Category: publishing

What’s most effective in selling a book? Word of mouth – personal recommendations. “Publishers often stand accused of becoming ever more sophisticated and cynical in their pursuit of creating instant author brands, when ultimately it is as likely to be good old-fashioned personal recommendation that really sells.”

What’s the most popular book club book? “After nearly 13,000 votes, we can announce the winner is Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, followed by Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog… and Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. A longlist of more than 50 was based on the suggestions from book clubs from across the UK who sent in their nominations to the Magazine last week.”

An extortionist in Australia used the Vigenere Code – made famous recently by the best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code – to blackmail a construction company. The blackmailer used newspaper classified ads to send his messages to the company, theatening to kill crane drivers unless he was paid the ransom by Tuesday.

“This week the South Huntington Public Library on Long Island, New York, became one of the first public libraries in the country to loan out iPod shuffles. For the past three weeks, the library ran a pilot program using the portable MP3 devices to store audio books downloaded from the Apple iTunes Music Store. They started with six shuffles, and now are up to a total of 10. Each device holds a single audio book.” The library owns several low-cost iPods, and is saving money by downloading the audiobooks rather than purchasing them on CD.

The New York Public Library has put 275,000 images of objects from its collection online. Included are collections of “prints, maps, posters, photographs, illuminated manuscripts, sheet-music covers, dust jackets, menus and cigarette cards. “If you dive in today without knowing why, you might not surface for a long, long time. The Public Library’s digital gallery is lovely, dark and deep. Quite eccentric, too.”

More than 8,000 items have disappeared from the British Library since it moved to new premises. “Some disappearances were thefts, with collectors using razors to cut rare maps out of books. But the biggest theft is believed to have been carried out by a contractor who stole £17,000 worth of comics from a storage area. These included the first issue of the Beano to contain its iconic character, Dennis the Menace, dated March 17, 1951, and rare copies of the Dandy and Eagle.”

Are Scotland (and the Scots) really a country of depressing, depressed people who “celebrate failure”? (ouch) More arguments to that effect this week: “Jenny Brown, a former director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, said: “In an age where readers are looking for feel-good novels, Scotland excels at feel-bad books.”

Ernest Hemingway’s house in Idaho will stay where it is and become a museum. “The board of The Nature Conservancy’s Idaho chapter voted Friday to move ahead with a plan to turn the 13-acre property near Sun Valley into a literary library and museum. The Nobel Prize-winning author fatally shot himself at the home in 1961. Neighbors had agreed to pay market value for the property — which could fetch an estimated $5 million — on the condition the house be moved. Neighbors fear the nonprofit group’s plans will disrupt the residential character of the upscale Ketchum community.”

Actors dressed as characters from The Da Vinci Code spent a day at Shanghai’s Book City exchanging pirated copies of the best-selling thriller for legal editions. “Customers looking to turn their fake copy in for a legitimate edition had to tell the actors where and when they bought the pirated book. Since the Chinese version was published last year, 500,000 legal copies of the book have been sold, but pirated versions are still readily available throughout the country. The real book sells for about 28 yuan (US$3.38), while pirated versions sell for between 5 yuan and 10 yuan.”

Winston Churchill’s “A History of the English-Speaking Peoples” told an epic tale of 2,200 years of history. Now “historian Andrew Roberts has taken on the daunting task of picking up where Churchill’s narrative left off, at the dawn of the 20th century. Roberts is writing a fifth volume to add to the four Churchill wrote. It will trace the main events of the 20th century chronologically, with the wartime leader himself a dominant figure.”