Category: publishing

Poets Kamau Brathwaite and Sylvia Legris were honored with $50,000 awards at Canada’s annual Griffin Prize dinner last night. “This year’s Griffin competition, the sixth, attracted 444 submissions from 20 countries.”

“For more than 30 years, Henry Kisor has reigned supreme as a book editor and literary critic — the undisputed emperor of fiction and nonfiction, poetry and prose, biography and memoir. Ever eloquent and fiercely incorruptible, his decrees have always been minimalist in style, and were generally drawn up on Post-It notes… Today is the last day that Henry will sit in the book maven’s catbird seat — a spot he first occupied at the old Chicago Daily News (from 1973-78) and has held at the Sun-Times ever since. When he leaves the building — and heads off into that great field of dreams known as retirement — he will carry away with him a great deal of history and authority, as well as a lifetime of achievement and wild adventure.”

DC Comics is resurrecting an old character in a very public way. Batwoman, who had her own regular comic book from 1956 to 1979, is coming back, and coming out of the closet as well. It’s part of a wave of new comic book heroes with something more than the average super-being’s pedigree.

HMV has agreed to buy Uk book retailer Ottakar’s. Why was Ottakar’s for sale? “Over the past year the book market has undergone a significant change, with new levels of competition from the supermarkets and online retailers impacting all specialist booksellers and in particular those with insufficient scale to compete on equal terms.”

One of Canada’s most venerable publishing houses, McClelland & Stewart (better known as M&S) has been the subject of plenty of rumors lately, and some observers are unhappily accusing Random House, which owns 25% of the company, of interfering in M&S’s affairs. M&S insists that its relationship with Random House is purely a matter of sharing marketing expertise, but some fear the publisher could be on the verge of abandoning its history.

“A European collector has paid $750,000 for 26 letters sent by the French philosopher Voltaire to the Russian Empress Catherine the Great. The figure is a world record for handwritten correspondence from this period, said Sotheby’s auction house. The 26 letters date from 1768-1777, when Catherine was ruler of Russia and Voltaire lived in Switzerland.”

WH Smith – Britain’s biggest bookseller – is “demanding payments of £50,000 a week from publishers to get books on its supposedly impartial list of ‘recommended’ reads in the run-up to Christmas this year.”

Indie presses are reinventing their businesses. “In big publishing, the line is that people don’t read, and we’re all competing for the same dwindling pool of readers. That’s not true. We’re going out and finding new readers, and showing people that reading can be provocative and exciting.”

Digital piracy is hurting the small-margin business of comic books. “Digital scanning and sharing of comic books have begun to make a dent in the business, driven by easy-to-use file-sharing tools and a culture in which enthusiasts eagerly pass along their copies to one another.”

“In 2006, the novelist has become a cross between a commercial traveller and an itinerant preacher. The cultural historians of the future will surely pick over the larger meaning of this festival fever, but one thing is indisputable: in just over a generation the novel has gone public in the most astounding way. In the process, the genre has sold out and become big business, the preferred medium of self-advancement and self-promotion for Blair’s children, and almost unrecognisable to fiction-lovers raised on the literary names of the Forties and Fifties.”