Category: publishing

“What if Edward Cullen, the moody vampire heartthrob in Stephenie Meyer’s best-selling Twilight series, was an undercover cop? Or a baker who specializes in bachelor-party cakes? Or a kidnapper who takes Bella hostage?” Fans write and post that kind of thing about their favorite fictional franchises all the time – indeed, Fifty Shades of Grey started out that way.

“Reading behavior on the Web is incredibly fragmented. Nobody reads from just 15 or 20 sites a month. People read from hundreds of sites a month, creating a vast long tail of publishers. And the great majority of those publishers never registered. Out of the millions–yes, millions–of domains that flowed through Readability, just over 2,000 registered to claim their money. As a result, most of the money we collected–over 90%–has gone unclaimed.”

The British novel beat out a formidable shortlist, including Pulitzer Prize winner Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, to win the €100K International Impac Dublin Literary Award. “Nominations for the prize are received from libraries around the world – Even the Dogs was proposed by a Moscow library.”

“For the first time, Thomas Pynchon’s back catalog will be available as e-books starting Wednesday. Pynchon was a major writer whose absence from the e-book canon was notable – particularly since his most avid readers tend to be intellectually curious, the kind of people who are often technology’s early adopters.”

“In the entire country, there were only some four thousand places where a book could be purchased, and most of these were gift shops and stationary stores that carried only a few popular novels. In reality, there were but five hundred or so legitimate bookstores … [and] most were refined, old-fashioned ‘carriage trade’ stores catering to an elite clientele in the nation’s twelve largest cities.”

David Denby: “The modern element in Notes From Underground is Dostoevsky’s exultation in human perversity. You can read this book as a meta-fiction about creating a voice, or as a case study, but you can’t escape reading it also as an accusation of human insufficiency rendered without the slightest trace of self-righteousness.”

The most common submissions included “Gone With the Windex,” “The Importance of Being Ernst & Young,” “Gulliver’s Travelocity,” “Lost Verizon,” “Midnight In the Olive Garden of Good and Evil,” “Slaughterhouse-Five Guys,” “A Tale of Two Citis,” and “Of Mice and Mennen.” People within our publishing company enjoyed “One Flew Over the Condé Nast,” perhaps a little too much.

“A Paris court had ordered Google to pay 300,000 euros (£240,000) to three French publishers. Google had appealed against the decision – but has now struck a deal.”

“‘Once a man is writing a sex scene he’s feeling omnipotent… but women don’t, and they write better about it,’ he said.”

“Imagine a scenario where a publisher is able to cross-reference a reader’s profile on their news site with information gathered through social media profiles and other online behaviors. The product, still in private beta, triangulates all the signals we leave around the Internet to try to create a unified picture. You can see how this would be useful to a news outlet that wants to better tailor its content for readers or simply needs better ammunition to raise their CPMs. (And you can see how it might raise the hackles of privacy advocates.)”