Category: publishing

There are some signs that the huge public protests against proposed library closures are making an impact, with Northamptonshire county council withdrawing plans to close four of its libraries, and a number of other local authorities reconsidering their cuts.

“For some years now – almost as long as people have been predicting the death of the book – there have been murmurs throughout publishing that books are simply not edited in the way they once were, either on the kind of grand scale that might see the reworking of plot, character or tone, or at the more detailed level that ensures the accuracy of, for example, minute historical or geographical facts.”

“[T]here’s a slight change in the rules this year to the three-year-old prize: For the first time, the Man Asian prize will be awarded to a novel already published in English. In previous years, the award – then US$10,000, now US$30,000 – was given to manuscripts unpublished in English. Why the switch?”

“As a member of third-wave feminism, growing up in the 1970s and ’80s, I was brought up to believe we lived in a meritocracy, where the battles had been fought and won, with the spoils left for us to gather. It is sobering to realize that we may live and work in a world still held in the grip of unconscious biases, no less damaging for their invisibility.”

“An unprecedented collaboration by five of publishing’s biggest companies, Next Issue was intended to secure their digital future by preparing magazines for digital delivery and creating an iTunes-like online newsstand from which to sell them. Now, however, it looks like it could be the latest in a line of failed digital consortiums.”

The winner is a passage from James Haynes’s novel Next: “The porch railing creaks under their weight, and even drunk and excited Kevin wonders about the farmhouse’s craftsmanship and hopes the Philosopher’s Daughter’s father is as good a handyman as he is a philosopher. …”

The four judges for Salon’s new Good Sex Award for fiction “talk about their decisions, their dilemmas and the delicate art of writing about sex.”

“Part of the statistical difficulty with charting reviews by the gender of the author is the lack of figures on the numbers of books written by men and women to compare that number with the review numbers. As far as I could determine, there isn’t one.”

“So long as humans have had things to be discreet about, they’ve had names that furnish some rhetorical distance from the things themselves.”

“As much as I enjoy the books, I often find that the book I have read is somehow not as exciting as the book I had imagined reading.”