Category: publishing

“Blyton wrote more than 800 books in her 50-year career – 37 of them in 1951 alone, during which productive peak she was estimated to be churning out about 10,000 words a day. Blyton was a one-woman mass production line, turning out workman-like units to serve a particular need at a particular time in a child’s life, not finely wrought pieces of art destined to have their secrets delicately unpicked over the years by a gradually maturing sensibility.”

Children’s books published in the UK will carry appropriate age recommendations. “Research within the book industry suggests people buying books for children would welcome the guidance. But it is a scheme which has already enraged a number of writers, leading to the creation of a website to protest against the plans.”

“The creator of the Famous Five series and the Noddy books topped the poll, followed by Roald Dahl and Harry Potter author JK Rowling. Jane Austen, the author of Sense and Sensibility was fourth and William Shakespeare came fifth. Charles Dickens came sixth in the survey of 2,000 adults.”

“Can there be anything worse than lovingly engaging with a couple of hundred thousand words of prose over perhaps two or three weeks, drinking in the author’s dialogue and descriptions, creating your own vision of the work in the privacy of your head, only to have every man and his dog (special offer on Tuesdays at your local Odeon) blast your intellectual ownership of the book out of the water after spending 90 minutes slobbing out in front of a cinema screen?”

“In a recent survey, 54% of UK employers said spelling mistakes on a CV were by far their biggest pet-hate. And only this week a judge branded a court official ‘illiterate’ after receiving a charge sheet littered with spelling mistakes and grammatical errors.”

“Certain totemic elements, certain gongs must been struck for a novel to be worthy of presentation to a mass audience. This is a coarsening. ‘[The Richard and Judy book club] is a wasted opportunity … They have a massive captive audience of people who aren’t completely undiscerning; they aren’t stupid. Why are they treating them as if they are stupid? There is an opportunity to use that connection to turn a generation on to good writing.”

A new company recently emerged on the publishing scene, offering writers the chance to buy and sell book endorsements. Aimed at self-published authors, Blurbings LLC traffics in “blurbs,” the often hyperbolic declamations on book covers alerting readers that they’re holding the greatest single work of literature since the Bible — or perhaps since “The Da Vinci Code.”

“Libraries are facing competition from television, magazines, the internet, e-books, yet they have this archaic and mad idea of charging people money for being slightly late. It’s all so negative, unprofessional and unbusinesslike; like any business, libraries need not to alienate their customers.”

“Anyone over 40 may have a secret cache of letters packed away in a biscuit tin under the bed, but lovers in the digital age are more likely to have assigned their erotic reminiscences to a memory stick. If letters have been killed off by off text and email, then love letters are the first casualties.”

“Many banned works, or works that are not put through the Bureau of Guidance for publication permission are embedded in blogs, accessible to the whole world, until the blogs are discovered and shut down – and then they are embedded in new blogs. So … despite tremendous obstacles, Iranians have found ways to express themselves in their art.”