Agate Bolden is the home of National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward's debut novel Where The Line Bleeds; Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr.'s novels Before I Forget and the forthcoming Freeman, memoir Becoming Dad, and collected columns Forward From This Moment; and daytime television star Judge Lynn Toler's My Mother's Rules and the forthcoming Making Marriage Work.

I kind of hate book jackets, as superfluous, distracting, and disproportionately overvalued in the book marketing effort. I see them, grudgingly, as a necessary evil, even though I recognize the brilliance of so many jacket designers. But that's how I feel. Maybe you like book jackets. This post's for you.

I think Elif Batuman is a wonderful writer. Here at The Rumpus she defends Mike Daisey--a position to which I am not sympathetic--but does so in a sensitive, even-handed way that acknowledges where and how Daisey sinned, but suggests that perhaps we (and Ira Glass) should treat his trespasses more leniently. Along the way she develops some very interesting on our culture's feelings about the relative authority and value of fiction and nonfiction, and how these have evolved in distressing ways. Highly recommended, as is everything else I've read by Elif Batuman.

I bet if Tolstoy was writing now in America, there would be a lot of pressure on him to do War and Peace as a nonfiction book – like, tracing the domestic and personal life of his wife’s grandmother through journals and letters, interwoven with his own philosophical musings about the Napoleonic wars. But Tolstoy didn’t think he was detracting from the truth-telling power of his book by writing it as a novel.

Companies like Agate are relatively vulnerable and powerless in these kinds of large-scale disputes. We depend on our business relationship with Amazon, and other massive companies like Apple and Barnes and Noble and Google, to reach the buyers of our books. I'm under no illusions about the munificent nature of these big companies--or about most companies of any sort, for that matter. To me, what matters is the health of the larger system, not the health of particular companies besides my own. A little company like mine can't survive if it doesn't become somewhat effective navigating among the big dreadnoughts that control its industry. The larger concern is what happens when one organization gets too big and too powerful, and in its growth and spread begins to affect the health of the entire industry. Isn't that precisely the situation that institutions like the Department of Justice exist to address?

As I see it, there are some especially troubling aspects to this whole ebook pricing situation, specifically in business terms. One is Amazon's eagerness to apply its traditional wholesale terms to ebook sales, and then price those ebooks to consumers at rates that appear, in many cases, to be well below the wholesale prices they're paying publishers for those ebooks. Would the government look at this as "predatory pricing?" Perhaps not quite yet, according to the Federal Trade Commission. A second troubling aspect is Amazon's movement into publishing--not only through its more-traditional trade imprint led by Larry Kirshbaum, but also through its Kindle Direct "self-publishing" program. In this respect, Amazon is using its market power not only to compete with other retailers, but also to compete with the publishers for whom Amazon is ostensibly a customer. Again, this kind of business practice might not seem too monopolistic to the DoJ and FTC quite yet. But depending on how Amazon continues to evolve, might it start looking that way before too much longer? Last, there's the fact that in supposedly colluding with Apple to establish the agency pricing model, those large publishers showed themselves willing to accept less money from retailers per ebook sold, in order to preserve some measure of control over how their product was priced to consumers. Why? To me (as a publisher, of course), it seems clear: because they realize that losing control over the pricing of their products will have a disastrous effect on their businesses. This is not an illegitimate concern.

What's happening to big book publishers right now is starting to look a little like what happened to the newspaper industry over the past ten years, and to the record industry over the past fifteen years. It's not pretty. It's not even necessarily bad for small publishers like Agate. But is it good for our culture at large? More specifically, is it good for the individual Americans who read books, or who write them, i.e., most Americans? And are those not the people whose interests the DoJ is meant to protect?

It will be interesting to see what happens to the ebook marketplace next. In particular, I'm very curious whether big publishers will see it as more in their interest to risk alienating some readers by holding off on the ebook releases of their most popular titles, just as they delay their lower-cost paperback releases. It's certainly within their power, and their rights, to do so. Also, how aggressive will Amazon wish to appear in pricing ebooks? The company certainly hasn't been shy in painting publishers as the bad guys when it comes to disputes over ebook prices. It's this that I think bears the most watching--not so much how Amazon battles its rival retailers, but how it treats the companies that supply the products it sells.

This is why we’re pleased to be publishing the seventh edition of the bestselling The Travel Writer’s Handbook, by Jacqueline Harmon Butler and Louise Purwin Zobel (click for a link to Amazon). This handy guide walks readers through the travel writer’s process. From how to pitch a story to planning and researching a trip to conducting on-the-road interviews, The Travel Writer’s Handbook provides a road map for finding success as a travel writer. This new seventh edition contains all the most essential and up-to-date information on how travel writers can tap into mobile and online resources to find new ways to publish and publicize their work, as well as to help with planning and preparation.

We hope you find The Travel Writer’s Handbook helpful. Happy traveling!

Why soup, as opposed to another type of meal?

Soup just seemed the right fit, both practically and conceptually. For one, it’s generally easy and inexpensive to prepare, so we aren’t asking too much of the contributors in terms of their time and money. Unless, of course, you’re Paul Kahan and you decide to throw truffles in your split pea soup. But that’s your business! Soup is easy to serve—all you need are some soup warmers, ladles, and bowls—which is important in a nontraditional setting like a tavern, where there might not be a full-on kitchen. (Side note: At one point we considered buying some toasters and throwing toast parties, but that never really caught on. I wonder why?) And, of course, soup is a hallmark of help in hard times, from the soup lines of the Depression to the classic soup kitchen model to mom bringing you chicken soup when you’re sick. When we started doing Soup & Bread in 2009 the recession had really just hit in a big way, and people in my world—as everywhere—were losing their jobs left and right. Soup seemed a way to connect the dots between the Hideout’s relatively small community of artists and weirdos and the larger cultural moment.

What do you think makes soup a particularly communal meal?

It’s a very forgiving dish, but from a creative perspective the culinary possibilities are endless, so you’re able to please even very picky eaters. And there’s something just so metaphorically satisfying about a community sharing a meal out of one big pot. When I started working on the book, over and over again people would say, “Oh, well of course you know the stone soup story, right?” The fable about the little village that is starving until everyone contributes a potato or a carrot or an ounce of beans to create a pot of soup? I swear I first heard it in preschool. But, it’s such a great story! It really epitomizes the ability of cooking, and cooking soup in particular, to create community, and of the ability of a community to sustain itself by harnessing the collective power of even its humblest, most raggedy parts.

The Soup & Bread series has become a noisy, communal, well-attended affair that many Chicagoans look forward to every winter. When you began back in 2009, did you ever consider that the event would resonate with so many people?

Not a clue. When this started I thought it would be a fun, casual way to get people out of the house in the depths of winter and raise a little money for a good cause at the same time. I had no idea it would take off the way it did—with hundreds of participants and more than $25,000 raised to date—and it’s been personally very gratifying to see this project grow and evolve. I’ve been particularly heartened by how many people have volunteered not just to make soup (or come eat it) but also to show up early to set up tables and slice bread, to take on boring behind-the-scenes work like helping post recipes to the website, and to jump in to set up events in other cities.

What do you hope the guests at a typical Soup & Bread event would take away from the evening?

I hope they take away the idea that a benefit doesn’t have to be a stuffy, rubber-chicken affair for rich people. That it’s possible to do good and have a good time to boot. That hospitality can be a radical act, and that it’s within their power to take an idea like Soup & Bread or any of the other grassroots community-building ideas in the book and run with them, in whatever direction strikes their fancy.

Can you talk about any particularly inspiring soup-related stories that you’ve learned through the Soup & Bread series?

This isn’t so much a story as an experience, but this summer we did a one-off event as an emergency benefit for the Garfield Park Conservatory, a beautiful 100-plus-year-old structure on the west side of Chicago that was severely damaged in a hailstorm. It’s a wonderful community resource and I’ve spent a lot of time there in the past as a volunteer. After the storm shattered something like 13,000 panes of glass in its greenhouses I threw together a Soup & Bread, for which a dozen restaurants and cooks donated soup and hundreds of people came out to attend. Given that it was organized in just a few days, it was thrilling to raise almost $3,000 in just a few hours, and the staff members who showed up were so happy both for the outpouring of appreciation and for the chance to kick back a bit and have fun after what had been a truly horrible week for them. That was inspiring.

What were the most popular soups you’ve seen over the years? The most unusual?

Squash soups seem to be very popular, year after year, as well as black bean and lentil soups. But it’s been fun to track some culinary trends through soup as well. In 2010, for example, an inordinate number of tortilla soups turned up at Soup & Bread. That was shortly after Rick Bayless won Top Chef Masters, and seemed to coincide with a general surge in interest in regional Mexican cooking. I think Mike Sula’s Asian Carp soup takes the prize as the most unusual thing ever to pass through our Crock-Pots (sweet-and-sour, challengingly bony) but there have been some other extreme efforts as well, like a turkey soup made with stout beer and chocolate chips, or my friend Vera Videnovich’s chicken and nettle soup, made from the weeds running wild on her farm. Then there was the genius night when, in a moment of random soup synchronicity, seven out of eight soups were all the same shade of taupe/tan. We dubbed it “The Night of Beige Soups.” A pot of chili was the lone outlier.

 What’s next for Soup & Bread?

The whole point the book is to show that these kinds of projects are just the tip of the iceberg—that soup is really an open-source idea—so I’d love to see other people take it up and launch their own Soup & Bread-style events, and I’d like to see Soup & Bread become a resource for them.