Category: publishing

Nearly 6,000 researchers so far “have agreed to boycott publishers Elsevier, vowing not to peer-review or submit papers for any of its scientific journals. … The researchers supporting the boycott, more than 1000 of whom are mathematicians, object to the journals’ pricing and the company’s support for several proposed US laws ‘ including the controversial SOPA and PIPA anti-piracy bills.”

“The only thing that ‘these books’ really have in common is that they’re written primarily by women and about relationships. Apart from that, they encompass as wide a range as any other genre. [Sophie] Kinsella and Jennifer Weiner, say, have no more in common than do Alan Hollinghurst and Jonathan Franzen.”

“A Belgian court has rejected a claim that Tintin In The Congo is racist and tossed a request to withdraw the controversial comic book.”

One graphic novelist raised $600,000 on Kickstarter. Another team raised their money – and then promptly fell apart. What happens then?

Novelist Christopher Bram: “Even when gay books were the only game in town, there were plenty of gay people who didn’t read. For them being gay was about sex and going to bars and dancing. There’s still gay culture around and it takes different shapes and forms. Gay bars don’t play the same role in gay life they once did 10-15 years ago. The Internet has changed that too. I miss the gay bookstores, but I like the difference and the variety.”

Sophie Kinsella, author of the Shopaholic books: “You can be highly intelligent, and also ditzy and klutzy. You can be unable to cook, you can like lipstick. And I think it’s more realistic to represent women having all these facets, than to say, OK, you’re intelligent, so I’ve got to write you as all competent, which I think is an unfair ideal.”

Novelist and short story writer Ben Okri says an editor who claimed to have rewritten dialogue in one Okri book “has a tendency to exaggerate his own importance.”

The author of The Descendants: “Setting shouldn’t just consist of describing nature or a landscape, or of saying where something takes place. It is the world of specific people. It’s not enough for it to feel vivid or credible; it should feel necessary.”

“With our robber-baron bankers, our financial panics, our privileged political elite and our disenfranchised migrant workers, it can feel as if we are living through a new Victorian era; certainly the narrative mode that Trollope established in The Way We Live Now has seen a renaissance in recent years.”

“Conflicts of interest, which used to be the third rail of journalism, now seem to have become like herpes instead: something you disclose if you want to build a real relationship, but maybe not if a brief assignation is all you’ve got in mind. And in an age when people are blithely receiving information straight from politicians and companies – Starbucks has a direct channel to 28-million latte lovers through its Facebook page, who can decide for themselves whether they agree with the message – perhaps it’s only crusty journalism profs who care about such things.”