Category: Writing and publishing

Summer thoughts: On publishing

I’ve been amazingly (and wonderfully) busy, reading the first two book manuscripts for the new publishing house. Okay, let’s be truthful. I’ve been reading one (Laila El-Haddad’s), and Bill the spouse has been doing the main reading on Chas Freeman’s first of two manuscripts.
Also went to Philly for a meeting (unrelated) with AFSC.
Also been doing more work on the Just World Books website, etc. I am really excited at the discourse-stretching aspect of the whole book-publishing project; and I was really buoyed up by some feedback I got from a longtime friend who’s been in mainstream publishing all her life and expressed real excitement at the JWB project, saying niche publishing like this really is the future of the business…
Bottom line here at JWN, though, is that I see I haven’t blogged since Monday. That’s how it goes in blogging.
Reading through Laila’s manuscript, which is a compilation of many of her blog posts and other writings, December 2004 through June 2010, has kind of confirmed the intense, personal, quirky, and incredibly rich quality of the whole blogging experience– and therefore also of its product.
By the way, Laila’s manuscript will be not one but two books! Yay! Just a bit more work of tweaking and editing before we can start laying out the pages, producing the books, and making them available to the waiting public! Let’s say as of now that we hope to get Gaza Mom, Book 1, out in late October, and Book 2 out in early December, in time for the second anniversary of Israel’s launching of the 2008 assault on Gaza.
… I have also been hoping to blog some of my own thoughts here on the nature of and prospects for our country’s horrendous continuing military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq…. (Snip. I’ll make the rest of this a new post.)

Update from Just World Books

I realize I haven’t posted anything here since mid-April about the progress of my new book-publishing company, Just World Books. But the authors and I– along with a range of other contributors to the project– have all been pretty busy. So I’ll tell you all to watch out for busy Fall 2010 publishing schedule ahead.
First off the press will most likely be Laila El-Haddad’s book, which now has the fixed title Gaza Mom: Palestine, Politics, Parenting, and Everything In Between. The due date for that manuscript’s delivery is tomorrow, but because I’m such a huge softie I’ve given Laila two whole days of grace on delivering… So this Friday, it will be.
I can’t wait. I worked a little with a short excerpt that we’re using to try to persuade the right kind of person to write a Foreword– more on that, later. But I found even working with that short excerpt from the book to be incredibly moving… And that, even though I’d read all her blog posts and other essays at the time, when they first came out.
Somehow, having them strung together (and in forward-chrono order) made for an incredibly gripping narrative.
I think everyone who enjoys JWN will just love her book.
By the way, one of the many “background/administrative” things I’m doing right now re setting up the business and all its systems is, not surprisingly, to supervise the design and building of the Just World Books website. (Ably assisted by the continuing advice from my homegrown CTO.) The site is just a wee bit behind schedule right now. But no worry. It should be up within 3-4 weeks. Hey, by then I might even have a price and an ISBN for Laila’s book so that all the publishing info can be up on the site and y’all can start ordering.
But I don’t want to fix the price till I have a clearer idea of the page-length, so I do need to see the manuscript first. (It’ll have photos from her blog in it, too, which will complicate some of that length/price planning. Oh my. There is definitely more to this publishing business than meets the eye!)
Then in short order after Laila’s book we’ll have Book 1 from Chas Freeman, which will be on “Americans, Intelligence, and the Middle East”, Joshua Foust‘s very timely book that’s a critique of U.S. policy in Afghanistan, Book 2 from Chas Freeman, which is on “America, China, and the World”, and then Reidar Visser‘s book on “Iraq under Nuri al-Maliki, 2006-2010.” (I actually emailed Reidar today to ask what we should do if the Iraqi pols can’t agree on a new PM any time soon. Heck, it looks as if the current stalemate might go on for many, many more months… ) Plus, I’m planning a 25th anniversary reprint of my 1985 book on Lebanon, which I’ll be re-packaging under a new title along with my two longish Boston Review articles on Lebanon from 2005 and 2006, a little connecting text, and a brand-new Foreword by my esteemed, longtime friend Dr. Michael C. Hudson of Georgetown.
So that’ll be most of our Fall line-up. Then, I have two more authors who have already agreed to deliver manuscripts in late fall and January 2011, respectively. They are Rami Zurayk, who’s curating a book called “Food, Farming. and Freedom”, and Ron Mock, who’s a prof at George Fox University in Oregon, who’s publishing a more general (and traditionally constructed) book called “Pacifism Under Pressure” with us.
In addition, I’m in an advanced stage of contract discussions with a couple of other really intriguing bloggers, to do curated books from their blog; and I’m in an earlier stage of discussions around a number of other fabulous-looking projects, including not one but two great-looking atlases, a cookbook (on Gaza’s distinctive and fabulous cuisine, from Laila El-Haddad and a friend), a memoir, and a couple of ground-breaking edited volumes.
The first of those blogger-curated books mentioned above might come out this year. The rest of those projects will all be in the Spring 2011 or Fall 2011 lists.
Anyway, as you all may guess, as soon as the JWB website is up, you JWN readers will be the first to know… And I’ll really rely a lot on all of you to help spread the word about the JWB books as they start coming out.
I have to tell you, starting this business, planning the whole editing and publishing system and getting it into place, and nurturing all these projects along has been a heck of a lot of work– but a lot of fun, too! I’ve found and started working with an incredible bunch of other professionals who’ll also be contributing to the project… and I really think the English-speaking world is ready for these new discourse-expanding books!
Plus, did I mention yet that I’ve been looking into e-book publishing in a very serious way, and one of the things JWB will be doing is to publish fabulous, iPad-optimized e-books that will really build on all the strengths of the original, often web-published texts.
(By the way, I am also hoping to sell other-language rights, too. If any readers here want to enquire about terms for those, let me know.)

Announcing… Just World Books!

I am delighted to announce the establishment of a new book-publishing company, Just World Books, an imprint of the recently created limited-liability company, Just World Publishing, LLC.
The first titles in Just World Books’ Fall 2010 list will start to be available in September. The list will include books by:

    • Laila El-Haddad, author of the ‘Gaza Mom’ blog, whose first book with us has the working title Gaza Mom Reflects.
    • Joshua Foust, a principal contributor to the ‘Registan’ blog, whose book will be a very well-informed critique of U.S. policies in Afghanistan and neighboring countries
    • Chas W. Freeman, Jr., the talented (and in some quarters controversial) retired diplomatist, who will be publishing two or more titles with JWB presenting some of his extensive expertise in U.S. foreign and military policy, U.S.-China relations, and the Middle East
    • Reidar Visser, who is probably the English-speaking world’s best-informed and most meticulous analyst of Iraq’s internal politics: His first book with JWB will be a study of Iraq under PM Nouri al-Maliki, 2006-2010.

As you can perhaps infer from this description our Fall list, JWB’s business plan is based on the concept of ‘Short Turnround Time for Timely Titles.’ I am confident we can bring out excellent books by these accomplished authors in a very timely way, based on these factors:

Continue reading “Announcing… Just World Books!”

‘Journey to Jerusalem, 1995’, Part 1

I’m happy to make available to JWN readers Part 1 of a seven-part series I wrote about Jerusalem for Al-Hayat, back in July 1995. It’s here.
Getting this series into uploadable– and also, potentially editable– form is part of an ongoing project to data-mine some of my own past writings (especially those that are not readily available, even to me.) This Jerusalem series from 1995, for example: I think I have it on a floppy disk, someplace. But I don’t have a floppy disk reader any more, and anyway I’ve shifted from a PC to a Mac… What I do have are two yellowing paper copies of the whole series, a scanner, and some new OCR software that I’m still assessing. (ReadIris… not too bad, but not great either. On the other hand, a lot more affordable that Adobe Acrobat.)
Actually, I got the series commercially scanned since my scanner doesn’t have a sheet-feed, and then started doing the OCR.
Working with this material has been interesting: poignant and also extremely depressing. I spent about three weeks in Jerusalem in the summer of 1995, doing the research and interviews for it… Oh my goodness, how much worse the situation of the city’s Palestinians has gotten since then!
Poignant: There was the material from interviews I conducted Faisal Husseini, who passed away in 2001 (RIP). There was Faisal’s great but already heavily threatened institution, Orient House, which Ariel Sharon shut down a few months after Faisal’s passing.
That latter Wikipedia page notes,

    Items confiscated by the Israeli government included personal belongings, confidential information relating to the Jerusalem issue, documents referring to the 1991 Madrid conference and the Arab Studies Society photography collection. Also the personal books and documents of the late Faisal al-Husseini were summarily impounded.

What hooligans the Israeli authories sometimes are…
One of my main aims in republishing the 1995 series on Jerusalem now is to underline a couple of things:

    1. The fact that the kinds of challenges the Jerusalem Palestinians face today are by no means new. They’ve been living in this situation of extreme threat for a long time already.
    2. The fact that the policies pursued by the Israeli authorities toward the Jerusalem Palestinians started to become significantly harsher right after the conclusion of the Oslo Accord in 1993. From the point of view of Faisal Husseini or other Palestinian Jerusalemites, Oslo was a crock of nonsense that radically undermined rather than increasing their security.

One last note. The OCR really isn’t that great. (Or maybe I need to use it more smartly.) So I’ll put up the pieces in this series one at a time, as I can.

Essays by HC in ‘Boston Review’, since 2001

Nearly all these articles contain considerable
amounts of material from interviews and other information gained during
on-the-spot reporting trips, as well as analysis and reflections:

Blast from the CNI past

Well, what should drop into our mailbox yesterday but the latest direct-mail fundraising appeal from CNI… And goodness, what an embarrassment to me now, my name is even on the letter as one of its four co-signers.
There was a fairly lengthy history to the drafting of this letter, which might make a good sub-chapter in a memoir or a roman à clef sometime.
While I was at CNI, I did learn much I hadn’t known before about direct-mail fundraising. But it’s kind of a dying art, these days, isn’t it?
By the way, CNI has still not announced my resignation, even though it went into effect on February 10. I wonder whether anyone receiving this fundraising letter, on which my signature appears and which is dated January 30, is of the opinion that I am still the Executive Director at CNI?
I do think they should have announced the resignation before now. The statement I issued about the matter is here.
Of course, a prudent leadership at CNI would have insisted that we negotiate the text of an announcement before the resignation went into effect. But on February 10, after I made one last attempt to negotiate the differences that remained between us (which were not huge), they informed me they were cutting off all further negotiations with me.
So this was one of a number of loose ends they left unresolved at that point. As I said, a prudent leadership might have paid a bit more attention to the details of the transition.

Malta: Some notes from the conference, tweeting, etc

I have wifi inside the conference hall here, which is nice. I did a bit of tweeting already– here.
The appearance of the US ambassador here just now was interesting. On one hand, it’s a welcome new development to see a high-level US official participate in a UN gathering on Palestine. Otoh, he insisted on not sitting on the podium with the rest of the participants in this morning’s session, but had negotiated them giving him a separate lectern so he could not be photographed under the big backdrop saying that says “International Meeting in Support of Israeli-Palestinian Peace.” Plus, the content of his presentation included a strong and quite a-historical anti-Hamas diatribe and repeated appeals to participants in the conference to stop whining about the hurts of the past, etc etc. Altogether, he was far more patronizing than he probably knew, and probably far more than he’d intended.
He was followed by a rep from the parliament of the Russian Federation who spoke in completely fluent Arabic and talked about K. Meshaal’s recent productive visit to Moscow, the need for a resolution to be based on international law and legitimacy, etc. A huge contrast!

In Boston Review forum– on Afghanistan

I have a contribution in this latest Boston Review forum on Afghanistan. The forum is built around a great piece of reporting by Nir Rosen.
I wish I’d had more time to work on my contribution. But given the time constraints I was under, I’m pretty happy about it.
There are some other good contributions there, too. I haven’t read them all yet; but I looked at Andy Bacevich’s and it’s filled with his usual good sense.
Fwiw, my life has been extremely busy since I took on this job at CNI two months ago. The job has involved a ton more administration than I’d envisaged, and has left just about zero time or energy to do anything else. In fact, this BR contribution is the only non-CNI work I’ve done since October 20.
My very first contribution to BR, back in 2001, was this contribution to a forum they were running on the one-state project in Palestine/Israel. At that time, I was against it, mainly because of its political unfeasibility. As I have noted elsewhere about this piece, “My views later evolved.”
Hey, maybe my views on the unwinnability of the US’s war in Afghanistan might “evolve”, too. At this point, though, I am not expecting that they will…
And here, obviously, is something else very sad about my work load. I haven’t had time to do any JWN blogging… Boo-hoo…
Anyway, if anyone’s reading this, Have a Great Christmas/Holiday time!

New blog!

For the foreseeable future I’ll be doing all or most of my Middle East-related blogging over at the new blog I’ve launched on behalf of the CNI Foundation. It’s called Fair Policy, Fair Discussion.
As veteran bloggers will probably recognize, at present FPFD uses a very standard WordPress template. I wanted to get it up and running quickly so it can be the main vehicle for whatever blogging I’m able to do during the upcoming CNI Foundation tour of the Middle East that I’ll be co-leading, October 30 – November 16. I’m hoping that other tour participants can do some blogging there, too.
So anyway, please put FPFD onto your RSS reader or other regular reading mechanism. Come and join in the (hopefully civilized) discussion over there.