Publishing Humor

It’s been a busy week, jam-packed with a revision deadline, children’s extra-curriculars, errands, small household emergencies of various types and descriptions, houseguests, and preparation for an upcoming short vacation.

I grabbed my grins where I could find them.

Today, for your blog-reading pleasure, a compilation of funnies. My sense of humor was a little twisted this week, but hope you’ll find them worth a smile, too.

Amusing quotations, courtesy of: http://ow.ly/uezD

• I love being a writer. What I can’t stand is the paperwork.
  Peter De Vries
• A catless writer is almost inconceivable. It’s a perverse taste, really, since it would be easier to write with a herd of buffalo in the room than even one cat; they make nests in the notes and bite the end of the pen and walk on the typewriter keys.
  Barbara Hollan

A spoof in The New Yorker about the demise of in-house publicity at publishing houses: http://bit.ly/4n1Vmr : Features a “letter” from an intern that’s been hired to take the place of the publicity department. She starts the letter to the author by praising the writer’s book, Clancy the Doofus Beagle: a Love Story and finishes the letter by saying she’s “looking forward to collaborating with you to make A History of Moorish Architecture, 1200-1492 the biggest success it can be.”

In between, the intern says soothingly, “Don’t worry if you think you’re not on Facebook, because you actually are. Jason enrolled you when you signed the contract last year, or at least he was supposed to, and he told Sarah Williams he did before he had to retire and Sarah left for nursing school. You currently have 421 Friends, 17 Pending Requests, 8 Pokes, 5 Winks, and 3 Proposals of “Marriage.”

An article in the Huffington Post entitled “Book Pitch Gone Bad: How to Piss Off Those You Most Want to Befriend : http://tinyurl.com/ybmjelo . It’s really a fairly serious article, but the publicist was so outrageous and clueless, it made me smile. I thought the title was funny, too.

I don’t remember why I was watching this video in the first place, but it’s really funny (and helpful, too for those of you facing a face-to-face agent pitch at a writing conference) and features several industry professionals in it: