Category: publishing

The publisher Chrysalis is shrinking. “Chrysalis is to cut a quarter of the staff from its unprofitable books division in an attempt to improve its balance sheet. The media company revealed yesterday that 46 of the 160 jobs in its books arm would go as part of a restructuring exercise. Chrysalis employs a total of 700 staff.”

Increasingly, some of the world’s more popular authors are embracing the reality of terrorism as a subject ripe with literary potential, and are advancing the way that the world thinks about the impact of specific attacks. “These writers are depicting how the air has changed in cities living with terror: the jittery feeling that comes and goes; characters who think they are adjusting, only to lose their grip on reason.”

Translated versions of the new Harry Potter opus won’t be available for months yet, but French bookbuyers apparently see no need to wait. In fact, Harry Potter & the Half-Blood Prince is currently the fifth-most popular purchase at Paris bookstores, despite being available exclusively in English. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is nuts for Harry, as well: illegal Chinese translations are already popping up for sale in Asia, and German readers have been posting their own translations online.

The heirs of Carl Jung dispute many points in a biography of the psychologist. “Now, in a compromise that is extremely rare in publishing, the German subsidiary of Random House has agreed to insert two pages of the Jung family’s version of descriptions and facts into a translation being published this fall by one of its imprints, Knaus Verlag. The family originally approached Little, Brown & Company, the publisher of the original English-language version in 2003, to seek changes in new editions and translations. But so far only the German publisher has agreed to the family’s request.”

The secret to giving (and getting) a good interview? “As much as the interviewer must ask questions or provide discussion points that inspire or intrigue his or her subject, it is the subject’s job to be open and generous enough for an original and unpredictable conversation. It’s pretty obvious what an interviewer can do to screw up an interview—fail to read the book (or be unable to fake it), ask questions directly from the press materials, rely on a prepared list of topics and refuse to let a conversation take its natural course. But are there things that an interviewee can do to make sure that an interview goes smoothly, or dreadfully?”

The home in the little town in India where George Orwell was born in 1903 is to be restored. “More than a century after Orwell’s birth, his first home – a crumbling, one-storey building near the abandoned indigo warehouse where his father worked – is home to a local English teacher. Now plans are afoot to build a museum and a stadium and put up a statue of the writer in the 10-acre area in Telliapatti.”

“A small and growing number of authors are asking publishers to print their books on environmentally friendly paper…”

A book titled “The Traveller” has climbed the bestseller lists, but the author is a mystery. “The book, which has just been published in Britain, is written by the improbably named John Twelve Hawks who nobody, not even his New York editors at Random House, has yet met. Billed as a JD Salinger or Thomas Pynchon-style recluse, Twelve Hawks, which his publishers admit is a pseudonym, has refused to appear in public to promote his hugely successful debut work. Even a film offer from Universal has failed to flush him out.”

“Bookcrossing started in April 2001 in Missouri, and now has 350,000 members in 90 countries who have liberated more than two million books in dozens of different languages. The concept is finders-keepers meets interactive virtual lending library. The rules are simple. First take a book down from your shelf. It should be one you love. (Ideally, if you ruled the world you would make reading of this book compulsory.) Log onto bookcrossing.com and register. Print out a label and a number for your book. Release it into the wild. The person who finds the book will see the invitation to the website where they can log their find, eventually write a review and then rerelease the book themselves. In theory, as the book travels around, it should build up an online profile of reviews.”

Almost three months before its official publication date, illegal copies of the latest Harry Potter installment translated into Chinese have gone on sale in Beijing. “Impatient Chinese fans also have begun posting their own translations online. One reader was so upset about the ending he wrote his own and posted it on a university Web site.”