Category: publishing

“A collection of fairytales penned by Harry Potter author JK Rowling is to be published to raise money for a children’s charity. The Tales of Beedle the Bard, which Rowling first mentioned in The Deathly Hallows, will go on sale on 4 December.”

“No novelist in Britain – apart, that is, from Salman Rushdie – suffers more from snide and stupid caricatures of who he is and what he does than [James] Kelman,” says Boyd Tonkin, and the snubs just keep coming, with Kelman’s exclusion from the Booker longlist.

“Having cottoned on to the fact that chick lit books sell like cupcakes, publishers are now adding chick lit-style covers to any book written by a woman whether it fits the genre definition or not.”

Their work “emphasizes the discovery of the evolutionary patterns of behavior within literary texts — the Iliad in terms of dominance and aggression, or Jane Austen in terms of mating rituals — and sets itself firmly against 30 years of what they see as anti-scientific literary theories like poststructuralism and Marxism.”

The longlist of authors for the Man Booker prize is packed with first-time novelists this year, and very few household names. Claire Armitstead says that’s probably as it should be, while John Sutherland says that the list shows the judges are too focused on diversity and not enough on quality.

“Tyndale House Publishers, a Christian company that was founded in 1962 to print a more reader-friendly version of the Bible, has had one of its biggest successes in the last year with a string of books on a slightly less religious topic: football… For years Christian publishers have stormed into traditionally secular territory, publishing crime fiction, self-help, drama, young-adult literature and Spanish-language romance novels.”

“Salman Rushdie says he may write a book about the fatwa imposed on him 20 years ago after the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses.” The author also says that, even with increased tensions between Western and Islamic countries, he doesn’t see a similar fate befalling contemporary authors.

“As teenagers’ scores on standardized reading tests have declined or stagnated, some argue that the hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading — diminishing literacy, wrecking attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books. But others say the Internet has created a new kind of reading, one that schools and society should not discount.”

The Australian publishing industry has stepped up its campaign against lifting restrictions on importing books that are also published in Australia, with literary agents and printers joining the campaign. “The Australian Literary Agents Association argue that an open market would undermine the industry, with books produced cheaply overseas crowding out more expensive Australian works.”

“In recent years, a growing number of writers, from the best-selling to the less so, have hit the rubber-chicken circuit, speaking at colleges and businesses, chambers of commerce, trade fairs and medical conventions. While a midlist novelist might ask, though not necessarily get, $2,500 per appearance, a superstar presidential historian might command $40,000. And some best-selling authors charge double that.”