Category: publishing

Having taught us how to write fiction, poetry, comedy, play and movie scripts and biography, The Guardian now offers us a primer on journalism.

“Poet Amiri Baraka railed that the choice is between Barack Obama or that ‘patient from the Vietnam War.’ But it was [Terry] McMillan (‘Waiting to Exhale,’ ‘How Stella Got Her Groove Back’) who eviscerated the GOP ticket with deadpan sarcasm….”

“Manchester University’s John Rylands Library will be digitising much of its renowned collection of medieval manuscripts… Staff will begin to scan the pages using a high definition camera in October and the results will be available by late 2009.”

“Attention political strategists: don’t forget to court the Young Adult (YA) writing community. Author Maureen Johnson started the social networking site YA for Obama after she realized many of her friends from the YA community supported the senator, and thought (in true YA fashion), ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we all had a place where we could write about Obama? And if we invited everyone to join?'”

“Jerome Kerviel, the man blamed by Societe Generale SA for the biggest trading loss in banking history, is now a comic-book hero. After inspiring at least five books, a ‘Save Kerviel’ club and fan t-shirts, Thomas Editions, a children’s book publisher, yesterday released ‘Le Journal de Jerome Kerviel,’ a fictional, illustrated ‘bande dessinee’ memoir of the trader’s rise and fall at France’s second-largest bank.”

Maghound, a new service from Time, Inc., lets its subscribers choose different magazines to receive each month. “Assuming Maghound takes off, it will offer a pure look at what consumers want to read… when offered a broad array of choices. It could become the Billboard charts of magazine popularity… it allows you to sample issues without paying the price of a subscription or the higher price of a news stand copy.”

“The process of getting blurbs – which the US journalist Rob Walker has termed “blurb-harvesting” – is thought, by some, to be a necessary part of modern book publishing. You send the manuscript of your book to another writer, hoping they’ll like it, hoping they will give you a favourable comment to put on the cover. It’s a weird transaction. No money changes hands. There is only one unspoken convention: if somebody blurbs your book, you should not blurb theirs.”

“The Poetry Archive, which will celebrate its third birthday in November, tells a different story. The website, which contains recordings by poets reading their own work, now has more than 125,000 unique visitors a month. Every month these visitors listen to more than a million pages of poetry.”

“If the bookstore has a second floor, the Humor section will be on the second floor, at the farthest point from the entrance. If the second floor has a window that can be jimmied open, and there’s a ledge outside, the Humor section will be at the very end of the ledge.”

“While a couple of generations ago it might have been a surprise to find a writer who taught at a college, now it’s a surprise to find one who doesn’t. But another question is discussed less. What exactly does all this teaching do to our writing? And what, if anything, does it mean for a country to have a tenured literature?”