Category: publishing

What do publishers want to publish these days? “Memoirs have been strong sellers throughout this decade. But this year, publishers plan to put out twice as many as last year – there are likely to be as many as 40, according to Simba Information, a book-tracking company.”

This month’s Vanity Fair “green” cover has a pedigree. “A spokeswoman for the magazine acknowledged Wednesday that the cover photo of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., George Clooney, Julia Roberts and Al Gore, shot by Annie Leibovitz, was “inspired” by “Ballet Society,” a 1948 portrait by Irving Penn of George Balanchine and three collaborators. Although there’s no mention anywhere in the magazine of the connection, the composition of the two photos is virtually identical, down to the leafy garland on Roberts’ head.”

Canada’s Environment minister has blocked a talk by a leading government environmental scientist about his novel. The book “is set in the not-too-distant future when global warming has made many parts of the world too hot to live in and has prompted a war between Canada and the U.S. over water resources.”

We tend to think of book titles as one-shot deals – once you’ve used it, it’s yours. But in reality, there’s nothing prohibiting publishers from reusing old titles if it suits their purposes – just go look up “The Island” on your favorite online bookseller, and see how many hits you get. “Romance, mystery and other genre books are particularly likely to have recycled titles because of the vast numbers that are published and their brief lives in the public’s memory — meaning a name can be brought back within a few years.”

This Sunday is Easter, of course, and even if you’re not particularly religious (or Christian,) odds are good you’ll have trouble avoiding Jesus this weekend. In fact, Christianity is not only on the rise in the U.S., it’s taking over the bestseller lists. That’s fine for the fiction list, but “over on the nonfiction list, the laughable ‘Jesus Papers’ debuts at the No. 5 spot. ‘Misquoting Jesus,’ a proto-academic howler, ranks No. 8, followed by the conversational ‘Home With God’ at No. 10, and Garry Wills’s ‘What Jesus Meant’ at No. 16.” Alex Beam sees a trend emerging, and it isn’t nearly so much about religious piety as it is about a cynical attempt to make millions off of gullible readers who will buy anything with the word Jesus on the cover.

It was no big surprise this week when a UK judge rejected charges of copyright infringement against DaVinci Code author Dan Brown. But the ruling could have a wide impact on the publishing industry, codifying for the first time some set of rules for authors of fiction who choose to base their work on fact. Or could it? “To suggest, as Gail Rebuck, the chief executive of Random House, did outside court, that the judgement represented a significant victory for creative freedom, is probably going too far… The key issue is the amount of a book, both in quantity and quality, which is copied by someone else.”

“Birds travel in flocks, fish in schools. Sometimes books arrive in cohorts, too, testing the attention spans of booksellers, reviewers and, most of all, readers… For publishers and authors, these pileups can lead to a scramble to distinguish their books from the pack, with moved release dates and changed marketing plans. Authors battle to snag talk-show spots. Book reviews often pair books, and booksellers clump them onto a themed table. For readers, this can create confusion, or worse, fatigue.”

For 2-1/2 years now, Oxford University Press has been catering to the needs of academic librarians on a budget with “a browsable database that contains the complete texts of more than 1,000 Oxford monographs, in four areas: economics and finance, political science, philosophy, and religion. As a result, participating institutions no longer have to shell out for print copies of Oxford titles in order to make them available to faculty members and students.” For cash-strapped university libraries, the program is a godsend, and far from hurting print sales of the monographs, the easy and cheap availability of the database appears actually to have stimulated interest.

What are the noevls that most change men’s lives? “The most frequently named book was Albert Camus’s The Outsider, followed by JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. The project, called Men’s Milestone Fiction, commissioned by the Orange prize for fiction and the Guardian, followed on from similar research into women’s favourite novels undertaken by the same team last year.”

A judge in England has rejected the plagiarism case brought against DaVinci Code author Dan Brown by two authors of an earlier non-fiction book with some similarities to Brown’s fictional plot. Most observers had expected the ruling, since a decision in favor of the plaintiffs would have turned much of what is understood of copyright law on its head.