Category: publishing

“Amazon has moved aggressively into publishing over the last year, signing major writers including bestselling self-help author Timothy Ferriss and actress and director Penny Marshall – the Marshall deal for $800,000 (£500,000), according to reports – and launching a phalanx of new imprints covering everything from romance to science fiction, each move a further blow to an increasingly nervous community of traditional publishers.”

“Commercials, or so-called book trailers, have become increasingly common as publishers look for novel ways to market their best sellers at a time when fewer people are buying physical copies of booksand chains like Borders Group are shutting down.”

“The biggest mystery in Q.R. Markham’s new spy novel Assassin of Secrets, it turns out, is the number of books the author borrowed from.”

“Calgary-born novelist Esi Edugyan has prevailed against almost 150 other Canadian novelists to win the 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize, worth $50,000.”

When author Murong Xuecun received his first literary award, he was forbidden to deliver his (quite provocative) speech. “On stage, Mr. Murong made a zipping motion across his mouth and left without a word. He then did with the speech what he had done with three of his best-selling novels … He posted the unexpurgated text on the Internet. Fans flocked to it.”

“I do think there’s a house style, or a collective house choir-voicing … Name its parts? First, a faith in the particular, in the facticity of things – this thing here rather than that thing, a tendency to love ideas but bend them back towards objects … Next, an almost excessive value placed on humor, a belief that … funny sentences can never be bad ones.”

When Geoff Dyer read Penguin classics as a lad, new books meant new art: “The use of different paintings meant each book was a ‘modern classic’ in its own particular way. A side effect was that books I was reading for an education in literature doubled as an introduction to art history.”

“I have never enjoyed a novel by Eudora Welty enough to keep going. I think I got to the end of V., which may be even worse than having put it down, and know for a certainty I never got far in Gravity’s Rainbow.”

“British writers and readers just can’t stop fighting the second world war. It ended nearly 70 years ago, but it’s as though the guns have just fallen silent.”

“Reading is solitary, and anyone who wants to discuss a passage must first shut their book,” says an entrepreneur who’s working on a social networking start-up that’s purely for those who love to read (and talk about what they’re reading).