This week, Laura got mad enough at Erik’s approach to his creative life that she’s devoting an episode to psychoanalyzing him and his writing practices. What could go wrong!
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Episode 178—The One About (Un)bound(less)
In light of the recent revelations about Unbound/Boundless’s failure to pay their debts to their authors, we talked about what went wrong, what flawed publishing impulse these mistakes come from, and the importance of publishing companies not pursuing growth at all costs. We also yell a little bit about AI. Come unpack the horrors with us!
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Episode 177—The Jimmies, The Rock, The Tariffs
This week…. Well folks there’s not much to say other than that we were pretty loose, given the general state of things in both publishing and beyond. We talk about MrBeast getting eight figures for a book, Dwayne The Rock Johnson being a True Crime Girlie, and the tariffs that promise to upend the publishing industry. Come hang out and blow off some steam with us.
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Episode 176—Co-ops as the Way Forward
This week we look at the announcement of a fascinating new agreement between eight small publishers that revolves around sharing shipping costs as a way to discuss the concept of cooperation in our industry; what do co-op initiatives like this do for the survival of independent publishing–or agenting, or writing, or anything else outside the industry’s largest corporate structures? We talk about how cooperation actually exists in opposition to consolidation, and the ways moves like this can actually free up the ability to take editorial and artistic risks.
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Episode 175—What We Owe Each Other
In response to an excellent listener question, today we’re talking about how writers can approach asking potential agents about how they might handle specific aspects of their lives–whether that’s gender or sexual identity, disability, pregnancy or possible pregnancy, and much more–that could affect their publishing journey. We are in an age where all of us are growing increasingly vulnerable in different ways to what feels like a genuine fascist cultural backslide–this means that we all owe each other more solidarity, that our publishing relationships must account for the different ways in which we could become exposed to risk or harm. This is a big episode on “what we owe each other”: what agents owe writers, what publishers owe writers, what anyone who works in publishing owes anyone else in terms of helping all of us stay safe and protected from an increasingly dangerous world.
Print Run is a podcast created and hosted by Laura Zats and Erik Hane. Its aim is simple: to have the conversations surrounding the book and writing industries that too often are glossed over by conventional wisdom, institutional optimism, and false seriousness.
We’re book people, and we want to examine the questions that lie at the heart of that life: why do books, specifically, matter? In a digital world, what cultural ground does book publishing still occupy?
Whether it’s trends in the queries from writers that hit our inboxes or the social ramifications of an industry that pays so little being based in Manhattan, we’re here for it. Probably to laugh at it and call it names, but here for it nonetheless.
Print Run is the happy-hour conversation after a long day at a catalog launch; it’s the bottle of wine you drink most of on a Tuesday when the manuscripts are no good. We’re for writers, for publishers, for anyone who’s opened a book and wanted to know—really know—what goes into getting the damn thing made.
Join us. We’ll talk about the worst sex scene we’ve ever read and wonder aloud about how millennials will affect the books of the future. We’ll figure out why Jonathan Franzen wants to replace your child with a penguin and whether or not that penguin will be buying hardcovers when he grows up.
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