Pamela Dorman is senior vice president and publisher of Pamela Dorman Books/Viking. In her more than thirty years at Viking Penguin, Dorman has published multimillion-copy, #1 New York Times bestsellers by Kim Edwards, Helen Fielding, Gail Honeyman, Sue Monk Kidd, Jacquelyn Mitchard, and Jojo Moyes. She began her publishing career at St. Martin’s Press and is a summa cum laude graduate of Wesleyan University. Is there one problem you see in books that you wish writers knew before their manuscripts made it to your desk? There are many! A couple off the top of my head: Try reading some of your […]
Story Confirms That Spotify Is Paying Real Money to Publishers
Since Spotify started offering US premium subscribers 15 hours of audiobook listening a month at no extra cost nearly a year ago, we know the company has been putting real money into the hands of publishers and authors, marking one of the few initiatives in our world from a big tech player that actually seems to have grown the market. (When Spotify launched a regular, a la carte audiobook sales program the year before, the impact was minor at best.) Digital audio had been growing a lovely 12 to 15 percent a year by industry statistics and through the first […]
Authors Are Creating “Agents and Editors Guides” to Jump-Start Querying Process
In a recent trend online, querying writers are posting agents and editors guides to their unpublished manuscripts. The guides comprise four images or slides and include the title, comps, a brief plot description, and other information presented concisely and visually. The trend was originated by Shardai Smith, a fiction and horror author who also works in book marketing. Smith posted a guide to her novel From Our Blood back in March. She tells PL she was inspired by indie authors who have been making pitch guides for their readers for a while. “As a book marketer, I’ve followed a few […]
People 10/23
Thousands of Creators Protest Theft of Their Work By AI Companies
While awaiting the slow gears of litigation and legislation, over 10,000 creators and organizational partners from around the world have signed on to a simple statement of protest, declaring: “The unlicensed use of creative works for training generative AI is a major, unjust threat to the livelihoods of the people behind those works, and must not be permitted.” Among the supporting organizations is the Association of American Publishers (AAP). CEO Maria Pallante said in a press release, “What is true is that creators operate in service to a well-read, informed, and inspired global public, not the unsanctioned, unregulated profits of […]
Forthcoming: Maria Shriver’s I AM MARIA, John Green’s EVERYTHING IS TUBERCULOSIS
On April 1, Maria Shriver‘s The Open Field imprint will publish her own book, I AM MARIA: My Poems and Reflections on Healing, Heartbreak, and Hope. According to a release, the book “combines Shriver’s hard-earned wisdom with her own deeply personal poetry and reminds readers there is strength, love, and hope on the other side of our hardest days.” Penguin Life, Viking, and Penguin Books president and publisher Brian Tart said, “Maria Shriver has written a book that will inspire readers everywhere to look beyond others’ expectations and labels to find their true selves. After years of searching, she accomplished […]