Category: publishing

“A standing room only crowd jammed into the Cromwell Room at Earls Court mid-morning on day two of the London Book Fair, hoping to learn the answer to what moderator Torin Douglas, media correspondent for BBC News, called ‘the $64,000 question: where’s the money’ in e-books?”

“Samantha Harvey’s first novel, The Wilderness, the story of a man in his early 60s struggling to hold on to his identity as Alzheimer’s takes hold of his mind, was chosen by judges for the six-strong Orange shortlist, ahead of Nobel prize for literature winner Morrison’s 17th century slave trade novel, A Mercy. The £30,000 women-only prize looks to reward excellence, accessibility and originality in writing.”

“It will make it easier for us to buy books, but at the same time make it easier to stop reading them. It will expand the universe of books at our fingertips, and transform the solitary act of reading into something far more social. It will give writers and publishers the chance to sell more obscure books, but it may well end up undermining some of the core attributes that we have associated with book reading for more than 500 years.”

“W. S. Merwin won his second Pulitzer Prize for poetry on Monday for ‘The Shadow of Sirius,’ a collection that the Pulitzer board described in its citation as ‘luminous’ and ‘often tender’ — and that Merwin called a happy accident. … ‘If people are honest, very few gardens are exactly the way they were planned, if they were ever planned. They evolve, just like children grow up.'”

“Six and a half years after the publication of ‘The Da Vinci Code,’ the best-selling adult hardcover novel of all time, Dan Brown will publish his follow- up on Sept. 15. ‘The Lost Symbol’ will feature Robert Langdon of ‘The Da Vinci Code,’ the Harvard professor played by Tom Hanks in the movie based on the novel. … The planned American first printing of 5 million copies would be the largest in the history of Random House….”

“A book looted from a US library during the American civil war has finally been returned, almost 145 years overdue. The only stipulation of the Illinois handball coach who returned the title was that he didn’t have to pay the $52,858 (£36,000) fine.”

“If it succeeds, Australia will be the largest book market to remove standard protections given to publishers and authors across the English-speaking world. Territorial copyright means authors are guaranteed much bigger royalties on their books sold in their home market compared to those sold abroad. But the commission says such protection should last just 12 months which means that writers will see their royalties slashed after one year of publication.”

“The author currently enjoying a surprise hit with [that] new literary genre of monster remix, … writer Seth Grahame-Smith has landed a rumoured $575,000 (£390,000) deal with a major US publisher that will entail writing the life of Abraham Lincoln, vampire hunter.”

“The main fun of [Stuart Kelly’s} The Book of Lost Books is deciding which text you would have back from oblivion if you could pick only one.” Let’s see: Shakespeare’s Love’s Labors Won, Lord Byron’s memoirs, the Hemingway stories in his wife’s lost suitcase, Confucius’s Book of Music, and who-knows-what-treasures from the ancient library at Alexandria …

“Typefaces convey meaning, typographers say. Helvetica is an industry standard, plain and reliable. Times New Roman is classic. Depending on your point of view, Comic Sans is fun, breezy, silly or vulgar and lazy. It can be “analogous to showing up for a black-tie event in a clown costume,” warns the Ban Comic Sans movement’s manifesto.”