Category: publishing

“[A]uthors are commonly told by publishers and independent publicists that a trailer is now an essential element of any book’s marketing campaign. … There’s a blind faith that book trailers, simply by virtue of being video and a form of new media on top of that, will magically” allow publishers “to partake of the mass market’s bounty.”

“Among the letters are Dickens’ instructions … about how a scene in a women’s hat shop in ‘Nicholas Nickleby’ should look: ‘there may be a cap on a block and a dress on a stand if it would improve the sketch,’ the author suggests, adding, ‘Please to take care that Miss Knag is not like Miss La Creevy.'”

“It takes six people to lift it and has been recorded as the largest book in the world, yet the splendid Klencke Atlas, presented to Charles II on his restoration and now 350 years old, has never been publicly displayed with its pages open. That glaring omission is to be rectified” when the British Library features it in an exhibition this summer.

A Scattering, Christopher Reid’s collection of poems on the illness and death of his wife, defeated favorite Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn to take the £30,000 Costa book of the year prize. A Scattering has sold fewer than 1,000 copies.

“People who have seen the tablet say Apple will market it not just as a way to read news, books and other material, but also a way for companies to charge for all that content.” If they agree to its terms, “Apple could help create a way for media companies to alter the economics and consumer attitudes of the digital era.”

“‘Since winning the novel award, [Colm] Tóibín has been backed almost to the exclusion of the field,’ said Ladbrokes spokesman Nick Weinberg. William Hill spokesman Graham Sharpe agreed, saying that Brooklyn was the only title which punters ‘are backing in numbers’.” The Costa Book of the Year is to be announced this evening.

“A gifted poet as well as a sculptor and painter, he wrote energetically about despair, detailing with relish the unpleasant side of his work on the famous ceiling. … ‘My haunches are grinding into my guts, / my poor ass strains to work as a counterweight, / every gesture I make is blind and aimless.'”

“[F]ew experiences carry more risk of active boredom than picking up a book. … A library is an enormous repository of information, entertainment, the best that has been thought and said. It is also probably the densest concentration of potential boredom on earth.”

“Reading with a group can feed your passion for a book, or help you understand it better. … There is a different class of reader, though. They feel that their relationship with a book, its characters and the author is too intimate to share. ‘The pursuit of reading,’ Virginia Woolf wrote, ‘is carried on by private people.'”

“Especially in recent years, New Haven has gone out of its way to distinguish itself as a place welcoming to immigrants, regardless of their legal status. Atticus,” an independent bookstore and café in a Yale building, “appeared to fit comfortably, even enthusiastically, into this mosaic.” Then came the news of its English-only policy for employees.