Category: publishing

“Workers assisted by police officers entered Kensal Rise library” – which Brent borough council decided to close due to lack of funding – “between 2am and 3am on Tuesday, removing furniture, murals painted in the 1930s for the library … along with the books, according to campaigners [fighting the closure].”

Yesterday Brevard County announced that “in response to public demand, but also … after considerable review and consideration by the library system”, its 19 copies of Fifty Shades of Grey would be made available again.

“How did this unsystematic system come about? And is it really that bad? Some say that there are only a few hundred deeply irregular words, but the trouble is that most of them are common.”

“These two lines – Larkin’s ‘What will survive of us is love’ and Auden’s ‘We must love one another or die’ – may be the most well-known lines of poetry about love written in the past century. But what’s remarkable about them both is that the poets who wrote them agonized over them, were conflicted and critical of their own lines. Both Larkin and Auden eventually tried to distance themselves from their original unmediated utterances.”

“[The] syllabus of adolescent male samizdat … used to go like this: Mad magazine at 13, Vonnegut at 15, Salinger at 17, Hunter Thompson at 18, Kerouac at 20. (When you got real big, you read Kundera.)” William Deresiewicz returned to Vonnegut’s novels at age 48. “Some of them are worse than I remembered, but some of them are even better.”

Poetry and nonfiction sales climb after the prizes; each of the three finalists in fiction sees a hefty bump in sales as well.

“Jennifer Egan’s last book, A Visit from the Goon Squad, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. There is no Pulitzer yet for fiction published on Twitter, but that’s where she’s taking a couple of her characters from the novel, in a New Yorker experiment that starts today.”

“In its 54 years in operation, [UMP] has published approximately 2,000 titles … on the topics of American and world history; intellectual history; biography; journalism; African American studies; women’s studies; American, British, and Latin American literary criticism; … regional studies of the American heartland; and creative nonfiction.”

“Z is a nice letter, and I am glad it is not Y, I do not care for Y, why, well there is the reason why, I do not care for Y, but Z is a nice letter. I like Z because it is not real it just is not real and so it is a nice letter to you and nice to me, you will see.”

A new study shows that – despite the incredible success stories, like Amanda Hocking – most self-published authors make less than $500.