Category: publishing

“It used to be that telling tales out of the White House was déclassé, even tawdry.” No longer. “These days, book parties have replaced cocktail hours in Washington social circles, and power is no longer measured in proximity to the Oval Office but in phone time with Bob Barnett, book agent to Bob Woodward and other aspiring political literary stars. Things have gotten so bad that the 8 a.m. staff meetings at the White House have reportedly gone chilly, with participants reluctant to express their views for fear someone at the table is taking notes or planning revenge — by the book.”

“The rise of fan fiction comes as little surprise – it mirrors the trend in music for bands basing their careers on a single sound or period of a earlier act, or in film for endless sequels and remakes of older, classic films. With so much to choose from, at least there will be the enticement of familiarity – or so the thinking goes. Only perhaps in published literature has the premium on originality lasted somewhat longer, though this, too, has been taking a beating with so many recent cases of literary plagiarism.”

“A glut of popular science books making a trenchant case against religion have soared up the bestseller lists both here and in America. The phenomenon represents a backlash against a perceived rise in religious fundamentalism and recent crazes for ‘spirituality’ by way of books such as The Da Vinci Code. Secularists are now eager to show that the empiricism of science can debunk the claims of believers.”

Is Azar Nafisi’s bestselling memoir, ‘Reading Lolita in Tehran’ “neoconservative propaganda aimed at Islam?”

“The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride, is believed by some scholars to be the first novel ever published by an African-American woman,” and this month, it will be reissued for the first time since its initial printing in 1865. “But the republication has stirred a dispute between its editors… and the Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr.,” who believes that he discovered a published novel by an African-American woman six years older than Slave Bride.

“Starbucks has sold 45,000 copies of Mitch Albom’s novel For One More Day (Hyperion) since it went on sale at the chain October 3, a week after the book reached bookstores. The figure accounts for roughly 12% of a total of 391,000 copies sold.”

“After a languid intercontinental auction that stretched for more than a week, the American rights to Jonathan Littell’s novel Les Bienveillantes, which became a publishing sensation in France, have been sold to HarperCollins.”

“The nine members of the editorial board of the Oxford University-based mathematics journal Topology have signed a letter expressing their intention to resign on December 31.They cited the price of the journal as well as the general pricing policies of their publisher, Elsevier, as having ‘a significant and damaging effect on Topology’s reputation in the mathematical research community’.”

“Books pages are going away because of profit margins. Corporate interests in profitability and the socially-based interests of the average journalist are diametrically opposed. So when asked to cut staff and cut newshole, it’s no surprise that newspapers turn to books and arts coverage first.”

A Merrill Lynch analyst says it could take 30 years for newspapers to get 50 percent of their revenue from online advertising. “Even if the rapid [online] growth continues for the next few years, we don’t see online representing over 50% of newspaper ad revenues for at least a couple of decades, suggesting that industry profit could stay flat for the foreseeable future.”