Category: publishing

“Performance poetry. It’s not a phrase that strikes joy into many people’s hearts – there’s a fear it’ll be some fop emoting furiously about a penchant for self-harm, or a lame attempt to make an archaic art form ‘hip’. But one young poetry collective is proving it doesn’t have to be that way.”

Stephen Elliott, author of The Adderall Diaries: “Originally, my publisher had a standard tour planned for me, bookstores in five large coastal cities. … I didn’t want to travel thousands of miles to read to 10 people, sell four books, then spend the night in a cheap hotel room before flying home.” So he arranged for himself a series of 73 readings in private homes all over the US.

“The report focuses on the illegal downloads of 913 popular titles in their digital format, finding that on average each [title] was downloaded without payment about 10,000 times.”

“The historian Elizabeth Fraterrigo asks us to accept a somewhat unlikely premise, which is this: A titty magazine that has been culturally irrelevant since the late 1970s was at the forefront of many of this nation’s most important social upheavals and reconfigurations. … [One] closes her book largely convinced that she is right.”

“What we see of the Arab world comes from news reports of war and other madness. Literature would be a much more profound contact … [that would] unveil elements of life across the Arab world that you won’t see in the newspaper or on TV.” Matt Rees recommends ten novels in English translation.

“Children’s books are looking healthy in a market which is shrinking slightly in the recession. Annual figures from [Nielsen] BookScan show children’s book sales in 2009 were up 4.9% in volume and picture book sales were up by 13% on 2008.” Children’s titles have also grown in popularity at libraries.

The 90-year-old bi-monthly is rebranding because the original title’s “unintended sexual connotation has caused the history journal to become snagged in Internet filters and has turned off potential readers.” Says the editor, “Market research showed us that younger Canadians and women were very very unlikely to ever buy a magazine called [name redacted] no matter what it’s about.”

As Laredo loses its only bookstore, the need for a local brick-and-mortar bookseller may seem unclear to outsiders — but not to the locals.

“Owner Reed Business Information — which insisted as recently as July that it was not putting its top title on the block — has been quietly dangling Variety before potential buyers for some time, according to at least five individuals.”

“Her passing represented the loss of the only connection that Anne had to the present world, and that her fans, in turn, had to her. As years passed, and the Holocaust became something that happened a generation ago, then two, then three, Gies alone was our tie.”