Category: publishing

“At 76, Mr. le Carré is snowy-haired, droll and courtly, speaking in perfect paragraphs and exuding the air of quiet privilege and distinguished manner of a retired statesman. If he chose to, he could still be producing crowd-pleasing books about his most famous spy, George Smiley, late of M.I. 6, or easing into a gracious old age of playing with his grandchildren, lunching at his club and resting on his laurels. But he is still sharp, still fizzing with ideas, and fueled by a new righteous fury.”

“JK Rowling is the world’s highest-earning author, making more than £5 every second over the past year… Her income was six times more than literature’s next-biggest earner, James Patterson.”

“Tom Bernard, the veteran co-head of Sony Pictures Classics, has a theory about critics. He believes when critics in key communities are fired by their penny-pinching newspapers, it’s the movies that suffer – especially art movies. He feels he can statistically demonstrate that filmgoers learn to trust certain local critics and that, when they leave, box office sags.”

“With British publication in doubt for Sherry Jones’ ‘The Jewel of Medina,’ the U.S. publisher of her controversial novel about the Prophet Muhammad has moved up the release date from Oct. 15 to Monday. ‘By speeding up the publication, we wanted to reduce or eliminate the chance of violence,’ Eric Kampmann, president of Beaufort Books, said Thursday, noting that three men were arrested in London last weekend for a firebomb attack on the offices of publisher Gibson Square.”

“In a surprise joint venture, they have produced a book [Public Enemies] of confessional letters to each other, raging at the vitriol heaped on them as the ‘whipping boys of our era in France’.” (BHL: “Why so much hatred?” MH: “If there is anyone in France right now with excuses for being paranoid, it is me.”)

“The entire staff of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary has been laid off because of declining sales, which the book’s publisher attributes to the proliferation of free online dictionaries … [Oxford University Press] will publish future editions of the [dictionary] with the assistance of freelancers and the lexicography department in Oxford, England.”

“Sixteen writers, including Miriam Toews, Rawi Hage and Margaret Visser, are in competition for a total of $155,000 in prize money as part of the annual Writers’ Trust of Canada awards honouring excellence in fiction and non-fiction.”

– than seeing her book remaindered. “And although the author will receive minimal – if any – royalties on these sales, it’s not all bad. A good presence in the bargain bookshops will mean exposure to the sorts of readers who might not frequent Waterstone’s… [and] it’s got to be better than getting pulped.”

A newly-published collection of all the two poets’ surviving correspondence documents “a remarkable friendship – part long-distance romance, part artistic collaboration, part AA meeting – that lasted almost thirty years.”

“The Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award is one of the highlights of the fall literary season, not least for the attention (and the $7,500) it gives to the winner… But there’s a twist to this year’s prize ceremony, which is being held this evening at Toronto’s uber-hip Drake Hotel: Books in Canada (BiC) has ceased publication.”