Category: publishing

How do you “spread the word that linguists are not polyglots, language cops, or anarchists, but fact-seeking, fun-loving, rule-embracing folks?”

Seligman is Canada’s “top fiction editor”: “You read a book, and maybe one can say what maybe needs work or what could use revision here and there. So, a reader might be able to do that. But if you’re really going to be useful, I think an editor has to understand what is possible to do. So you learn to develop the idea that ‘Okay, this is this book’ and you learn to make a distinction between what changes would make it another book as opposed to what can be done with the rough parameters of what the author wants to do with this book.”

The books we loved as children always seem to hold a special place in our hearts, and though we may not reread them often as adults, they never fail to conjure warm and fuzzy memories. In fact, not rereading them is frequently a good idea. “Moments I had treasured from the book down through the decades now seemed like cheap gags… Where as a child I had seen mystery and wonder, as an adult I saw smug, self-satisfied intellectual humor.”

Why is it that American writers have difficulty writing English speech, and British writers have difficulty writing American? “True virtuosity, in fact, lies in the simple ability to render a single line of speech in a way that sounds like a real person talking. There aren’t many novelists, in reality, who can reliably do this even if the character shares their own nationality, class and position. The number of novelists who can bring off a character speaking the same language from a different country, no matter how apparently familiar the cadences and accent, can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Not so smashing, after all.”

Most authors wouldn’t extend the length of the average book tour for anything, but J.A. Konrath can’t get enough of the road, apparently. With the aid of an in-car GPS device that allows him to locate bookstores not on his official itinerary, Konrath visited 95 more stores than his publisher asked him to on his last tour. “His ability to use the technology to find more places to promote his book impressed his publisher enough that this summer, Hyperion is sending Konrath out for a two-month, 500 bookstore tour.”

Last week Zadie Smith’s novel On Beauty won the £30,000 Orange prize. “Yesterday Utterly Monkey, a lad-lit novel written by her husband, the poet Nick Laird, won the £10,000 Betty Trask award, administered by the Society of Authors.”

US bookstore sales were down ahrply 4.3 percent in April. “The decline was the steepest monthly decline so far this year and marked the third consecutive month that sales were down.”

Google has launched a site devoted entirely to the Bard that “allows U.S. users to browse through the full texts of his 37 plays. Readers can even plug in words, such as ‘to be or not to be’ from ‘Hamlet,’ and immediately be taken to that part of the play.”

“Listening to poetry on your iPod may not be everyone’s idea of entertainment, but a new website called iPoems (which has nothing to do with iTunes or its owner, Apple) is setting out to persuade audiences that downloadable poems read by their authors are the next big thing – and worth 50p per poem.”

The Librarian of Congress will name Donald Hall as the US’ 14th Poet Laureate. “Mr. Hall, a poet in the distinctive American tradition of Robert Frost, has also been a harsh critic of the religious right’s influence on government arts policy. And as a member of the advisory council of the National Endowment for the Arts during the administration of George H. W. Bush, he referred to those he thought were interfering with arts grants as bullies and art bashers.”