Print Run Podcast

Hosted ByErik Hane & Laura Zats

Print Run is a podcast created and hosted by Laura Zats and Erik Hane. Its aim is simple: to have the conversations surrounding the book and writing industries that too often are glossed over by conventional wisdom, institutional optimism, and false seriousness.

We’re book people, and we want to examine the questions that lie at the heart of that life: why do books, specifically, matter? In a digital world, what cultural ground does book publishing still occupy?

Whether it’s trends in the queries from writers that hit our inboxes or the social ramifications of an industry that pays so little being based in Manhattan, we’re here for it. Probably to laugh at it and call it names, but here for it nonetheless.

Print Run is the happy-hour conversation after a long day at a catalog launch; it’s the bottle of wine you drink most of on a Tuesday when the manuscripts are no good. We’re for writers, for publishers, for anyone who’s opened a book and wanted to know—really know—what goes into getting the damn thing made.

Join us. We’ll talk about the worst sex scene we’ve ever read and wonder aloud about how millennials will affect the books of the future. We’ll figure out why Jonathan Franzen wants to replace your child with a penguin and whether or not that penguin will be buying hardcovers when he grows up.

Episode 60 — Making Publishing Safer

This week, after discussing Washington Post’s incorporation of Amazon’s proprietary data into their bestseller lists, we discuss what appears to be the onset of book publishing’s reckoning with sexual harassment and abuse. Similar to other industries, how can the book world do an honest and sufficient job of examining the structures of power that allow these things to take place? What can an industry that by all accounts would like to be a more inclusive and safe place for everyone do to correct its course, and what challenges stand in the way? A bit more serious than usual this week, but a necessary conversation. Thanks, as always, for listening.

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