Category: publishing

“A number of books now regularly included in middle and high school curricula have startling, if realistic, scenarios, experts say. The jury is still out on whether exposing children to these ideas gives them ideas or helps them think through things they or their friends are experiencing.Is reading about a girl cutting herself likely to prompt more girls into doing this to themselves or to get help for themselves or their friends?”

“Harry Potter publisher Bloomsbury is pinning its hopes on strong sales for the last instalment on the boy wizard’s story after 2006 profits slumped 74%. … The company, which has raked in tens of millions of pounds from JK Rowling’s success but did not have a new instalment last year, blamed the collapse in its annual profits on a poor run-up to Christmas, fewer bestsellers than in previous years and problems selling electronic rights to some of its reference titles.”

“The 2007-2008 fellows at the New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers will include five young novelists, four historians, two Pulitzer Prize winners, and a journalist who won a 2006 MacArthur Foundation ‘genius’ grant.”

Prompted by The New Republic’s recent excoriation of storyteller David Sedaris for taking fictional liberties in work sold as nonfiction, Oscar Villalon ponders “the head-scratching issue of talented (and not-so-talented) writers lying on the page. Why take the risk of a public shaming?” The problem, he suggests, may be linked to the perceived lesser worth of fiction.

“This week, ‘Kingdom Come,’ the 16th and last novel in the hugely successful ‘Left Behind’ evangelical series, will be released, and the publication marks the culmination of a sea change in the American book world. Before the first installment in Tim LaHaye’s and Jerry B. Jenkins’ modern-day stories based on the Book of Revelation appeared in 1995, Christian fiction was typically tucked away in Christian bookstores. Now, 43 million books later, the Left Behind titles have paved the way for these books and others like them to be sold in chain outlets, discount stores and big box retailers.”

More authors are doing pre-publication book tours, “a ritual an increasing number of authors are enduring so that their books can have a fighting chance in an industry that issues, by some estimates, more than 175,000 titles a year. Unlike the postpublication book tour, which focuses on publicity and public appearances, the pre-publication tour is meant to win the hearts of the front-line soldiers in the bookselling trenches, and more and more publishers are finding it an indispensable part of their marketing plan.”

“Historians estimate that the typewriter was invented at least fifty-two times, as one tinkerer after another groped toward a usable design. One early writing mechanism looks like a birthday cake, another like a pinball machine. Until about the eighteen-thirties, all typewriters lacked a keyboard, and when they got one it was usually modelled on that of the piano.”

Philip Roth has won the first ever PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, a $40,000 prize named for the late Nobel laureate and one of Roth’s closest friends and literary heroes.

There’s a proposal to name a poet laureate for Boston. But “some have derided the notion that a city of crumbling infrastructure might trouble itself to subsidize poetry. The most surprising naysayers, perhaps, were poets themselves.”

What’s the best way to score yourself a book deal when you have no previous experience as a writer? Just arrange to be born the daughter of a prominent Washington, D.C. politician. “The authors of D.C.-daughter lit are often, however, the very same children who grew up trying to steer clear of the media spotlight. They didn’t run for public office, the line of reasoning goes; they didn’t ask for the publicity. But now they are asking.”