Category: publishing

Take it from one whose job was to sift through unsolicited manuscripts: there’s a reason that many publishers don’t accept unsolicited manuscripts. “By the time I left my job in publishing a few weeks ago, my idealism was in tatters, destroyed by the piles of typescripts I received from people who told me that their fondest desire was to write full time while sitting in a villa overlooking the Mediteranian, despite the fact that they didn’t know how to spell it.”

“Writers get obsessed with a project and lock the doors and sit and work at it, like animals in a leg trap trying to chew through the leg, which is not good strategy. My advice is to get out of the house and take a walk, a good first cure for the depression that hits after you’ve been working for a year and it dawns on you that your book is not ‘Huckleberry Finn’ but you must finish it anyway….”

“For elderly men of a literary bent in central Europe, the past is not another country. Zygmunt Bauman, the Leeds-based social philosopher, it now transpires, was a teenage secret policeman as a young communist in his native post-war Poland. And a few months after he died, triggering innumerable paeans to his talents and insights, Ryszard Kapuscinski, it turns out, also struck a Faustian bargain with the commies…. The real moral question is, how did he deliver on the Faustian pact?”

“This week’s London Review of Books begins with a splendid essay by Andrew O’Hagan called The Things We Throw Away.” Splendid, that is, but incomplete, failing as it does to “consider the place of waste in our literature. … The age of compulsory recycling, plastic bag taxes, and shrinkwrapped cucumbers has not yet found its poet.”

“When predicting which candidate is likely to win an election, what a movie will make at the box office or how much the price of oil will fluctuate, the guesses of a crowd can be remarkably accurate. But can crowds predict whether a book will succeed? That is the hope of the founders of Media Predict (www.MediaPredict.com), a virtual market beginning today, and Simon & Schuster, a publisher that plans to select a book proposal based on bets placed by traders in the new market.”

Few arguments concerning historical figures are more fun than the ones regarding a given legend’s stand with or against political power. Since the individual in question isn’t around to chime in, experts on his/her life can speculate endlessly on whether the work s/he produced indicates a cozying up to power or a rebellion against it. The latest subject of this type of standoff is none other than Shakespeare.

“Literary festivals used to be humble gatherings of authors and fans. But now they are undergoing a boom, with new events opening and everyone from politicians to pop stars getting in on the act… While thousands will flock to the 450 music festivals in Britain this summer, contributing an estimated £500m to the economy, it seems there is a similar thirst for dub poets and multimedia memorials to literary greats.”

Before he was leader of the old USSR Stalin was known as a poet. And a good one. “Stalin was no Georgian Pushkin. The poems’ romantic imagery is derivative, but their beauty lies in the rhythm and language… Stalin never publicly acknowledged his own poems. Why did he stop writing them? One answer is that, gifted as he was at poetry, he was superbly qualified for revolutionary politics in every way: Marxism was to be his religion and his poetry.”

Think the new Harry Potter will make the book industry rich? Truth is, the book is so heavily discounted, book shops won’t make much. “It’s not a big money earner for us. It’s more of an event for our customers, a way to give them something back without losing too much money. Department stores set prices we can’t compete with, so we have to think of other ways to give back to our customers.”

A national tour by the Moth, a well-known storytellers collective, is drawing fans of literature and storytelling to venues across the US. “While raconteurs run the gamut – from singer Moby to an astronaut – the Moth relies heavily on writers, who make up about 70 percent of its performers.”