Category: publishing

In the period from May 2010 through April 2011, he was again the world’s top-earning author, with total income of $84 million.

“New editions of a book tend to require new covers, and since 1945 jacket design has been all but given over to graphic designers. It has rarely attracted artists, despite the overlap in what great writers and great artists try to achieve.”

A boomlet of books about Coco Chanel “raises the crucial question: what does it take to justify a biography today? What makes a publisher think that a dead person’s life is worth the general reader’s attention again? What makes it worth joining a herd of other authors writing about the same life?” (Quite a bit, actually.)

On November 24, 1703, “a violent tempest with no name – and no meteorological forewarning – ripped through England. It was probably the fiercest storm in British history … Yet it left more than a legacy of destruction. It also became a source of creative inspiration, giving birth to the first substantial work of modern journalism: The Storm, by Daniel Defoe.”

“The problem with Kindles is that you can’t tell what other people are reading on public transport.”

“Since it was published, Slaughterhouse-Five has been banned or challenged on at least 18 occasions. And the rhetoric around each case appears to be, like [protagonist] Billy Pilgrim, ‘unstuck in time’.”

“Ever since Wordsworth launched English Romanticism with the publication of Lyrical Ballads, the wilds of the Lake District have been synonymous with poets baring their souls. But this weekend an assortment of male poets were persuaded to bare a little more for a charity calendar shot amongst the ‘vales and hills’.”

“Amazon has begun letting writers check weekly print sales figures from retailers around the country, by city and region. That’s a blow to the power of book publishers (and some agents), who pay thousands of dollars annually for such numbers.”

“Are books, like defunct internet pages, heading towards the point where they will be archived as an academic curiosity? Some think so.”

Books aren’t, Tom McCarthy claimed, objects of individual creation, but “echo chambers”; the best of them “tune” the endless repetitions of language and thought that are zipping back and forth around us.