photo by Miriam Berkley
About Ron Hogan
Ron Hogan created Beatrice.com in 1995, making it one of the oldest continuously running literary websites on the Internet. He also writes about the business side of publishing at GalleyCat.
He speaks frequently at book festivals and industry conferences, to both aspiring and published authors, about the bookblog phenomenon and other transformative trends in book publishing. Newspapers and magazines also call upon him to discuss such issues:
He is the author of The Stewardess Is Flying the Plane, a visual tribute to '70s Hollywood Publishers Weekly called "one of the year's most fun" coffee table books when it was published in 2005. He also contributed to the New York Times bestseller Not Quite What I Was Planning.
He has published an e-book of his "translation" of the Tao Te Ching that is downloaded by more than 25,000 readers a year in various formats.
Ron Hogan is represented by Channel V Media for publicity and speaking engagements.
The Long Version
I launched Beatrice in the mid-1990s, when I was fresh out of graduate school and trying to figure out what my first website was going to be about. At the time, I was working at Dutton's Brentwood Bookstore, and it eventually occurred to me that I could interview my favorite writers.
I continued to maintain the site after I moved to San Francisco for various freelance gigs in new media, and then again when I moved to Seattle for a two-year stint as the nonfiction and history book review editor for Amazon.com. At one point, my supervisor there asked me to choose between the job and Beatrice, and since I liked the website better, I started making plans to leave as soon as I'd earned my next round of stock options. Two weeks later, they slashed the department by 20 percent and sent me home with all my options intact, so I'm pretty sure got the best of that deal.
I moved to New York in the summer of 2000, and though the next few years were Beatrice's busiest period ever, I eventually hit a wall. Unable to find the motivation to work much on the site when the recession was at its worst, then unable to find the time to do the extensive interviews for which the site had become known when my freelance writing career finally got back on track, I decided at the end of 2003 to switch over to the blog format that was so popular with all the kids, hoping it would revitalize the site—and it totally did. Soon I had more readers than ever before, I was getting positive notices in the national media, and in the fall of 2005, I was invited to start commenting about the publishing industry at another site called GalleyCat. Along the way, I found time to write a book about Hollywood in the 1970s, and that was really fun, so I'll probably write another one some day. (About something else, that is.)
More Potentially Relevant Information
I have profiles at GoodReads and LinkedIn.
You can also keep track of my comings and goings through my tumbleblog, even though it's sort of silly.
photo by Mrs. Beatrice
"The best lit bloggers are keen and devoted readers, witty gossips and perceptive critics of the book industry. The worst lit bloggers sound like what you'd get if you seated the title characters from Heathers around the Algonquin Round Table and gave them a photo of Zadie Smith on a bad hair day. Ron Hogan... stays on the right side of that line."