Category: publishing

It “takes a lot of gumbo to have fun with the biggest name in the book world, but that’s exactly what a group of booksellers are doing. In a cute play off You Know Who, the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance announced plans for a new marketing plan this fall: The Okra Picks.”

Marc Kelly Smith, the Chicago-based originator of slam poetry, “expresses mixed feelings about the growing popularity and respectability of the art form that he created almost 25 years ago. From the start, he envisioned slam poetry as a subversive, thumb-your-nose-at-authority movement, and he wants to ensure it stays true to those origins.”

“The idea of a bunch of guys sitting around a living room, or in a restaurant or bar, and not talking only about the Sox or their sex lives or their mortgages, but also ruminating on something as abstract as evil while sipping Cabernet, might be hard to imagine. … Men’s book groups are coming of age, digging deeper and acquiring a seriousness of purpose commensurate with these serious times.”

“Some people sneer at paperback romance novels, but they’re the most prolific, profitable arm of the publishing industry — even despite the recession. And before 1980, all the damsels being clasped to hard male chests had been white. Lots of passion, zilch diversity. Then, under the pen name Rosalind Welles, journalist Elsie Washington published Entwined Destinies.”

The future was in the eye of the beholder at this year’s BookExpo America. “For major publishing conglomerates … there was a sense of retrenchment, a feeling that the business model had irrevocably shifted — although to what exactly, no one was quite sure. But for independent publishers … there was an air of possibility, the belief that the future was very much in play.”

“It doesn’t take a big clue to deduce that there’s something between Supreme Court women and Nancy Drew of River Heights, Somewhere, U.S.A., the teenage star of a wholesome series of detective novels that have been in print in some version — dated and updated — since their inception in 1930. What stuck with these judicial women might be a harder case to crack.”

“Google appears to be throwing down the gauntlet in the e-book market. In discussions with publishers at the annual BookExpo convention in New York over the weekend, Google signaled its intent to introduce a program … that would enable publishers to sell digital versions of their newest books direct to consumers through Google. The move would pit Google against Amazon.com….”

“Behind much of the frothy speculation and accusation was an older, subtler and more intractable conflict between the myths of poetry and the realities of the modern university. What we may be willing to put up with from a poet — in Mr. Walcott’s case, and perhaps Ms. Padel’s as well — is different from what we’re willing to put up with from a professor, which can be quite a problem when the poet is expected to profess.”

“It should be no surprise that at BookExpo America, the publishing industry’s annual trade convention that ended Sunday in New York, publishers seemed to be putting their own stamps on the increasingly frenzied conversation about electronic books that has hijacked the business.”