Letters From Libby James

When you see in Publishers Weekly that someone just scored a big five- or six-digit advance, do you ever think, “I wonder how they are going to spend that big fat check?” I don’t, because I know they aren’t getting that check all at one time, that it is in fact coming in over the course of months, sometimes years, and so they are likely just desperately paying the bills with it like the rest of us… This is how advances work: Advances are split into installments tied to milestones in the...

For about a decade I went pretty hard in the zine world. The first zine serial I wrote was called Sour Girl, of which there were maybe close to a dozen issues, and then when I graduated high school I graduated to a zine called The Way Fish Love, which I only mustered a few issues. Then I took a long breath from making my own zines, and only taught zine arts on occasion to the next generation of zinesters. I did make a zine a handful of years ago that was a set of flash stories set in...

There is this expectation about speed and leverage based on the old ways of things that does not match what is happening inside the acquisition pipeline now. One of the clearest structural signal changes came when Baker & Taylor, one of the largest library distributors in the United States and a company operating since 1828, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Library distribution has for so long been a stable revenue stream for publishers, particularly for midlist and backlist titles that...

I recently relocated to Arizona. Some back story first, why the desert: Arizona is where I lived many years ago when I went to college, and I moved back to Minnesota (my home state) for grad school with the intent of always leaving again as soon as I was done with the program. Then I met the person that I thought would be my life partner...who I am now no longer with, and it freed me to go where I wanted again. I committed to a year lease, and that is something that I am now deeply struggling...

Lisa wrote in with a problem. She has a main character who is in the later end of the timeline. Around that, she has built a substantial body of backstory to understand that character’s growth. Now she is trying to decide whether to alternate timelines or whether the choice of protagonist is wrong. When I am writing or reviewing a manuscript and there is suddenly a lot of backstory, and it feels like important backstory, I right away ask: if you are telling so much backstory, could the story...

I have been known to be guilty of writing really lazy cover letters. If you're submitting to a literary journal, your cover letter isn't the place to charm anyone. It’s not where you show off your style. It’s not where you explain what the piece is “about” or where you talk about what was going on in your life when you wrote it. No one is reading your cover letter to be moved. The cover letter is admin. It's there to confirm that you're not going to waste their time, that you can read and...

A couple weeks ago I wrote a piece about a story we had to pull from a lit journal I work with because we received a cease-and-desist letter. Boy, did that trigger some of you into writing me back. How could this happen? you said. How will I know if I can get sued? you asked. What a dick! You rightly called the guy out. Look, everyone's line is gonna be different. The writer who writes a piece about what happened to them and how much they are willing to share about someone else is going to be...