Category: publishing

“Well-meaning parents say to their children: you ought to read this, because it’s the sort of thing you should read at your age. They treat literature as a kind of medicine or tool. But the children pick up on it quickly: they resist it and they become fearful, as I did when confronted by Dickens.”

“The three-tome work is one of the literary events of the decade and the first volume – already riding high in the US best-seller lists – will go on sale in Britain on Monday.
What will be revealed in its full ferocity is his loathing for Miss Lyon and her then-husband Ralph Ashcroft, a Briton who was the writer’s erstwhile business advisor.”

“Tiny Nova Scotia publishing house Gaspereau Press had made headlines for being unable to meet the high demand for the book, which won the $50,000 Giller Prize last week. The company, known for its hand-crafted books, said today it has sold rights for the book’s Canadian paperback edition to Douglas & McIntyre, who plan to ship stock this week. The first 30,000 copies of the new edition of “The Sentimentalists” will be shipped from Nov. 19.”

Spillcam and vuvuzela make the list. “The Texas-based survey uses a math formula to track the frequency of words and phrases in the English-speaking world of more than 1.58 billion people.”

“Whatever happened to brevity? Once upon a time, it was not just the soul of wit, there was a strong literary preference for the shorter book.”

“Works about major names no longer attract huge advances and publishers are only interested in familiar figures like the Brontë.”

“New numbers show that even successful authors earn far less money from books than they used to. In an industry driven by hunger for the next blockbuster, the chances of making a living as a writer are slimmer now than ever.”

“On Wednesday, Gaspereau said that despite the Giller win and flood of requests for The Sentimentalists, it was sticking to its policy of making its hand-crafted books locally with no outsourcing. Gaspereau prides itself on high-quality books and can only print about 1,000 copies of The Sentimentalists a week.”

“Everyone from publishers to hardware manufacturers to designers is desperately trying to see around the corner. This is literature’s equivalent of the space race, complete with all the one-upmanship and wild speculation that accompanied the original.”

“For the past five years, a nonprofit called Librivox has been giving away MP3 recordings of public-domain books read by volunteer narrators. … Last week [the service] announced the launch of Iambik Audiobooks, a company that sells recordings of select titles by independent small presses for the more-than-reasonable price of $4.99 apiece.”