Category: publishing

“This year’s International Festival of Authors [in Toronto] will be the year of the wunderkind. The preliminary lineup for the country’s premier authors festival released yesterday revealed a slate packed with next-generation stars such as Jonathan Safran Foer, Helen Oyeyemi and Diana Evans.” Last year, the festival celebrated its 25th anniversary, and this year’s lineup represents a conscious effort to move forward with a new generation of writers.

“In the workshop, the students critique each other’s writing and as the comments are bandied about, a “consensus” develops about what does and doesn’t “work” in a story. The writer then meshes the “popular” opinions of the group into his or her work, slowly removing the unpopular parts, until the work is readable and accessible to all. More often than not, this process destroys the writer’s initial vision, leaving behind a work that is void of passion and anything that is different, new, or creative. Many of world’s greatest novels would have never made it through the workshop process.”

“At least 21 states, including large and powerful California, Texas and Florida, have committees that decide which books can be used in public schools. The scrubbing and sanitizing that are imposed to satisfy the big states have affected all the commercially produced textbooks. That means that even states without adoption laws end up using the same books as the ones written to please California and Texas. Their decisions have been excoriated by spokespeople for both the right and the left. Their fear of offending any politically connected group means the textbooks they approve are often the dumbest and dullest of the bunch.”

“Scott Pack, whose day job as buying manager at Waterstone’s gives him considerable powers over the relationship between writers and readers, has recently been hired as a columnist for Bookseller magazine and in his first outing took a swipe at the broadsheets’ books pages, asking, essentially, what is the point? ‘They should inspire reading. They should excite, stimulate, agitate and empower readers to discover new books.’ But they’re not…

The comic business is thriving (even if the revenue model isn’t clear yet). “Even though revenue models remain fuzzy, increasing numbers of artists are using the Internet to reach readers directly and break into a business that historically has been limited to the lucky few who get syndicated in newspapers or picked up by comic book publishers.”

A man has returned a book to the Oakland Public Library 78 years after it was due. “The hardback copy of Rudyard Kipling’s “Kim” was due back on Aug. 29, 1927, but no one in Jim Pavon’s family realized that it was an overdue library book. ‘It’s classic — we all read it. It sat on a shelf or in a box for years. But I guess no one ever noticed that there was a little library card and sleeve on the back cover that said when it was due’.”

“The Octagon library at Queen Mary, University of London, in Mile End, east London, is in the process of refurbishment and decided that it would have to dispose of its surplus books. These have now been dumped in skips outside the library, to the outrage of staff and students who were clambering through them yesterday to find what they described as literary gems.”

Seventeen years after it was removed from bookshops for its racist content, the children’s story Little Black Sambo has made a comeback in Japan…

“Major book publishers are preparing to boost their business by selling directly to consumers from their websites, a move that has booksellers spooked about being squeezed by their own suppliers.”

“A group of freelancers in San Francisco believe they’ve found a way to help remedy writer’s block, share advice, get feedback on a first draft and keep from driving their families crazy. They call it The Grotto. Strip away the pretentious moniker and their strategy is deceptively simple — shared office space.”