Category: publishing

Although squeezed booksellers are under increasing pressure to “make events revenue-bearing,” bookstore owner Paul McNally said in an interview, the $25 appearance fee is not a response. “It’s not a fee,” he explained, rather a share of the costs involved in promoting events. “And we’ve been doing it for a million years.”

“JK Rowling has confessed that halfway through the Potteriad, at a low point (it can’t, surely, have been money worries) she was tempted to rub out Ron Weasley. Her motive? ‘Sheer spite’, she says.” (She’s hardly the only one, either.)

Robert Pinsky: “Mistakes are instructive. In particular, they can become a form of analysis, as, for example, in sports or music, when getting something a little bit wrong leads to improvement in technique or understanding.”

“In 1980, publishing’s awards went Hollywood — with results disastrous enough to ensure it would never happen again.”

“Canadian content has only become rarer in Canadian literature. While many U.S. and British writers turn inward – a trend exemplified by Julian Barnes’s Booker-winning The Sense of an Ending – Canadian literature is more than ever characterized by free-floating cosmopolitanism.”

“Sometimes the public wrongly chooses what to venerate, and publishers are forced to decide if an author will be promoted, and who will die of oxygen starvation.” Will new publishing platforms save the once venerated who are now long forgotten? Maybe.

Bestseller lists aren’t what they used to be – they might be a little more accurate, now that e-books get included in the count.

What makes a font presidential? Did you hear about the guy who created a font in honor of another fontmaker who was overly fond of dogs? Plus, why it’s right to shun (and make fun of) Comic Sans and Papyrus.

Absolutely, says a British Army officer working in Afghanistan. A retired US Air Force man disagrees: “Our current military is much more disciplined and respectful than the characters portrayed by Heller.” Yet a former US Marines supply officer declares, “Bless Joseph Heller for a guidebook for the past 50 years.”