The Second Pass

I love books and I greatly admire people that write effectively about one’s love of good books.  The Second Pass (“an exclusively online publication devoted to reviews, essays, and blog posts about books new and old“) is the kind of concept I wish I had developed and that is overflowing with people that write effectively about books. After visiting the publication for awhile, I contacted the site’s founder and editor, John Williams, to garner a better understanding of what he’s trying to achieve. The site just celebrated its sixth month of existence and Williams entertained a series of questions from me. Williams’ career path to The Second Pass includes the following details: “From 2001-2007, he worked in the editorial department at HarperCollins. Before that, he spent time as a journalist in Texas and an editorial intern at Harper’s Magazine. His work as a freelance writer has appeared in Slate, McSweeney’s, Stop Smiling, the Austin American-Statesman, the Dallas Morning News, the New York Sun, and other publications.” My thanks to Williams for his time and for shepherding a site worthy of my jealousy.

Tim O’Shea: With six months of the site under your belt, what do you consider to be some of the successes and missteps of the site to date?

John Williams: I feel like the site overall has been a success. I’m proudest of the way people have responded to it, both general readers and people in the publishing business. The vast majority of the feedback I’ve received has been positive. I guess the most specific success was the “Fired from the Canon” feature, which hit a nerve with people and spread far and wide.

The missteps have been mercifully small (in terms of how public they are). For instance, I started the site with confidence that I could get material rolling in as I went, and that was a mistake. I should have had more “inventory” at the start. I feel like I’ve been playing catch-up in order to keep the site refreshed on a regular basis, though that’s finally starting to change. I guess another misstep would be my desire to have a “Letters” page, as a way of nodding to the tradition of letters to the editor. That’s been a bust, and I put a comments function up on the blog instead. I’m still trying to figure out what to replace “Letters” with, so the heading remains up on the nav bar for now — useless, like an appendix.

Read the rest of this entry »