Michael Erard
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"Writers & Writing"
Like any writer who wonders how his work is doing in the commercial world, I keep my eye on Um’s Amazon rankings, where I see that the hardcover is outselling the paperback. I know why that’s attractive: it’s a bit cheaper, plus it’s a hardcover, which projects the bookish essence of the book. You get [...]
Continue Reading →The other day, I got an email out of the blue from the managing editor at a Big Magazine that’s often associated with literature and the South. Do you have anything we can publish? she asked. I love it when that happens.
Continue Reading →1. I looked at my Nielsen Bookscan numbers for Um... in all of its formats, and realized that
2. in Denver, five paperbacks were sold at the same week before Thanksgiving, so
3. I took a chance and called Tattered Cover on the off-chance the sales happened there, and on the phone discovered
4. [...]
Continue Reading →I wrote a review of the 16th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style for Design Observer, pointing out how thoroughly they’ve departed from their bookish bibliocentrism and embraced, as never before, the digital reality. Apparently I noticed some things that no one had seen before, such as this fact:
The words “electronic,” “software,” [...]
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I’m ecstatic to report that Babel No More, my book about hyperpolyglots, has been sold to Free Press/Simon & Schuster; I’ll be working with Hilary Redmon, who’s published a number of neuroscience books and is interested in things language and who has also worked with Richard Dawkins and Daniel Tammett (who appears in the [...]
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So plagiarism is in the air; the NY Times caught the bug (with a reasonably nuanced nondemonization of the perpetrators) the other day, with an article that’s, at this writing, the most emailed. Or maybe they stole the idea from me — my essay for The Morning News, “Cheater, Cheater,” burned up the [...]
Continue Reading →Last week, The Morning News published an essay I was first assigned to write by Rolling Stone back in 2002, in which I found the first student I caught plagiarizing and interviewed her about how it impacted her life. The piece got killed (because I didn’t know what I wanted to write) but I remained [...]
Continue Reading →Over at Design Observer, my Dream Job Project was recently launched. In this first post, I invited people to post the concrete aspects of the work they do or the work they want to do. Later I’m going to boil down this input into a set of parameters that would serve as the outlines [...]
Continue Reading →The second paragraph of my new essay, an homage to my time at the Dobie Paisano ranch, up at Design Observer:
Cutting cedars is a lot like writing, but it doesn’t replace writing, and I’ve never gone out until I’ve done my daily. Standing, searching, bending, cutting, standing: it’s repetitive work but has [...]
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Last week I appeared with Ammon Shea at Real Art Ways in Hartford, Connecticut, reading and talking about books. (He talked about his, me mine. Maybe next time we can swap.) His is a word book: he spent a year reading the Oxford English Dictionary. But it’s not a word book like a lexicographer [...]
Continue Reading →One of the books I love the most is Toolbox by a Mexican poet, Fabio Morábito, which was translated from Cajas de herramientas by Geoff Hargreaves. This is the first paragraph of chapter about “oil”:
Oil is water that has lost its get up and go, its cheeky forward drive. Having exhausted all its routes, [...]
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