The Printer's Devil: A WVU Press Intern Blog
printer's devil n. (1755-65): an apprentice in a printing establishment
Welcome to The Printer's Devil
Dwight Pavlovic, a WVU Press intern, chronicles the inner workings of our Press and the publishing world in his new blog. Read here and become a West Virginia University Press facebook fan to receive updates and notifications about this publication.
Interview: David H. Sutton
"Helvetia is a unique and interesting community worthy of having its story told in detail and with accuracy. It was truly a piece of community service for me. Seeing how all these families I knew as a child wove into the tapestry of this little town was fascinating and often nostalgic."
Acquisitions, Marketing, and Financial Solvency
With two new interns learning the ins and outs of acquisitions under the watchful eye of our director Carrie Mullen and me gathering text and music and visual contributions for my own publishing projects, my mind frequently turns towards label/publisher-musician/author relationships. A month or so ago, I made a post about how digitization and ebooks would effect author contracts and the nature of their shared obligations, but for me, the last month has been spent congealing isolated relationships into a coherent network. As the public face of my record label evolves, I think more and more about the creative and practical cooperation that occurs within it, creating the contours of that face as its more prominent features develop.
Profile: Twisted Spoon Press
On Thursday I linked to an article in Publishing Perspectives on WVU Press' facebook page that talked about Twisted Spoon Press, a Prague-based publisher of primarily Central European literature in translation, as a lead-in to the question of how big publishers benefit from "small press risk taking" on various authors. I thought I'd expand on that a bit by profiling the Press.
Interview: Jerry B. Thomas
"When I came to the Depression era in my preparations for the course I found few useful sources. I still had my notes from my undergraduate course with Professor Summers, but little else. So, my original purpose was to put together some material for the course and maybe prepare a journal article. Tens years or so later, it turned out to be a book manuscript."
UK Magazine Publisher Expands to Langa Township
Gavin Weale is the 32 year old director of London's Live Futures, a social enterprise that recruits young, at-risk teenagers living in less than ideal circumstances to prepare and send to press Live, a regular culture and current events magazine. This month, Weale was recognized by the UK Young Creative Entrepreneurs Awards in Publishing for his plans to adapt a similar model to Langa Township, one of the oldest African settlements in South Africa. He hopes the project will work as well there as it has in London, empowering the teenage staff and helping them build career experience. The entrepreneur bit comes in with his interest in the country's incredibly small book-buying audience. Weale hopes to train a new generation of publishers for what he considers an introverted national industry, and raise popular interest by applying the Live Magazine model to a community unengaged by publishers and government.
It's take your daughter to work day 2010!
It's take your daughter to work day. I will remain nameless until near the end. I'm just on Dwight's computer. These are some of the people who work at the press, what they do, and all sorts of other stuff about them.
Randy Cohen on Illegal E-Book Downloading
Randy Cohen is the Emmy award-winning author of The Ethicist, an internationally syndicated New York Times Magazine humor column that answers readers' questions about ethical dilemmas. Cohen's background as a writer is in comedy, having spent decades working on successful TV and radio projects, but he capably balances this with a fair assessment of the concerns people bring to him. Given the Times' readership the nature of the questions is a bit more specialized than what other writers might receive, but his answers are typically satisfying.
Profile: Capricious Magazine
So as to avoid beginning yet another blog post by establishing temporal context (ie, "in such-and-such month, year, or otherwise"), I thought I'd begin my first "profile" post - which will also be my first semi-regular column of sorts within the larger information aggregate that is: this particular blog - by saying... well, essentially that. I imagine these "profiles... of sorts" will rove from periodicals and particular publications to publishers, authors, and entities of all and sundry type. The first of this class will be Brooklyn's Capricious Magazine, an international fine-arts/photography journal founded by Swedish photographer Sophie Mörner.
Contracts & Authors
2010 has been a busy year for all types of media publisher, with most new and surviving institutions having to respond quickly to new input from changing paradigms of distribution and format. This year, my record label has expanded significantly and the clerical demands of operation have changed likewise, forcing me for the first time to think seriously about having to prepare a stable of uniquely structured contracts to suit a diverse stable of projects: digital, vinyl, or otherwise. For book publishers with any hope of survival or expansion, now more so than record labels, the question of how these contracts connect author to publisher and publisher to author is more overbearing.
