Category: publishing

“Amazon is proving very detrimental to the niche author. To the public they are wonderful because they sell books cheaply but for anyone that has to deal with them they are a nightmare. All they are concerned with is driving the prices down. “

“Look-ups during a major news event suggest cultural narratives.”

“During the holiday season and other brisk sales periods, the number to hit the bestseller list is certainly higher, but for large parts of the year it only takes a few hundred copies a day, not a few thousand, to get to the top of Amazon’s daily charts.”

The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, worried that Amazon will use new internet names like “.book” and “.author” to gain more power in the publishing industry, are asking the agency that assigns control of those names to refrain from giving them to a private entity.

Leslie Klinger, an attorney and Sherlock Holmes scholar, has filed a legal case against the (notably litigious) Doyle estate for falsely asserting copyright over material that is actually in the public domain.

“The need for literary agents – a vital third party between publishers and writers – has become a hot topic in Chinese publishing since a February announcement by the country’s first Nobel laureate in literature.”

“I think this moment belongs to little magazines. While subscriptions to the glossies keep going down across the board, ours keep going up. Their ad sales are plummeting; over the last year, ours more than doubled.”

The author of the Harry Potter fantasy books says that T.V. shows present a romanticized view of teenage life.

“There never was a more self-deprecating natural born genius than Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, whose appreciation of his own oeuvre lay in direct inverse proportion to the rapture enjoyed by its readers. He would probably be flattered that so gifted a novelist [as Sebastian Faulks] is to publish Jeeves and The Wedding Bells in November, though if he was peeved he would be infinitely too polite to let on.”