Category: publishing

The book seems like a license to print money. “It certainly has meant ‘print more books.’ Now it also means “print movie tickets, paperbacks, store displays, posters.” Think of a tickertape parade with all that paper raining down: Dan Brown’s controversial thriller about a murdered art curator and a centuries-old Vatican conspiracy is going to generate heaps of paper in the next two months. And a lot of it will be green.”

On the eve of the release of the Da Vinci Code in paperback, Julia Keller wonders: “why is “The Da Vinci Code” such a hit? What accounts for its sensational success?”

With the impending release of the Da Vinci Code movie, bookstores are being inundated with religious-themed books…

Louise McBain has been building a $600 million publishing empire af arts magazines. Now she’s restructuring. “In five years, MacBain bought Art + Auction, Modern Painters and Museums Magazines and Gallery Guides, which publish guides for eight or more cities each. She added a data service, Art Sales Index, and a French publisher, Somogy. She launched a Web site, Artinfo.com, in 2005, and Truman will help start a new magazine, Culture & Travel, in September.”

As co-director of Cactus Television, Amanda Ross is described as “the most powerful woman in British publishing. All the other reasons can be summarised in two names and three words: Richard and Judy.”

French publishers are drowning under a sea of unsolicited manuscripts. “With the short 35-hour working week in France and a fall in the average retirement, increasing numbers of French men and women are turning pen to paper to write ‘their book’. Most, some 75 percent, write novels loosely based on their own experiences, turning the editor into a kind of shrink, an often unwilling confidante party to the author’s deepest secrets, fears and desires.”

Hong Kong is becoming a big literary center. “This month, Hong Kong becomes home to a new international literary prize and to the relaunched Asia Literary Review. Major overseas publishers and agents, meanwhile, have been making regular visits or setting up operations in this area. Hong Kong is working hard to position itself in the middle of this potentially booming book trade.”

“Whether due to the short attention spans of readers, the churn of the book-publishing world or some kind of writing meme, authors are slicing and dicing up their experiences and their studies into rapidly digestible, often bestselling 12-month packages.”

“Books, it turns out, inflame a particular kind of passion. They inform, they amuse, they provoke. They keep us company and lull us to sleep. They give manifest evidence of our intellect. They show off our interests and our values. And when we’ve run out of places to put them, they prove extremely difficult to part with.”

The Booker Prize has renewed its affiliation with financial company Man Group. “The five-year agreement means the UK’s most prestigious literary award will continue to be branded as The Man Booker Prize.”