Category: publishing

James Joyce only wrote a single play in his lifetime, and it was a critical disaster. Inspired by the work of Ibsen, Joyce created Exiles, “a work freighted with jealousy and the ogre of betrayal… His efforts to have it produced were Herculean and sometimes ludicrous… The tension surrounding the first night had something of the mystique of a séance, [and] the play was immediately withdrawn.” Exiles is currently being revived in London.

“It’s literary legend: how Jack Kerouac wrote his breakthrough novel On the Road in a three-week frenzy of creativity in spring 1951, typing the story without paragraphs or page breaks onto a 36-metre scroll of nearly-translucent paper. In fact, he revised the book many times before it was published six years later, and while the scroll came to symbolise the spontaneity of the Beat Generation, the early, unedited version never reached the public. Now, to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the novel’s publication, the original, scroll-written version of On the Road will be published next year in book form for the first time.”

Workshops are a popular activity among playwrights, a chance to learn about the craft from others who have achieved success in the field. But playwright Mark Ravenhill says that the whole concept seems more than a bit fraudulent. “There is the unspoken expectation that in two hours, to a group of complete strangers, I am going to deliver a fundamental insight into playwriting, if not all the fundamental insights into playwriting… Tell a workshop participant that there are no rules, that they need to discover what a play means to them and write something that is unique to their sense of the world, and you are likely to be faced with a sullen customer who feels they aren’t getting their money’s worth.”

Ever since Oprah Winfrey got interested in books, the American publishing industry has known that getting a title on Oprah’s list is as good as buying a spot on the bestseller list. But Oprah isn’t the only one who can sell books: meet Richard and Judy, the UK’s favorite afternoon talk hosts, whose own televised book club is making major waves in Britain’s publishing world.

“Simmered by three years of lawsuits, religious debates and conspiracy theories, brought to a boil in May by the Hollywood movie, the craze for all things ‘Da Vinci Code’ is finally fading, publishers and booksellers agree.”

Before James Frey and JT LeRoy, there was Vicki Johnson, who claimed to be the adoptive mother of a boy dying of AIDS. Too sick to meet anyone, ever, the boy nonetheless published an autobiography, sans author photo. Writer Armistead Maupin, who befriended the teen without ever actually laying eyes on him, was only one of Johnson’s many celebrity dupes.

An Australian cultural fund called Copyright Agency Limited has been quietly assisting writers and publishers in protecting their work and ideas for more than 20 years, and in this age of digital information access, its work is becoming ever more important. “With digital copying gradually being corralled along with photocopying, the agency’s revenues have grown from $72 million in 2003-04 to $86 million in 2004-05 and more than $100 million in the past financial year. This will be distributed in roughly 5000 payments to its members.”

The Da Vinci Code has been banned in Iran after complaints by Christians. “Eight previous editions of the Persian translation of Dan Brown’s book will remain in the country’s shops but no further versions can be produced. The Da Vinci Code has sold 40 million copies worldwide and was turned into a film, which was not released in Iran.”

“Canadian periodicals continue to occupy only about 15 per cent of the rack space in any decent Canadian newsstand, with U.S. titles taking up most of the remaining 85 per cent. But in the past quarter-century, the total number of these titles purchased by Canadians has dropped by 30 per cent, while the average circulation per American title has been slashed in half, to 13,243 in 2005 from 26,303 in 1983.”

“A federal judge Monday temporarily barred the Miami-Dade County School District from removing a children’s book on Cuba from school libraries. Last month, the Miami-Dade school board voted to remove the book from its elementary schools after a parent complained that its depiction of life in the communist nation was overly rosy.”