John B. Thompson’s Merchants of Culture is not a how-to manual like the first two books in this list, and it’s not practical in quite the same way. Rather, the book is a history of the publishing industry in Britain and the United States, with a focus on current upheavals and uncertainties in the business. It historicizes the players in trade publishing: Agents, publishers, editors, bookstores, warehouse chains and online booksellers. If you’re a writer without past experience in publishing, you may not know much about the food chain or your position in it. The author, a Cambridge University sociologist, brings copious amounts of data to his analysis, whether working with numbers or qualitative interviews – and what results is an insightful and sometimes devastating look at how capital operates in the book trade today.
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
