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Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Making Book

Posted by John Holbo on 01/16/07 at 07:08 PM

I’m in the process of editing our Theory’s Empire event into a book, for Parlor Press. I have two questions for you: what should these books look like? What should the editorial goal be? I’m more or less going for: most of the posts, but not all; authors can re-write what they wrote for the final version. Links to the rough and tumble original event, so those curious to see it in the raw can find it easily. This approach may risk falling between two stools, however: not a record of an actual event, because it’s been polished; not fully polished academic work, because it’s basically still blog posts. I’m not actually worried that it won’t be a good book. Rereading the posts I’m really quite proud of how it went. We have several excellent essays. But, in general, what do you think my approach should be?

Which brings me to question two: I decided not to dig into comments and attempt to cull those for publication. I stuck with posts. But maybe that’s a mistake - and one I still have time to correct. Does anyone care to offer up candidates for ‘excellent comments to Theory’s Empire event posts’ deserving of inclusion in my fine book? If so, feel free to drop them in comments to this post. A distributed editorial effort would not only save me work but be, in some sense, a better measure of the sorts of comments people actually find valuable. Then there are potential copyright problems if I want to publish someone’s work. Would it be fair use? Well, I’ll worry about that if I decide to go with this best-of-the-boxes plan.

For ease of dropping in the box, you needn’t bother making links. Just cut and paste the text of the comment and give the permalink.

Comments

There’s no way you could get anything like the flavor of the original event without some comments. Maybe you could divide the essays into related topics and headline each topic with a characteristic sentence from a flame?

More seriously, it seems like adding one or two postscript comments to some of the essays would be a good idea. I’ll have a look around, time permitting.

By on 01/16/07 at 10:57 PM | Permanent link to this comment

I’m thinking something like the alternate cover from The Areas of my Expertise.

By David Moles on 01/17/07 at 04:27 AM | Permanent link to this comment

I second Rich’s comment, and also his ‘time permitting’, can’t-get-to-it-right-away-ness.

By Adam Roberts on 01/17/07 at 04:45 AM | Permanent link to this comment

I don’t know if you’re including this follow-up in the book event book, but it would be a shame to pass up a chance to reprint Peter Sattler’s cogent and elegant contributions (starting here). I’ve always been a Luther Blissett 7 fan, and I still wish more participants had taken up CR’s challenge, but if you want to keep things tidy, the exchange between Sattler and Sean McCann shows productive online debate at its best.

(Apologies for linking instead of copying-and-pasting, but the back-and-forth aspect seems pretty important here.)

By Ray Davis on 01/17/07 at 12:45 PM | Permanent link to this comment

Boy, that thread really takes you back, doesn’t it? The good old days, chez Valve.

By CR on 01/17/07 at 03:26 PM | Permanent link to this comment

The good old days, indeed! Back when throats were for ripping and comity was for, well, people who find surprising things to agree upon over tea, crumpets and endless niceties.

By Scott Eric Kaufman on 01/22/07 at 01:38 AM | Permanent link to this comment

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Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Making Book

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