Category: publishing

“Now our poets are mostly good guys. They go for long walks. They think about how much people have suffered. They try to heal the world with their language. The exceptions are incredibly rare.”

“I suppose you could describe literary festivals as a sort of live porn show for the educated classes. Authors turn up and perform in front of an audience gratified by their wit, erudition and insight into their own books and those of anyone else who happens to be on the platform at the time.”

“If a proverbial alien landed on earth and tried to figure out what human beings did with their time simply on the evidence of the literature sections of a typical bookstore, he or she would come away thinking that we devote ourselves almost exclusively to leading complex relationships, squabbling with our parents, and occasionally murdering people. What is too often missing is what we really get up to outside of catching up on sleep, which is going to work at the office, store, or factory.”

She doesn’t, she told Guardian Review editor Lisa Allardice, like reviews or critics. “It’s a very uncomfortable thing for a writer, we’re very tender,” she said. Writing is the thing she does best, how she earns her money, but “not being published would be great”, Atkinson continued. “When I say that to other writers they look at me as if I’m totally insane.”

Cole “might be the bestselling British author today, but it’s certainly not through publicity. She’s built her readers from the ground up. And now they’re some of the most loyal around. There’s a huge amount of snobbery towards commercial fiction in literary circles and although you’ll see Ian Rankin on Newsnight these days, Cole still finds herself at the receiving end of a certain amount of patronising comments.

“If the Kindle isn’t the future, exactly, it’s a precursor. What it tells you, even if you are an unreconstructed book lover, is that the future will not be as hard to get used to as you imagined. Books are heavy, the Kindle reminds you, and they take up a lot of room.”

“Publishers sold 3.08 billion copies in 2008, down 1.5 percent from the 3.13 billion copies sold the previous year, according to Book Industry Trends 2009, an annual report that analyzes sales in the United States. Higher retail prices helped to lift net revenue just 1 percent, to $40.3 billion from $39.9 billion. The numbers confirm a litany of dreary news that has emerged from the publishing industry since last fall.”

Art-book publishers also love art. Currently, they tend to be suffering not from arrogance but from amnesia about their trump card. In any other business, this amnesia would be called “lack of confidence in the product”.

“EU ministers are today … expected to call for an investigation into whether Google has breached EU law. The German government has said that Google has ‘stolen a march’ on rival digital library projects with its Google Book Search.”

“Everything is secret, except the author and title. But the first novel in five years by Japan’s Haruki Murakami has become a hit even before its arrival in stores Friday.” The 1,000-page, two-volume work will have a first printing of 480,000, “up from 380,000 after orders flooded in.”