Category: publishing

Penguin is embarking on a new series of classics featuring Canadian writers. Choosing great Canadian literature is problematic. Who gets in? What is a classic? “The irony is that while Penguin Classics attempts to show that some of our authors, torn and bleeding, have indeed climbed up the rocks where excellence dwells, academic critics have been in a lather over the very notion of “classics.” How is it, they ask for one thing, that almost all the writers who, up to this time, have climbed up on the rocks have been Dead White European Males?”

Does a strong online used-book market lessen the sales demand for new books? A new study says not: “When used books are substituted for new ones, the seller faces competition from the secondhand market, reducing the price it can set for new books. But there’s another effect: the presence of a market for used books makes consumers more willing to buy new books, because they can easily dispose of them later.”

Last year’s 9/11 Commission report was an unexpected bestseller. Now the report’s publisher is donating some of the profits to anti-terror causes. “When we undertook the report’s publication. we did so in a spirit of public service, fully aware that we would shoulder a financial commitment unprecedented for this firm and were unlikely to recover all our expenses. Donations amounted to about 10 percent of the company’s gross proceeds from sales of the book to wholesalers and bookstores.”

“Publishers are increasingly alert to sources of undiscovered gems that in the past might have slipped through the net. The slush pile is one, word of mouth another, as well as books being launched by risk-taking small or independent publishers. Some of these titles are successful in their own right, while others are taken up by mainstream publishers.”

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has sued the author of a book about crime in Italy. “Penguin, which published the book in English, has promoted it as an exploration of the dark underside of Italy today. The book looks at Mafia, organised crime and corruption in Italy, and it also looks at Silvio Berlusconi … the principal actor of the Italian political stage since the early 1990s,”

The unusual level of security surrounding the release of the latest Harry Potter book has led to an unusual problem in the international marketplace: translators didn’t get to begin working on foreign versions of the text until mid-June, and at 672 pages, there’s a lot to work through. The Spanish language edition, for instance, won’t be on shelves until next spring. The first translations (German and Mandarin Chinese) are expected to be available this fall.

Book critic David Kipen expected to hear from a few disgruntled readers when he gave the latest Harry Potter book a lukewarm review. What he didn’t expect was the death threat. “When somebody e-mails to say, ‘Seriously bitch u need to watch what teh f — you say,’ it certainly commandeers a critic’s attention. Add to that the dozens of correspondents who took the trouble to call me dork, idiot, schmuck or worse, and it’s all occasioned some serious soul-searching here on the literature desk.”

In a field crowded with literary heavyweights, Albanian author Ismail Kadare didn’t exactly stand out on the shortlist for the Man Booker Prize. But while his win several weeks back was a surprise to many in the publishing world (and to the author himself,) there can be no doubt as to Kadare’s significance. “At 69, Kadare is Albania’s most beloved literary export and one of the central cultural figures in the recently troubled Balkan region — but unlike many other Eastern Europeans writing under socialist regimes, he was no dissident. His early writings earned him wide acclaim in official (and tightly controlled) literary circles, and he was particularly well received by Albania’s then-ruler, Enver Hoxha.”

How do you insure that your new book will be a slam-bang bestseller? Well, you could write a really good book. A solid marketing push never heards. You could charm a few critics. Or, if you just don’t want to work that hard, you could give your book a subtitle that contains the phrase, “The whatever That Changed The World.” As it turns out, those words are pure publishing gold, and few authors seem to be too proud to take advantage of it.

“A scathing parody that likens President Bush to the ‘idiot’ in William Faulkner’s novel ‘The Sound and the Fury’ has won this year’s Faulkner write-alike contest — and touched off a literary spat. Organizers of the Faux Faulkner competition are accusing Hemispheres, the United Airlines magazine that has sponsored the contest for six years, of playing politics by not putting Sam Apple’s ‘The Administration and the Fury’ in its print edition — only on its Web site.” Hemispheres’ editor says politics had nothing to do with the decision.