The crisis in publishing is the collapse of the book as a commodity, as a nexus for shopping. That's it.
Reading can shape an economy. I call that practice publication, and I'm going to draw things in sharp contrast to clarify the practice. Publication is the creation of new publics through a culture of reading. Shopping, which is the prevailing culture of our time and which drives most of the choices now being made in publishing, corrodes or evacuates public. Real publication begins by quieting the noise of shopping.
Reading and shopping have never been a very good match.
For those of us who love reading, and who are sick and tired of shopping, this is a golden time indeed.
Publication is the creation of a public. It is an essentially political act.
Literary culture . . . is almost beyond the ken of those would like to manage it.
Literary culture and its economy have never been made better by convincing non-readers that they ought to buy books.
The quick changes, the premium on novelty, the need for a next debut novelist--once the last one has moved tiresomely on to their second novel--is not a happy companion to publication.
Publication is a political strategy.
A literary thriller, HELL OR HIGH WATER takes place in New Orleans three years after Katrina. The protagonist, a young Cuban American journalist at the Times-Picayune, juggles her friends, her mother, and the teenaged girl she's mentoring with her hunt for sex criminals and a missing woman. (Oh, and a little romance--if you can call it that.) 
Last year, the lovely and generous Anita Mumm of the Nelson Literary Agency in Denver answered questions from the graduate students in my memoir writing workshop. 
Judith Ortiz Cofer is a writer's writer and a friend to writers, as anyone who's been fortunate enough to have been befriended or mentored by her can enthusiastically attest. She's as kind as she is talented, as funny as she is smart, and as generous to writers as she is prolific. There's no one I'd rather have endorse my new collection of essays, ISLAND OF BONES, than the author of the gorgeous breakthrough books Silent Dancing and The Latin Deli and so many more wonderful works since then. Replete with a quiet wisdom, Joy Castro’s essays are powerfully focused revelations, as in the lyrical examination of a creosote bush, word by word; she trains our eyes to see beauty in pain, “Yet observe for a moment the grace of the creosote bush, hollowing as it grows, stretching and bending under an empty sky.” And along with the writer “you cry here it is!” In the author’s journey from abused runaway child to a fulfilling life as a wife, mother, writer, and professor, we see the flowering in an arid desert landscape, the miraculous flowering of the creosote. The power of these personal narratives resides in Joy Castro’s ability to invest every telling detail of every sorrow and every joy with her piercing attention, until each scene reaches a transcendental clarity. We are moved out of our complacence quietly but steadily by a voice that must witness and will testify. We come to a new awareness of what it means to triumph over unimaginable obstacles, and to the empowerment that comes of forgiveness. Joy Castro has achieved in these essays what Emily Dickinson called “the Truth that must dazzle gradually.”
We'll talk about the various subgenres of mystery (what's the difference between a mystery and a thriller? between hardboiled and noir? what's a cozy? and so on) to figure out where your own concept fits and/or which genre elements you're blending. We'll discuss character, plot, and setting, and how caring passionately about some larger social or political issue can help keep you motivated when the writing gets tough. (Can you bring your politics into your mystery novel? Of course.) We'll talk about outlining (yes, no, never?), drafting, and revising, and I'll share my favorite how-to book. my talk "Writing Your Mystery" at Chapters Books in Seward,
guest-editing a special issue of Brevity,
and a Q&A with creative nonfiction writer & Water~Stone Review cnf editor Barrie Jean Borich.
Named one of the 25 most influential Hispanics and the "Godmother of Chica Lit" by TIME magazine, a Woman of the Year by Latina magazine, and one of the 100 Most Influential Hispanics in America (twice) by Hispanic Business Magazine, she is known for the warm, casual, intimate voices of her believable characters, her irreverent sense of humor, her focus on female friendships, and her iconoclastic brand of social critique. Also the mother of a son, she writes a column at Mamiverse.com.
Alisa: I can tell you that I use terms like "women's fiction" grudgingly. Ernest Hemingway once said, when asked his opinion of "the Russian writers," that there was no such thing as a "national writer" because writers belonged to only one nation, the nation of writers. I feel the same about sex and race and ethnicity in writers. It's irrelevant. Writers are writers, born with writers' souls, and we all have more in common with one another than we will ever have in common with anyone else. We are writers. Publishing has created divisions among books and writers out of their need to sell these things to an audience that they see as being segregated along extremely simplistic lines. So they label us, and our work, with simple phrases that by their very lack of nuance go against everything the writer stands for in being a writer. Writing is the physical act of thinking. Segregation (like prejudice, its mother) is, by its nature, the act of NOT having to think at all, a simple and inaccurate solution to a complex question. So, no. I cannot talk about women's fiction. I can happily talk about writers I love. The writers who have most influenced me, who consistently drop my jaw in awe and envy, are Charles Dickens, Mark Twain and Dean Koontz.I'm sure that many readers will agree and that your audience will appreciate the sensitivity and tact of this shift.likely moved past the shallow materialism of the 'chick lit' era. I find few things as distasteful in this era of extreme need and desperation as books or other popular culture offerings that glorify materialism, narcissism and consumerism. Those are the sins that got us all into this mess in the first place. I cannot be party to promoting consumption as the road to happiness anymore.
Can you talk about what you see as the differences between "literary fiction" and commercial fiction? All of your fans are familiar with your many strengths as a writer of "chica lit," including warm voices, believable characters, humor, and social critique. What drew you to literary fiction? Do you think the publishing industry overstates the case for drawing boundaries among different kinds of books?"Okay, but if you do base a character on me, make sure she's glamorous and employed. You want it to be aspirational fiction, not the shit that wins Pulitzers and makes everyone who reads it want to slit their fucking wrists. Whatever you do, promise you won't go all E. Annie Proulx on me, because ain't nobody actually likes them books of hers."