Category: publishing

“Rowling has turned her back on Bloomsbury, the publisher of the Harry Potter series whose first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, was released 15 years ago. Little, Brown Book Group, owned by Hachette, has acquired the rights to publish Rowling’s new novel and the publisher will have the lucrative English language rights in both print and ebooks.”

“A guide to Estonian socks, an examination of the role of the fungus in Christian art, and a celebration of the humble office chair are among the books in contention for the Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year – the prestigious literary award run by The Bookseller since 1978.”

“A copy of Detective Comics No. 27, which sold for 10 cents in 1939 and featured Batman’s debut, got the top bid on Wednesday – raising $523,000.”

“Thus the death of Borges’s father and Naipaul’s father left space clear for the sons to work. They would only have powerful ghosts rather than real presences looking over their shoulders, ghosts whom they could dismiss at will. Like Picasso, whose father was a failed painter, or William James, whose father was a failed essayist, they could compensate for their fathers’ failure, while killing off the fathers’ indolent influence.”

The novel plays a different and a diminished role in our cultural life as compared with even the quite recent past.

Paramount has sued Anthony Puzo, a son of the novelist, seeking to stop publication of a new “Godfather” novel called “The Family Corleone,” Reuters reported. The studio says that it gave permission for a 2004 sequel, “The Godfather Returns,” written by Mark Winegardner and published by Random House, but not for a 2006 follow-up, “The Godfather’s Revenge,” also by Mr. Winegardner and published by Putnam.

Last year, a legal aid lawyer sent to an incarcerated client a copy of Slavery by Another Name, “Douglas Blackmon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning account of how the South instituted a form of de-facto slavery by mass arresting black men on nonsense charges and ‘selling’ them to plantations, turpentine farms and other places of back-breaking labor.” Prison officials thought the book “too dangerous” to have around.

The author of All the Pretty Horses, The Road, and No Country for Old Men edited a new biography, by his friend Lawrence M. Krauss, of physicist Richard Feynman. McCarthy’s advice? Remove all exclamation points and semicolons.

CEO Erik Engstrom: “We are taking the petition very seriously and we are engaging with our stakeholders to better understand and address their concerns … All [objections] … are based on misstatements or misunderstandings of the fact.”

“Low or not, romance is by far the most popular and lucrative genre in American publishing, with over $1.35 billion in revenues estimated in 2010. That is a little less than twice the size of the mystery genre, almost exactly twice that of science fiction/fantasy, and nearly three times the size of the market for classic/literary fiction.”