Category: publishing

“[A]s book sales fall and publishing houses look for ways to cut costs, many literary agents are growing increasingly worried that publishers looking to trim their lists will start holding authors to deadlines and using lateness as an occasion to renegotiate advances and, in some cases, terminate contracts altogether.”

“Book publishers have worried about the $9.99 flat price ever since Amazon.com introduced it for its Kindle reader in 2007, fearing that it could cannibalize sales of higher-priced hardcover books. … Sony is also introducing two new electronic reading devices: the Reader Pocket Edition and Reader Touch Edition. They will sell for $199 and $299 respectively,” substantially less than the devices they replace.

“The safe stolen from Common Goods Books, a St. Paul shop owned by Garrison Keillor, has been found, but the store’s manager still is curious about how the burglar got it out. Sue Zumberge said she is about 5 feet 5 inches tall and the safe ‘was at face height for me.'” She also recalled, “When we opened the store and we were talking about security, Garrison said, ‘Do you really think my neighbors would steal from me?'”

McEwan says the protagonist of his next novel “is a Nobel prize-winning physicist who faces media attacks after he suggests that men outnumber women at the top of his profession because of inherent differences in their brains, rather than any gender discrimination. McEwan found himself under a similar kind of fire last summer, besieged by the media after he told an Italian newspaper that he ‘despise[d] Islamism, because it wants to create a society that I detest’.”

“Plans by German scholars to reprint Adolf Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ as an academic treatise were rejected by the state copyright holders, who said a new edition of the book could fuel support for far-right groups. The Bavarian authorities this week reaffirmed a 64-year-old ban on the book after the Munich-based Institute of Contemporary History, or IFZ, applied for permission to reprint the work.”

“They are complaining that the charity sells donated stock, receives 80% business rate reductions – as do other charities – and largely employs volunteers. The smaller running costs, they argue, allow it to undercut rivals. They say it is no surprise that Oxfam, which now has 130 specialist bookshops across the country, has become the biggest retailer of second-hand books in Europe.”

Five years ago, Modernism/Modernity, “the quarterly of the Modernist Studies Association, ran a review essay of the writer David Foster Wallace’s story collection Oblivion. The essay was a put-on, a leg-pull, a sham, in ways that take some explaining for nonspecialists in recent American fiction. But no one publicly called attention to the con until last month.” In the meantime, some grad students mistook it for the real thing.

“[E]pisodic fiction has been dealt a sorry hand of late. Our most popular critically acclaimed novels are pure narratives. Their straightforward storytelling style connects events together in one continuous thruline whose fundamental purpose is to reveal the Big Fated Meaning of life. In the war between Narratives and Episodics, the former are winning hands-down.”

Carver wrote multiple versions of his stories, cutting them down and making them lean. His editor was complicit in the style that emerged. But his wife is attempting to undo the editor’s influences…