Pinboard (coldbrain)

The Rise of the Sensitivity Reader

coldbrain — 2026-05-29T06:43:56+00:00

Kyle Paoletta on Adam Szetela’s That Book Is Dangerous!, which charts the rise of the sensitivity reader and the publishing industry’s habit of capitulating to whichever online faction shouts loudest. Szetela’s position is that it all works as cover for an industry that won’t address its own class problem.

What's the point of hardbacks?

coldbrain — 2026-04-12T15:53:30+00:00

Tom Rowley asks publishers, agents and the boss of the Booker why fiction still debuts in hardback when readers clearly prefer paperbacks. The answer is margin; the first edition is a “glorified marketing tool” for the paperback a year later. Indies are already breaking the pattern: Fitzcarraldo has always done paperback-first, and Faber recently published Eliza Clark’s “She’s Always Hungry” in both formats simultaneously. Fine for non-fiction and cookbooks. For a novel you want to shove in a bag, less so.

I’m bringing everything back to my website

coldbrain — 2026-03-16T18:07:36+00:00

30 Years of Writing on the Internet

coldbrain — 2026-02-07T11:43:32+00:00

Everything I Know about Self-Publishing

coldbrain — 2026-01-10T10:46:36+00:00

This essay is also available on my Substack. Subscribe here: https://kevinkelly.substack.com/ In my professional life, I’ve had several bestselling books published by New York publishers, as well as many other titles that sold modestly. I have also self-published a bunch … Continue reading →

The Editorial Battles That Made The New Yorker

coldbrain — 2026-01-01T21:33:53+00:00

The magazine has three golden rules: never write about writers, editors, or the magazine. On the occasion of our hundredth anniversary, we’re breaking them all.

Why I Left Substack

coldbrain — 2025-12-28T09:08:33+00:00

in case you can't guess

The Cultural Decline of Literary Fiction

coldbrain — 2025-11-24T18:53:47+00:00

What happened?

Is the Internet Making Culture Worse?

coldbrain — 2025-11-23T14:44:09+00:00

The decline of criticism might explain the sense that our culture is stagnating. How can we bring it back?

Which publisher has the best classics line?

coldbrain — 2025-03-16T10:30:42+00:00

It's Oxford University Press

Fitzcarraldo Editions Makes Challenging Literature Chic

coldbrain — 2024-07-27T11:46:31+00:00

In ten years, the London publishing house has amassed devoted readers—and four writers with Nobel Prizes.

The Oral History of Pitchfork, From the Careers It Made to the Bands It Killed

coldbrain — 2024-07-07T15:52:22+00:00

Witnessing the death of the web as a news medium

coldbrain — 2024-06-24T21:33:17+00:00

The Making Of: Mean Machines, The Magazine That Sold Console Gaming To The UK

coldbrain — 2024-04-03T19:59:14+00:00

"Like the Renaissance, Left Bank and Vietnam of vulgarity, all rolled into one"

Let's talk about Goodreads.

coldbrain — 2024-03-09T18:25:41+00:00

Publishing obsesses over Goodreads, but does Goodreads actually sell books?

What Was Literary Fiction?

coldbrain — 2024-01-15T20:52:50+00:00

Phonies: J.D. Salinger and Wielding Copyright as Self-Protection

coldbrain — 2023-12-28T12:28:37+00:00

After J.D. Salinger published his story “Hapworth 16, 1924” in The New Yorker in 1965, he decided to stop publishing his works. Although he had resigned from his nearly twenty-year-long stint in th…

How Relevant Are the Literary Jonathans?

coldbrain — 2023-11-05T08:50:19+00:00

In advance of Franzen’s new book, Emily Gould takes stock of the scene.

Where Is All the Book Data?

coldbrain — 2023-04-01T14:11:43+00:00

Industry is already using data to remake culture. To reverse the tide—to make culture more equitable—we need to decode that data for ourselves.

Yes, I Judge Books by their Cover

coldbrain — 2023-01-13T22:53:15+00:00

A cross-cultural review of books as physical objects 📗

Ebooks Are an Abomination

coldbrain — 2023-01-09T21:59:53+00:00

How WordPress and Tumblr are keeping the internet weird

coldbrain — 2023-01-08T13:34:50+00:00

Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg on what it’s like to run WordPress’ and Tumblr’s parent company

How Amazon Ruined the Publication of a Secret J.D. Salinger Novel

coldbrain — 2022-12-16T22:03:24+00:00

Pageviews, assemble! Why there’s no escaping the Marvel Cinematic Universe online

coldbrain — 2022-10-01T22:05:01+00:00

In 2022, few pop-culture brands move the needle, so newspaper blue-bloods and recipe sites alike rally around Marvel Cinematic Universe content as their last stand.

“It’s Gotta Grow to Stay Alive”: Inside Noah Shachtman’s Raucous Reinvention of ‘Rolling Stone’

coldbrain — 2022-10-01T03:58:09+00:00

The scoop-hungry, Twitter-happy editor has turbocharged the magazineâs digital metabolismââback in the game,â says Gus Wennerâand chafed some staff along the way, who wonder if the new Rolling Stone is becoming the old Daily Beast.

Short stories: How much do you make? How do you sell one? How long does it take to write?

coldbrain — 2022-09-24T11:02:29+00:00

Prestige Comics: On the Penguin Classics Marvel Collection

coldbrain — 2022-05-30T12:59:34+00:00

The idea that a citadel of bookishness has fallen to this siege of adolescent fantasia could easily take on outsize importance.

The Birth of the Egghead Paperback

coldbrain — 2022-05-18T20:29:10+00:00

Trolling Is Taking a Toll on Science Journalism

coldbrain — 2022-05-10T19:12:32+00:00

Opinion | Science journalists say they face threats of online harassment — and that newsrooms are doing little to protect them.

Of platforms, publishers, and responsibility

coldbrain — 2022-02-06T22:54:34+00:00

Last week, criticism of Spotify for hosting the Joe Rogan Experience—a popular podcast that has on multiple occasions aired misinformation about COVID-19, among other things—accelerated after music legend Neil Young chose to remove all of his work from the streaming service. “I am doing this because Spotify is spreading fake information about vaccines—potentially causing death […]

The Attack of Zombie Science - Issue 112: Inspiration - Nautilus

coldbrain — 2022-01-20T22:59:06+00:00

Let it die

coldbrain — 2021-09-10T03:51:09+00:00

It should be impossible to read Spin in 2021. The URL should either redirect to an elegiac 404, or a tasteful archive of the magazine's glory years. No publication has been treated more viciously by the plundering agents who run the media industry; those psychos who seem uniquely obsessed with distressing the assets of every beloved legacy brand on the web before handing off the baton to the next specious consortium of VC suckers.

The one where writing books is not really a good idea

coldbrain — 2021-05-11T19:37:46+00:00

Novels and Novellas and Tomes, Oh My!

coldbrain — 2021-05-04T12:08:10+00:00

The star Japanese crime novelist almost too good to translate

coldbrain — 2021-04-21T19:43:31+00:00

Kaoru Takamura's books made her an acclaimed bestseller in Japan for decades. How one American editor finally translated her epic, "Lady Joker"

A New Article Page Design at ProPublica

coldbrain — 2021-04-01T12:52:25+00:00

How a game about making zines helped me recapture my creativity in lockdown

coldbrain — 2021-02-22T14:17:54+00:00

Praxis and the Indieweb

coldbrain — 2021-02-12T13:48:55+00:00

A great summary of the issues re: ‘Indieweb’

Why we should create a markup language for journalists

coldbrain — 2019-07-13T18:32:13+00:00

JSTOR Labs Text Analyzer

coldbrain — 2019-06-22T14:45:11+00:00

Paste text or upload a doc to get suggested articles and papers

The open access wars: How to free science from academic paywalls - Vox

coldbrain — 2019-06-22T10:27:47+00:00

How librarians, pirates, and funders are liberating the world’s academic research from paywalls.

The year of the loyal reader

coldbrain — 2019-01-02T15:54:13+00:00

At the end of the day, bigger may not actually be better when it comes to an engaged audience. Instead of chasing pageview goals this year, I’d love to see more teams focusing on how to increase time on site or pages per visit. I’d love to see more newsrooms talking about how they deliberately plan to move a user from a mobile app to a podcast to a newsletter and back to the mobile site all in the same day or week. Declining social traffic for everyone, plus the shift to more organic/direct traffic, means loyalty and retention are increasing in priority for publishers. This could mean embracing a paid audience through subscription or membership programs. But it could also mean focusing on habit-forming products like podcasts and newsletters.

The 'Future Book' Is Here, but It's Not What We Expected

coldbrain — 2018-12-22T15:06:33+00:00

Visionaries thought technology would change books. Instead, it's changed everything about publishing a book.

Facebook is done with quality journalism

coldbrain — 2018-01-22T16:06:34+00:00

For Facebook, journalism has been a pain in the neck from day one. Now, bogged down with the insoluble problems of fake news and bad PR, it’s clear that Facebook will gradually pull the plug on news. Publishers should stop whining and move on.

Shorthand — Beautifully simple storytelling

coldbrain — 2017-03-16T10:12:24+00:00

How we use Kanban on the GOV.UK Publishing Platform team | Inside GOV.UK

coldbrain — 2017-02-15T17:19:55+00:00

Summary of how GDS use Kanban and Trello.

AMBER

coldbrain — 2016-01-28T17:35:32+00:00

Amber is an open source tool for websites to provide their visitors persistent routes to information. It automatically preserves a snapshot of every page linked to on a website, giving visitors a fallback option if links become inaccessible. If one of the pages linked to on this website were to ever go down, Amber can provide visitors with access to an alternate version. This safeguards the promise of the URL: that information placed online can remain there, even amidst network or endpoint disruptions.

For news organizations, this was the most important set of Apple announcements in years » Nieman Journalism Lab

coldbrain — 2015-06-08T20:16:01+00:00

FOLD

coldbrain — 2015-04-22T16:09:00+00:00

Micro Data & Schema: Guide To Generating Rich Snippets

coldbrain — 2014-12-10T15:31:16+00:00

Scoop: A Glimpse Into the NYTimes CMS - NYTimes.com

coldbrain — 2014-06-20T11:46:13+00:00

COPE: Create Once, Publish Everywhere

coldbrain — 2014-04-01T09:12:09+00:00

The Battle for the Body Field · An A List Apart Article

coldbrain — 2014-02-25T21:08:40+00:00

The opportunity for Slow Media | PandoDaily

coldbrain — 2013-11-03T21:25:48+00:00

The best magazine on the Internet? | PandoDaily

coldbrain — 2013-11-03T20:59:04+00:00

The Discipline of Content Strategy · An A List Apart Article

coldbrain — 2013-06-26T06:49:42+00:00

The Archive is a Campsite | Contents Magazine

coldbrain — 2013-03-17T14:22:26+00:00

The Web Is a Customer Service Medium (Ftrain.com)

coldbrain — 2012-05-22T12:33:24+00:00

That's what I tell my Gutenbourgeois friends, if they'll listen. I say: Create a service experience around what you publish and sell. Whatever “customer service” means when it comes to books and authors, figure it out and do it. Do it in partnership with your readers. Turn your readers into members. Not visitors, not subscribers; you want members. And then don't just consult them, but give them tools to consult amongst themselves. These things are cheap and easy now if you hire one or two smart people instead of a large consultancy. Define what the boundaries are in your community and punish transgressors without fear of losing a sale. Then, if your product is good, you'll sell things. (Don't count on your fellow Gutenbourgeois to buy things. They're clicking the little thumb icon on YouTube like everyone else.) If you don't want to do that then just find niche communities who might conceivably care about your products and buy great ad placements. It's a better online spend.

The Atavist Matures as a Publisher and a Platform - NYTimes.com

coldbrain — 2012-05-21T16:06:25+00:00

Workflow for self-publishing on Amazon’s kindle platform | Ingenuity Lab

coldbrain — 2012-02-13T15:55:14+00:00

How Amazon’s KDP Select Saved David Kazzie’s Book

coldbrain — 2012-01-30T18:37:31+00:00

The War for Catch-22 | Culture | Vanity Fair

coldbrain — 2012-01-22T08:38:40+00:00

The Millions : The Year of Wonders

coldbrain — 2011-12-08T22:51:30+00:00

How To Make An eBook - Smashing Magazine

coldbrain — 2011-12-03T16:09:55+00:00

BBC Four - Storyville, 2011-2012, Deadline: The New York Times

coldbrain — 2011-11-26T20:00:45+00:00

Documentary which goes inside the newsroom at one of the most venerable publishing institutions in the world, the New York Times. Director Andrew Rossi gained unprecedented access to America's pre-eminent news factory during one of its most tumultuous years, as the film follows its struggle to survive in a year where Wikileaks emerged as a household name and other newspapers folded. Led by people such as David Carr - a firebrand journalist and former crack addict - can the foot soldiers of this bastion of old media keep up with the torrent of information that is the world wide web?

Pub Rules

coldbrain — 2011-11-24T10:42:11+00:00

I’d love to run, edit, and write for a publication bigger than just me and my blog. I don’t have time, so I won’t, at least not any time soon. But if I were to run a publication, I’d have a few rules.

Newsstand Is Promising, Yay! But Enough with Issue-Based Publishing (Global Moxie)

coldbrain — 2011-10-29T19:18:14+00:00

Thing is, designing an iPad app shouldn’t be “just like designing a print product.” It’s not the same design you want to bring to new platforms, it’s the content. Issue-based publishing puts a straitjacket on digital content, freezing it into a big arbitrary block of pages and articles, sealed with print metaphors. This approach privileges print and its design conventions, imposing them on new platforms. And why should that be the case? Looking out five or ten years, will print be the winner among these platforms? Nope. So why should we rely on print’s design conventions and workflows now?

Kindle formatting for web geeks | A ton of useful information about screenwriting from screenwriter John August

coldbrain — 2011-09-16T06:11:42+00:00

When I was preparing my short story The Variant for the Kindle, I found a lot of confusing and contradictory information about how to do the formatting — much of it on the official help site. So I’m writing up this quick guide aimed at somebody with roughly my level of coding or design experience.

Haruki Murakami's cult trilogy 1Q84 poised to take the west by storm | Books | guardian.co.uk

coldbrain — 2011-09-12T09:33:59+00:00

In the US, interest has been such that Knopf has already ordered a second print run. In the UK, Bethan Jones, of Harvill Secker, said inquiries from booksellers were running at 10-15 a day. "He is huge in Japan. Here he started out as an alternative, cult author. But this book looks as though it will be immense. It is really unusual for a book in translation, but we have produced a massive print run."

The Millions : Ten Things I’ve Learned over 12 Years of Sending Out Stories

coldbrain — 2011-09-10T11:33:51+00:00

1. Mark Farrington, my first writing teacher at the Johns Hopkins MA Program in Writing in the fall of 1998, suggested we should start sending our stories out “when they are as good as we can make them.” That may seem obvious, but I’ve found it to be a great rule of thumb. Perhaps you’ve had several rounds of feedback, you’ve revised, and while you still see problems, you don’t know how to fix them. When you’ve taken a story as far as you can on your own, send it out.