Holding My Work in Hand

It’s always great when I get a chance to hold my work in my hand–literally. Helping an author take words and ideas and shape them into a book is the most rewarding part of my job. So it’s been fun in the past few weeks to receive copies of the final...

The Ultimate Niche Product

Books are the ultimate niche product. And they’re getting “nichier” every year, according to a number of people I heard and talked to at the Independent Book Publishing Association’s Publishing University 2015. Peter Hildick-Smith of Codex-Group opened Pub U 2015 with...

Editing Harper Lee

By now, anyone who pays any attention to the world of words knows that Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, is releasing a new book. The stature of To Kill a Mockingbird, which was published in 1960, can surely be measured by the number of news outlets around...

Finding Help in a Festival of Choices

In 1996, my husband and I took our four-year-old son to the first-ever Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. The main draw for us was a chance for our son to get to meet some of the characters from his favorite PBS shows—none of us remember now which ones. The event,...