Bright Lights, Big Conference →

Here’s a great article about how the publishing industry has changed, becoming increasingly professionalized.

Writers, young and old, might still come to New York, but today the city is a place you visit to have lunch with an agent, talk to a publisher, attend a conference. You don’t need to live in Greenwich Village and drink at the White Horse to be a writer. Instead, if you’re lucky, you teach in a college, and, if you’re just starting out, you might be enrolled in a “low residency” writing program or taking courses in the summer. These days, after all, writing is seriously organized, almost a business, with schools, grants, fellowships, trade magazines, workshops, and programs of every sort.

Certainly explains why self-publishing companies are proliferating.