Are Agents Now The Real Publishers? And Are Publishers Making Themselves Redundant?

• My nonfiction book proposal course starts in two months; 5 spots left.
  

• I’m teaching another course— different, shorter, and cheaper—in July as well
  

• American Made: Stories of Work from the WPA publishes July 14. Ask your library to order it! Put in a request to your local indie. Or order directly through the line.

In a few weeks I’m giving a talk at the Piedmont Publishing Symposium about publishing as a creative act. So I’ve been researching what others have said about this topic, including publishers who have embraced this concept (starting, perhaps, with Aldus Manutius), and thinking about what it means to approach publishing as an art, at least in the sense that it is something that has a form, just as do books themselves. And that form, as with books, should be specific to the publishing house. The easiest way to shorthand this is to say—imagine a book by Archipelago, or Fitzcarraldo, or a Penguin Classic—when you see the cover, you might instantly know who published that book. T…