Dempsey scores! More here.

Never mind. We lost.

The Myths of Nonprofit Literary Publishing: “If a for-profit group had grants, no income tax liability and a free workforce, someone would be making good money and fewer small businesses would go under. Why does a nonprofit have these savings and still claim to be too poor to pay its bills, namely the writing content that serves as the very foundation of the publication?” (via The Publishing Spot)

There is some speculation that Kate Morton, author of The Shifting Fog, has one-upped Chloe Harper’s $1 million advice from 2002, collecting the largest publishing bounty ever granted to a debut Australian novelist. The book proposal started off as an elaborate, small-time Ponzi scam so that Morton could garner a bit of pocket money out of the Australian publishing industry. To everyone’s surprise, while waiting for the checks to come in the mail, Morton ended up writing her novel. And the deal became legit shortly after Allen & Unwin admired Morton’s inventive approach to sales. They responded with largesse.

The Globe and Mail‘s Sarah Hampson profiles fiction editor Ellen Seligman, who observes that, like the protagonist in Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly, she has split her brain in two independently functioning hemispheres. There is the First Response Brain, which is designed to offer immediate answers (such as “It’s Strunk & White, you callow amateur! Not Stunk & White! Call me when you have a clue!”). And there is Seligman’s Editor’s Brain, an entity quite capable of whacking down a 1,200 page manuscript in half before lunch hour. Seligman’s Editor’s Brain (hereinafter “SEB”) has threatened to develop its own set of limbs, walk away from Seligman’s body and enter the cranium of Viking editor Paul Slovak. SEB’s plan is to ensure that Bill Vollmann’s books aren’t nearly as long and that T.C. Boyle turns out a book every other year rather than annually. Fortunately, Viking has employed considerable security to ensure that half-brains — particularly Canadian half-brains — will never enter its premises.

[UPDATE: Bookninja has some inside dirt relating to Seligman.]

Today is a sad day — a bleak and possibly irreversible moment in publishing history where we shall all mourn the loss of one of the great incomplete masterpieces. I am convinced that literary scholars will place this stunning work next to Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth, Dickens’ The Mystery of Edwin Drood and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Love of the Last Tycoon. Of course, the Great Author’s representative states that the Great Author herself will “save the memoirs for a rainy day when she needs to re-invent herself.” I take this as a sly reference to the immortal melody “MacArthur Park.” Will the Great Author and Her Man finally find connubial bliss and settle down in a needle-laden warren? And shortly before moving, will the Great Author and Her Man, both distracted by the heightened opioid receptors blitzing through their bodies, zone out and leave their wedding cake in the rain?