Category: publishing

“This is, by consensus, the time to be violently shaking up magazines. The Web has arrived; the readers are leaving; the industry’s grip on the pinnacle of the words-and-pictures trade is getting sweatier and slipperier. Many Condé Nast magazines are about to skip excitedly into the Web business. All around, it’s a time for youth and change, or something like them.”

“We have become a culture of borrowers—musicians sample, painters appropriate, computerists worship open-source software. Cool. The problem is that at the same time we’ve forged a society in which misrepresentation is routine, encouraged, obligatory. For all her sweet Hogwarts dreams, an observant, canny, IvyWised-up kid is bound to draw certain conclusions about the way the real world works. She might have noticed, for instance, that the “announced” first printing of her novel was 100,000, about twice the number that shipped—and if she asked why, she would’ve learned that 100 percent exaggeration is simply publishing’s rule of thumb.”

Irish writer John Banville caused an uproar when he won the Booker Prize. “In a low, steady voice of thanks, he said: ‘It is good to see a work of art being recognised!’ Many cheered, whether for the unapologetic arrogance of the remark or for the truth of it, or perhaps stirred by the whiff of drama in the room. But the sense of outrage among certain of the glitterati only ratcheted up a notch, to spew out the next day in newspaper column-centimetres of invective.”

A report issued by the UK’s federal Arts Council says that publishers and booksellers are neglecting minority groups, citing research that says “only 50 of the top 5,000 best-selling books in 2006 so far are by black and minority ethnic writers.”

“Since the downfall of Kaavya Viswanathan, the Harvard sophomore whose novel was yanked from stores and whose two-book contract was canceled by her publisher last week, attention has focused on Alloy Entertainment, the little-known book packager that shared the copyright with her. What has received scant notice is that the parent company, Alloy Media + Marketing, is not really in the publishing business. It is an advertising and marketing firm that specializes in selling stuff — and helping others sell stuff — to teenagers and preteens.”

Anyone who was ever a child has probably read at least one Beverly Cleary book, and most of us have read far more than that. “Although Cleary’s 39 books have not achieved the quick sales numbers of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series (120 million copies) or Lemony Snicket’s books (50 million), they’ve never gone out of print. And since 1950, when Cleary’s first children’s novel, Henry Huggins, was published, she has sold more than 90 million copies.” Now, at age 90, she has finally agreed to allow her popular “Ramona” series to be made into a movie, but is zealously guarding the character against the rampant commercialization she so detests.

Most historians focus on works that actually existed. Stuart Kelly has gone in search of books which were “burned, misplaced, abandoned, suppressed, never finished, never started…”

“The two-year term of current poet laureate Pauline Michel runs out Nov. 16. The Library of Parliament has called for nominations to the post and a selection committee will look at applicants. The job description? Write poetry, sponsor poetry readings and get Canadians interested in poetry.”

The pair who sued Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown for plagiarism and lost, are late on their court-ordered payment of Brown’s legal fees. “Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, who sued publishers Random House, were ordered to pay 85% of the company’s legal bill, estimated at £1.3m. Their first instalment of £350,000 had been due on Friday. But they have applied for more time to pay.”

Only three percent of the books published in the US are translations, compared with almost 70 percent in Italy. What does that mean for the American reading public? “To reduce translation to this miserable 3 percent is to lose your sense of what is out there.”