Category: publishing

Less than 40 percent of books sold in America are sold by independent bookstores. But “genre stores, specializing in literature ranging from fantasy to religion, have bucked this trend by catering to inveterate and demanding readers. Booksellers in southern California, New York, Minneapolis and elsewhere are finding ways to be profitable by targeting specific markets.”

Even as 200 to 300 independent bookstores close a year, the number of independent book stores opening is creeping up. “For a long time, from 1992 to 2002, you literally could count on two hands the number of openings. In the last three years there are 60, 70, 80 stores opening.”

What’s the greatest English-language novel of the last quarter-century? A recent survey of American literary experts says it’s Toni Morrison’s Beloved, but in the UK, the poll went in an entirely different direction. “In the novel, as in everything else, there are Anglo-Saxon and American attitudes. We celebrate a literary tradition of astonishing variety. They want to believe in the Great American Novel, the classic exemplar, the last word. We don’t really believe in the last word, prefer not to be told what’s best and would rather make our own discoveries. They subscribe to the pursuit of (literary) happiness.”

This week, Edmonton celebrated the 50th anniversary of the opening of one of Canada’s most successful independent booksellers. “Hurtig Books proved virtually an immediate success, the only full-service, independently operated book retailer between Toronto and Vancouver. Within a decade, it was being hailed by many as the best bookstore in Canada and, after a couple of moves to ever-larger premises as well as the opening of two satellite outlets, had become one of the biggest book retailers in the country, perhaps even the biggest.”

“A ‘new wave fabulist’ is a writer who has transcended the conventions of sci-fi and fantasy fiction, lifting the traditional genre form into a new literary realm. Any effort to narrow down the category much further than that would be like trying to nail a raindrop to the wall.”

Publishers are paying enormous advances for bloggers. “It’s like the dot-com boom all over again. In the same way that publishers knew they needed a Web site even if they didn’t know what that was, they’re just buying up blogs because they’re hot.”

“Why are we first-time authors so obsessed with the Amazon rankings? Partly because, like pretending to do your tax return or essential research, it offers yet another displacement activity to avoid the real hard business of writing. But it’s also because once your book is out there, all alone in the big wide world, you desperately want to know if it’s thriving or has got completely lost – and for a considerable period nobody can tell you.”

“There is no short list of possible winners, but buzz has centred on Syrian poet Adonis, whose real name is Ali Ahmad Said, and controversial Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk. Other contenders, at least in the eyes of the media and on betting Web sites, include Americans Joyce Carol Oates and Philip Roth and Swedish poet Thomas Transtromer.”

Why was there such a flurry of excitement when a Robert Frost poem was recently discovered? “There are a number of unpublished poems that scholars know of, residing in several libraries, that he never chose to publish.”

Google is launching a Web site “dedicated to literacy, pulling together its books, video, mapping and blogging services to help teachers and educational organizations share reading resources.”