Social media gives us new ways to connect with others and pursue our interests, which can include following our favorite authors, publishers, and bookstores. While it may seem an unlikely place, Instagram is one of these platforms with a rather large book-loving community. Recently, I became the new admin behind the Swenson Book Development Instagram account, but of course, there are many others in the literary community that have been #Bookstagrammers for much longer. Author and filmmaker Elizabeth Rynecki – who documented in both book and film her “emotional quest to find the art of her Polish-Jewish great-grandfather, lost during World War II” – is an experienced member of the Instagram literary community and models the best practices of #Bookstragrammers. As a guest for Swenson Book Development, Rynecki has written about writing book reviews and using Instagram, and I am excited to share it with you. Elizabeth Rynecki: Last year I posted 50 mini book reviews on Instagram. That might seem like a large number of books to read in a year, but it’s notably smaller than the number of books I started and then decided, for various reasons, not to finish. Not all books are for all readers. It seems like an obvious statement, but as an author myself I have come to understand this in a much deeper way, to the point that I’ve almost made it a mantra. My recent background as an author [Chasing Portraits was published by Penguin Random House in 2016] leads some people to…
1) Emma Donoghue, Frog Music: A Novel (Little, Brown and Company, April 2014) From the author of the bestselling novel, Room, Emma Donaghue penned this novel based in San Francisco during the summer of 1897 in which the city suffered a smallpox epidemic and a record-breaking heat wave. The story begins when a young woman named Jenny Bonnet is shot dead through the window of… [Read More]
Filed Under: Amy Strewart, Between Shades of Gray, Chasing Portraits, Editor of Genius, Elizabeth Rynecki, Emma Donoghue, Frog Music, Girl Waits with Gun, Max Perkins, Ruta Sepetys, Scott Berg
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When I mentor interns, I often spend time thinking about what advice might be helpful to those who pursue career goals in the world of publishing. This month I’ve had the good fortune to have two interns working with Swenson Book Development LLC. They’ve both seen many of their friends and classmates graduate this June but both of them completed their third not final year… [Read More]
Filed Under: bookseller, career in publishing, college graduation, internships, jobs, library volunteer
Amidst the nervous titter of soon-to-be graduates, I could feel the excitement boiling under the clean, black robes at Lawrence University’s graduation ceremony. This year’s commencement speaker was Lan Samantha Chang. An Appleton WI native, Chang is the author of Hunger, All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost, and Inheritance. Hunger is a novella and collection of short stories, published in 1988. Chang’s prose follows the… [Read More]
Filed Under: commencement, graduation, Hunger, immigration, Inheritance, Iowa Writers Workshop, Lan Samantha Chang
Guest blog by Naomi Yaeger, Duluth MN A book award ceremony can refresh and energize you while you plug away at a manuscript. For more than three years I’ve worked on a manuscript. I’m a newspaper journalist, but that doesn’t make writing a book any easier for me. I’m used to weekly deadlines and writing short stories. I’ve been in a funk lately. A couple… [Read More]
Everyday my email is flooded with a rush of correspondence. There’s a seemingly endless stream of messages all day, every day. Yours, too? Do you sometimes wonder whether your message disappeared into cyberspace because you did not receive a response? Did they end up in a spam folder? Is no response a “no”? How are the email messages you send handled by recipients who are… [Read More]