Category: publishing

“I think in five years other than a few speciality bookshops in capital cities you will not see a bookstore. They will cease to exist because of what’s happening with internet-based, web-based distribution. What’s occurring now is an exponential take off – we’ve reached a tipping point.”

When it was first published, Uncle Tom’s Cabin “became the most influential novel in American history and a catalyst for radical change both at home and abroad. Today, of course, the book has a decidedly different reputation.” The title character “has become a byword for a spineless sellout … [and] we tend to think of the novel itself as an old-fashioned, rather lachrymose affair … But this view is egregiously inaccurate.”

“A pseudonym may give a writer the necessary distance to speak honestly, but it can just as easily provide a license to lie. Anything is possible. It allows a writer to produce a work of ‘serious’ literature, or one that is simply a guilty pleasure. It can inspire unprecedented bursts of creativity…”

“A really first-rate bust-up must transcend the limits of ‘an entertaining side show’ and involve playing for high moral and intellectual stakes.”

“[The] two manuscript parts of the unfinished and unpublished Jane Austen novel known as The Watsons will not be reunited, exactly, but will be closer they’ve been in almost 100 years – just 35 blocks or so from each other” in Manhattan.

What has become of the winners of the prestigious Orange Award for Fiction after their wins?

“A ‘treasure trove’ of more than 60,000 19th Century books is being made available by the British Library in a new iPad application. The paid-for app will be launched in full this summer, but until then a thousand titles can be browsed for free.”

“Almost every day, my mailbox is filled with handwritten letters from students … I have yet to receive a letter from a child somehow debilitated by the domestic violence, drug abuse, racism, poverty, sexuality, and murder contained in my book. To the contrary, kids as young as ten have sent me autobiographical letters … that are just as dark, terrifying, and redemptive as anything I’ve ever read.”

“I’m concerned about the slow and subtle shift in attitude that constant marketing may effect in writers. Once you are in charge of your own promotion and sales, you cannot but help think of your audience as a market, and a market must be pleased.”

“We’re talking 30 tonnes of books. The weight of the books is pulling the house apart. The books range from old textbooks to volumes of Shakespeare to ‘How-To’ manuals. Shaunna Raycraft tried selling the books on eBay, and to collectors and used book stores, but no one wants the task of sorting through them.”