Category: publishing

“The Scottish poet John Burnside has won the most controversial TS Eliot poetry prize in years, for a collection described as ‘haunting’, after two of the original shortlisted poets dropped out in protest over funding from the hedge fund Aurum.”

“Should every three-part newspaper series be turned into an ebook? Should every sports season produce a newspaper-generated ebook made up of the year’s game stories, player profiles, and so on? Should a compilation of a newspaper’s restaurant reviews be pushed out as a $2.99 ebook each year?”

“People are collecting e-books like nuts for the winter. They are easy to buy and download, much like music. And, frankly, it’s fun to fill up your iPad with a colorful, robust set of thumbnails in your library.”

It all started with a “snarky” (or “honest”, depending on who’s side you’re on) review of a much-hyped YA novel, Tempest by Julie Cross, just published in the UK by Macmillan Children’s Books. A sarcastic response and put-downs of reader views on the Goodreads site by Cross’s author friends, and comments by her agent, caused outrage. While Cross responded gracefully, other YA authors and agents took the fight to Twitter in a spectacularly misjudged bout of reader-bashing, “sneering at the people who make their ****ing books reach the NYT bestseller list”, The Bookwurrm judged.

“South Asia is suddenly awash in literary festivals – from Dhaka to Kerala, from Jaipur to right here in Karachi, next month – and Pakistani authors are headlining all of them, and pulling the big crowds.” But can those authors stay safe when their fiction mocks the Taliban?

What to do with a glut of print books? Turn them into garden benches – or sculptures, of course.

“The central question driving literary aesthetics in the age of the iPad is no longer ‘How should novels be?’ but ‘Why write novels at all?'”

Fake authors (possibly organized international gangs) are taking advantage of the ease of e-book self-publishing to earn crazy dollars off of pirated material, especially pirated erotica. Does Amazon care?

“A record seven titles are in competition for the Man Asian Literary Prize, with author Amitav Ghosh among a trio of Indian writers dominating the latest short list for the $30,000 US honour. The ‘power and diversity’ of the fiction coming from contemporary Asian writers compelled the jury to expand the finalists beyond the traditional five titles.”

Is this a January publishing gold rush? “Publishers are convinced that viewers who obsessively tune in to follow the war-torn travails of an aristocratic family and its meddling but loyal servants are also literary types, likely to devour books on subjects the series touches.”