Category: publishing

“The Conan Doyle Estate, which represents the family of Holmes’ creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, picked the author to write the novel which will be published in September. Meanwhile US thriller writer Deaver releases the latest addition to the Bond franchise in May. The book, called Carte Blanche, features 007 in a contemporary story set partly in the Middle East.”

“Signings after events where you’ve been flying solo may be slightly less soul-destroying. It could be that book-buyers, or owners, will attend a reading by you to deepen their experience of … well, you don’t really want to consider, but perhaps something that might mean they need a book to be signed.”

“Novelist time is reptile time; novelists tend to be ruminant and brooding, nursers of ancient grievances, second-guessers, Tuesday afternoon quarterbacks … Blogging, I think, is largely about seizing opportunities, about pouncing, about grabbing hold of hours, events, days and nights as they are happening, sizing them up and putting them into play with language … Then there’s that whole business of the Comments.”

In a rant that has drawn more than 1800 reader comments (so far), Farhad Manjoo declares that putting two spaces after the end of a sentence “is totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong” – despite the fact that “two-spacers are everywhere, their ugly error crossing every social boundary of class, education, and taste.”

“I’ll take Manjoo’s word that all typographers like a single space between sentences. … [But] I lost my patience with the typographically-obsessed community when they started trying to get me to pay attention to which sans-serif fonts were being used anachronistically on Mad Men.”

“Wikipedia now has on the way to 4m articles in English. This we can liken to a 1,600-volume printed encyclopedia, which turns to any page immediately, and effortlessly opens for you related pages and external sources on the thinnest belief that they may hold the nugget that will fulfil your informational needs as a writer.”

“Thankfully, few fictional representations are so offensive to their (reputed) models that actual violence ensues. The notable exception … took place 100 years ago this month when Fitzhugh Coyle Goldsborough expressed his supreme displeasure with what he believed was the depiction of his family in the novel The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig by pumping six bullets into its author.”

“Eva Gabrielsson has been locked in an ongoing battle with the family of Stieg Larsson, who died in November 2004 from a heart attack.” She says that Larsson “had just finished 200 pages in the [Millennium] series’ fourth installment before dying” and that she could complete the book if Larsson’s estate would grant her the rights.

Michael Chabon: “Hey, remember the guy in the university town who thought it was a good idea to go through Huckleberry Finn and replace the word ‘nigger’ with something less offensive? Not the dude at Auburn. The other one. The one writing this sentence.”

“Overall, novelists — from Jonathan Frazen to Nicholas Sparks– accounted for 77% of the weekly best sellers, up from 76% in 2009 and the highest percentage since the list began in 1993.”