Category: publishing

Cybervisionary novelist William Gibson recently did a live reading that was also a virtual reading on Second Life. “I had a laptop open so I could see it as if I was watching from within Second Life. What I saw I found a bit distracting — people levitating and sitting on top of the microphone.” He writes, these days, about the contemporary world, which is not, he says, as big a shift as it might seem. “All science fiction is in one way or another about the moment in which it’s written, even if the people who write it don’t know that.”

“Three-quarters of the writers” at Saturday’s third annual Los Angeles Black Book Expo “were self-published, said Charles Chatmon, the festival’s executive director. ‘Rather than deal with the horrors of mainstream publishing, they prefer to control the finances and the content,’ said Chatmon, a proofreader for an Irvine biomedical firm who has self-published two poetry books. ‘And it’s the only way many African Americans can get their works out there.'”

Are you one of those New Yorker readers who pretends to be working your way through Alex Ross’s latest treatise on the importance of Prokofiev, while actually just scanning the cartoons? Well, have we got a board game for you! Yes, we said board game. Yes, they still make those. “In the latest expansion of its brand name into the retail market, the board game version of the New Yorker’s weekly cartoon caption contest has just gone on sale at Target stores nationwide.”

A new poll asking Britons to name the greatest love story ever set down on paper has seen The Bard of Avon knocked off by Emily Brontë. “Wuthering Heights, recounting the doomed affair between sweet Cathy Earnshaw and the brutal outsider Heathcliff, has seen off Shakespeare, Gone With the Wind and everything by Barbara Cartland in a survey which shows the lasting power of classic works.”

Ben Dolnick may not be your typical debut novelist – 24 years old, low-key, and getting plenty of press for his first book – but his journey from kid obsessed with Vonnegut to professional writer reads like the fantasy story every creative writing teacher dreams of. “Praised for his ability to evoke the self-conscious flailings of people close to his own age, he is an acute observer of his elders as well.”

A Polish author is on trial for allegedly committing the brutal crime he later detailed in a bestselling novel. The author claims he was inspired by a newspaper account of the torture and murder of a businessman. Prosecutors say that “the book contained intimate details of the murder that could be known only to police — or the killer. Further investigations revealed that the victim was an acquaintance of [the author’s] estranged wife.”

The ending of the final Harry Potter book isn’t the slam-dunk, loose-ends-tied finish that some had hoped for, especially a certain oddsmaker who has had to pay out thousands in bets on what the ending would hold. “Fans who put their money either on Potter dying, killing himself or being killed by his nemesis Lord Voldemort all received a payout.”

The long list for the Man Booker Prize is out, and it’s decidedly short on star power. “In contrast with previous years, 2007’s list is restricted to a ‘Man Booker dozen’ – a mere 13 titles, compared with the usual 18-24. This new brevity coincides with a year in which few of the biggest literary names have chosen to publish; as a result, the longlist contains only two authors… who can genuinely be described as household names.”

“A literary mystery appeared to be solved this year when a long-lost manuscript of Pearl S. Buck’s novel ‘The Good Earth’ surfaced in a sale tied to a former secretary’s family. … But at least two foundations with links to the Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winner, who died in 1973, now hope to share in the discovery. And a legal brawl could be on tap….”

“Forget writer’s block — many authors put their manuscripts aside because they cannot stop checking their rankings. ‘There really should be a 12-step program,’ said Harry Kirchner, a senior national accounts manager with Ingram Publisher Services, a book distributor that counts Amazon as a customer. As tantalizing as the rankings may be, it is difficult to correlate them to the number of books sold….”