Category: publishing

Chinese dissident writer Yu Jie, who fled with his family for the U.S. earlier this year, has a new book out about the imprisoned writer Lu Xiaobo – a man he thinks is far more important to China’s future than artist Ai Weiwei.

Novels are over – we can learn everything about other people from magazines and therapy, says novelist Fay Weldon, though she just published the first book (complete with “If you liked Downton Abbey, you’ll love this” sticker) in a planned historical novel trilogy.

“The old ways that publishers promote books, like TV spots and back-of-book blurbs are over. They don’t sell books in an online world. Those offline marketing tactics have no accountability, whereas online marketing is a metrics game.”

Earlier this year, Amazon.com announced a deal with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt to print and distribute in hard copy Amazon Publishing’s e-books. Brick-and-mortar stores – from Barnes & Noble to the independents – refused to carry the books. Now that the first books are ready to ship, stores are standing by their decision.

“Wizard hero Richard Rahl smites wrongdoers with his Sword of Truth. His creator, the bestselling fantasy author Terry Goodkind, turned to Facebook to name and shame a fan who pirated a digital version of his latest novel, The First Confessor.”

Andrew Gallix, editor of 3 AM, recounts what happened when he awoke last week to discover that the magazine’s web site had disappeared without warning.

“Language in American books has become increasingly focused on the self and uniqueness in the decades since 1960,” a research team led by San Diego State University psychologist Jean Twenge writes in the online journal PLoS One. “We believe these data provide further evidence that American culture has become increasingly focused on individualistic concerns.”

“Publishing is not evolving. Publishing is going away. Because the word ‘publishing’ means a cadre of professionals who are taking on the incredible difficulty and complexity and expense of making something public. That’s not a job anymore. That’s a button. There’s a button that says ‘publish,’ and when you press it, it’s done.”

Michael Cunningham: “On April 16, 2012, the Pulitzer Prize Board announced that it would award no Pulitzer for fiction in 2012. This was, to say the least, surprising and upsetting to any number of people, prominent among them the three fiction jurors, who’d read over three hundred novels and short-story collections, and finally submitted three finalists, each remarkable (or so we believed) in its own way.”

“Moving from a peep show to a summer camp for the elderly, from a West Bank settlement to a vodka-soaked Florida get-together, Nathan Englander’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank has won the American author the €25,000 Frank O’Connor prize.”