Category: publishing

“We’ve seen our sales [of single-author collections] decline by over a quarter in the past year, and our sales have halved in the past five years.”

“For example, Time Warner could launch a movie series based on a character you created and not owe you a dime. While the terms state that you retain the copyright, you also give Amazon an exclusive license to your original work and Amazon in turn licenses your work to Time Warner in a license that provides nothing for you.”

“For several decades, writers, scholars, and language rabble-rousers have been suggesting that apostrophes are perhaps less necessary than we might suspect.”

“Retail watcher Placed Insights found brick-and-mortar booksellers saw a 27% increase in shopper traffic in the first three months of 2013 when compared to the same period in 2012. That’s according to a report in National Real Estate Investor, which keeps an eye on which stores tend to draw customers.”

“A slew of high-profile departures from the prestigious literary magazine and publisher Granta has left staff reeling as owner and philanthropist Sigrid Rausing steps up to take full control of the company.”

“On Wednesday, Amazon announced a new scheme in which writers of fan fiction can self-publish and sell that writing with the sanction of the original copyright holder.”

“Dutch writer Gerbrand Bakker has won this year’s £10,000 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize with his novel The Detour … It is the author’s second major literary prize win; his previous novel, The Twin, won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2010.”

“We had 50 books to read in the first three months, and a book every other day is fine. Then publishers submitted more. A lot more. My reading speed had to double overnight: between March and July, I will have read the final 100 books in 100 days. You get ahead sometimes (a couple of short books in a row), and then a 900-page monster lurks behind them on the shelf, gobbling up the spare day and spitting out its bones. It’s like running on sand, but less healthy.”

“It will be a truly bookless library – although that is not a phrase much to the liking of BiblioTech’s project co-ordinator, Laura Cole. She prefers the description “digital library” – after all, there will be books there, but in digital form.”

“Buck, the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, is believed to have completed the manuscript for the book, The Eternal Wonder, shortly before she died of cancer in 1973 … The manuscript was stumbled upon in a storage unit in Texas and returned to the Buck family in December in exchange for a small fee.”