Publishing News 7/16/13

From PW Daily:

Ria Julien has joined the Frances Goldin Literary Agency as in-house counsel and will also acquire selected projects for representation. Before joining the agency and being admitted to the New York Bar, she was a nonfiction editor and foreign rights agent at Seven Stories Press.

From The Smithsonian via Salon.com: 

New research suggests the secret to preserving mental agility may lie in simply cracking open a book.

The findings, published online today in Neurology, suggest that reading books, writing and engaging in other similar brain-stimulating activities slows down cognitive decline in old age, independent of common age-related neurodegenerative diseases. In particular, people who participated in mentally stimulating activities over their lifetimes, both in young, middle and old age, had a slower rate of decline in memory and other mental capacities than those who did not.

From The Daily Beast on Five Ways to Fix Book Publishing Houses:

This model of literary production is doomed. The idea that there should be centralized, massively consolidated, bureaucratic organizations known as the major trade houses, with multiple layers of editors, vast publicity departments, and books fed to them by an entity known as literary agents, only to take repeated losses and rely on a few stars to help them break even, is bound for extinction....

In short, writing needs to be reader and community driven, hierarchies need to be radically flattened, creativity needs to be diffused at the local level, and globalization needs to reactivate literary worth everywhere....