Category: publishing

It’s “truthiness”. “The American Dialect Society chose the word Friday after a runoff with terms related to Hurricane Katrina, such as “Katrinagate,” the scandal erupting from the lack of planning for the monster hurricane.”

“According to Barnes & Noble, 80% of customers who bought books on relationships are women. Relationship books for women outsell those for men by a ratio of 4 to 1, the company reports. But if it indeed takes two to tango, if on a very basic level men and women are seeking the same thing — each other — why are women so much more keen to study the ins and outs of dating and relationships? Where are the advice books for men? Why aren’t books being written for men?”

Want your favorite author to talk to your book club. These days they might just do it. “Book clubs are a growing force in the publishing industry, and publishers and authors view the call-ins as a way to show their appreciation, build loyalty and market their books. ‘This is the next step in the evolution of the relationship between book clubs and publishers’.”

Okay, so maybe it’s a stretch to consider the literary merits of legal filings. And yet… “Has there ever been such a deluge of mass-consumed legalese in a condensed period? Indeed, this is a golden age for the turgid and stultifying, a wave of indictments, plea bargains and “informations” interspersed with three Supreme Court justice nominations in a five-month period, with all of the poetic briefs, memos and opinion-writing those can yield.”

“In 2004/05, visits to public libraries rose for the third year running, with the number of visits up by a total of 17m since 2001/02. However, the fact that the number of books borrowed is on the decline appears to suggest that visitors are using their local libraries for research or for multimedia facilities rather than for their traditional purpose of book lending.”

“This is a golden age for the turgid and stultifying, a wave of indictments, plea bargains and ‘informations’ interspersed with three Supreme Court justice nominations in a five-month period, with all of the poetic briefs, memos and opinion-writing those can yield.” What are we talking about? Why, those delightfully lurid and informational indictment documents now being handed down in Washington with almost as much frequency as new Scott Turow books, of course. In fact, the interest in such legal docs is so intense as to provoke the question: are these court filings now officially a form of entertainment for wonks and news junkies? And if so, could they even be considered… gulp… literature?

London’s Sunday Times submitted two classic Booker-winning books to publishers as the work of newcomers and they were rejected. “One of the books considered unworthy by the publishing industry was by V S Naipaul, one of Britain’s greatest living writers, who won the Nobel prize for literature. The exercise by The Sunday Times draws attention to concerns that the industry has become incapable of spotting genuine literary talent.”

The only known manuscript of a poem by Lord Byron has been found in the archives of University College London. The original, which had been assumed lost, was found in an 1810 edition of The Pleasures of Memory by Samuel Rogers.

Ali Smith has won this year’s Whitbread Award for her first full-length novel, The Accidental. “The Scottish writer beat authors including Salman Rushdie and Nick Hornby to the title.”

A team of statisticians developed a model to predict books that would hit big. Trouble is, books like “The Da Vinci Code” didn’t rate high in the model. “This year’s runaway bestseller should have had only a 36% chance of reaching the charts, according to Alvai Winkler and his team. Their model fits work by some topselling authors but gives only middling marks to the Harry Potter titles and rules out almost everything by Charles Dickens except for his lesser-known Christmas story The Battle of Life.”