Faulkner Influence in Stephen King Stories

At the same time I was marveling at Martha Grimes’ Emma Graham series (Hotel Paradise, Cold Flat Junction, and Belle Ruin) and having a grand time with Jury in the Richard Jury series, I was also having fun identifying and guessing at the literary and cultural influences on Martha Grimes. I finally had a reason [...]

Why is The Huffington Post Important to Today’s Publishing Reality?

Three years ago The Huffington Post, barely out of its incubator, was brushed off as a casual, digital hobby of Arianna Huffington.
By February 2010 The Huffington Post had 3.7 million unique visitors (Nielson Online). Technorati, the premiere blog search tool, has the Huffington Post as the second most linked to blog, second to TechCrunch.
The Huffington [...]

Threes, the Third, at Bennington College

From the Diary of Joseph Kaufman.
It was at Bennington College, formerly an all-woman’s school gone co-ed seven years previous–450 women and 150 men at the time of my attendance–that I met my third great writing teacher, Nick Delbanco, and my third great friend, Marc Falcone. Bennington dorms were two-story, white New England clapboard houses abutting [...]

Growing Beyond, From the Diary of Joseph Kaufman

After Mr. Benson, my 9th grade Marine writing teacher, I had no writing teacher for the rest of high school—there simply were no creative writing classes at Pittsfield High School from 1970-1973. Rather, in English class, we read Dickens and Twain and Hawthorne and wrote ten page papers about their significance—I don’t even think I [...]

Book Model Variant 1

Sometimes an author has a great idea for a book, but can’t get a nibble from a publisher. What’s he supposed to do? The first step involves risk. Either the author invests a great deal of time looking for an agent to sell the idea to a publisher, which cuts into any future royalties the [...]

Life Cycle of a Book: Understanding the Basic Book

Books on a Shelf

So many book models exist today. From the traditional write-and-publish to the eBook, with everything in between, the variations are staggering. This post is about the basic book model. Once the book life cycle is described I can then talk about the variations on the model. By enumerating the book models I [...]

Doom and Gloom or New Beginning?

Everyday I receive an article talking about the demise of this publisher or that book store chain. This morning The Independent out of the UK lamented the Borders UK non-agreement-that-would-save-the-day. The managers’ buyout does not seem to be happening, or they are too little too late – Borders UK is not taking online orders. It [...]

Meet Joseph Kaufman, New Author with French Creek Press

It feels great to offer a good fiction book that looks at who we are: post baby boom, post 60’s, post rebound, post lots of growth. It doesn’t surprise me that our readers, many of a like age, connect with “The Legend of Cosmo and the Archangel”. We all question who we are today, 40 [...]

French Creek Press and its name

It has been said that where you live influences you, like an angel that sits over the land and guides the happenings of mortal men. Perhaps being born in a territory fusing East and West, and later spending most of my childhood in a place governed by a true innovator, formed my foundation.
Hawaii at the [...]