one who writes the book.”

Moderated by Betsy Burton of the King’s English Bookshop in Salt Lake City, Utah, the panel explored the life cycle of Strout’s bestseller My Name Is Lucy Barton from the perspectives of the author, her agent Molly Friedrich, her Random House editor Susan Kamil, Ruth Liebmann (v-p & director, account marketing, PRH) and bookseller Pete Mulvihill of Green Apple Books in San Francisco, Calif.

“I think that a lot of what an agent does is try to help the author manage expectations, focus on the work, the work; stay honest to the work,” Friedrich said, adding that with Strout’s manuscripts, “she’s been over that work so many times and with such lapidary attention that there’s very, very little to say except to be in a kind of swoon of admiration…. And with Lucy Barton in particular, it was kind of perfect.”

Kamil observed that “editors are like literary shape shifters. We become exactly what our authors need us to become,” and recalled that after reading the Lucy Barton manuscript for the first time, “I can’t quite describe the feeling to you, though as book lovers I’m sure you know what I mean when I say I was stunned and I was speechless…. I also knew it was a masterwork. It’s all about the book. And in this particular case, what a book! I had to get it into the hands of our publishing team.”

Link to the rest at Shelf Awareness

2 thoughts on “The Life Cycle of the Book”

  1. I was expecting something along the lines of the old Introduction-Growth-Maturity-Decline marketing model of a product’s life cycle. I guess that’s hardly the only way to define the term, but I’m mystified by exactly what “life cycle” was described in the article. Unless the life cycle is presumed to end at the point the book gets onto a bookstore shelf, I guess. Which is where I still kind of think it should begin, if life cycle is somehow related to sales.

  2. The “life cycle” they’re talking about is where you send them your book, they realize that it isn’t horrible and might be saleable, and then they take your rights and money in exchange for making a cover and formatting the ebook, along with printing some copies, sending a few to you to make you happy, and quietly remaindering any that didn’t somehow get sold.

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