Category: publishing

Over the weekend, news broke that JK Rowling would be writing an eighth Harry Potter book. “But fans shouldn’t get too excited. Instead of a new novel, the writer is apparently considering compiling an encyclopaedia of magic.”

“The key, and positive, change to the arts that has taken place under Blair – the advent of a fluid sense of identity – has gone hand in hand with the rise of spin: the deliberate use of ‘semantic slippage’ to achieve political and commercial ends or obfuscate moral embarrassments in those fields. Postmodernism, by nature a free-going sort of animal, turns very nasty when harnessed to deliberate ends.”

“In an event highly anticipated by [Flannery] O’Connor scholars and fans, her nearly 300 letters to [close friend Betty Hester] will be opened to the public Saturday at Emory University, where, at Hester’s request, they have been kept under seal for 20 years. The archive is expected to reveal much about the nature of their relationship, as well as O’Connor’s attitudes about subjects from civil rights to homosexuality.”

Maryland poet Lucille Clifton has been named the recipient of the Chicago-based Poetry Foundation’s lifetime achievement award. The $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize is handed out annually, and will be officially presented on May 23.

“Many jobs — such as book editor — go away because content and production are being separated. However, we have no intention of eliminating our book pages. We probably won’t often hire out-of-town freelancers to review books at a national level. Instead we will present reviews from the wire services. … This will free us to focus our resources on local books and metro Atlanta’s literary scene.”

Audiobooks “typically ride on the coattails of the hardcovers. Because audiobooks are so fast, inexpensive and easy to record, the dynamic seems to be changing, with publishers looking to the audio format to fuel interest in paper books that aren’t quite ready for the printing press. And with the ubiquity of iPods, that interest can be generated quickly: recordings need not be pressed onto CDs and packaged, but can quickly be uploaded to iTunes.”

“You might not think it from this publicity, but most literary endeavour ends not in prizes, but failure. First, there are the countless manuscripts completed, but never published, and the hours of frustrated composition tossed into the wastepaper basket. Then there are the thousands of books published, but not reviewed. These, in turn, are matched by the scores of titles reviewed, but scarcely sold.”

“Most of us are familiar with people who make a fetish out of quality: They read only good books, they see only good movies, they listen only to good music, they discuss politics only with good people, and they’re not shy about letting you know it. They think this makes them smarter and better than everybody else, but it doesn’t. It makes them mean and overly judgmental and miserly, as if taking 15 minutes to flip through ‘The Da Vinci Code’ is a crime so monstrous, an offense in such flagrant violation of the sacred laws of intellectual time-management, that they will be cast out into the darkness by the Keepers of the Cultural Flame.”

“It’s true that while newspapers in other countries (notably Spain) are enhancing their coverage of books, U.S. dailies (and weekly papers, too) have been de-emphasizing or out-and-out eliminating their reporting on, and criticism of newly published works. Illogically, this is happening at the same time as the number of books published in the States has exploded beyond the ability of even conscientious critics to keep up.”

“I am an idiot. Given that publishing honest and thus sometimes unfavourable assessments of the work of colleagues is violently at odds with a writer’s self-interest, it’s surprising that literary editors can cajole any author into reviewing. But then, plenty of writers like me don’t know what’s good for them, and some writers plain need the money.”