Category: publishing

“There are many pitfalls in a literary career, including convincing folks you have one. Writers, like Pavlov’s dogs, actually do learn, and after jettisoning all that romantic baggage that books are about what’s between the pages, they see with clear eyes the genius of the marketplace. The book business has never been more about moving units, though hawking novels, even the big ones, can be much harder than selling wet dog turds.”

In the past few years there have been several high-profile cases of historians plagiarizing. “Their cheating ways go right to the ailing heart of the history profession, which, to its detriment, has dropped the ball on governance. There’s something very wrong in the house of history when the right-wing Weekly Standard passes as the profession’s whistleblower and chortles over careless mistakes by liberal historians.”

C-SPAN founder Brian Lamb has always been a strong proponent of literature in an age in which television is dominant in the lives of most Americans, and he has regularly used his family of networks to promote books and authors. But this weekend, Lamb’s self-hosted and much-admired series “Booknotes” comes to an end on C-SPAN’s air. The decision to end the series was Lamb’s own, but he has no intention of leaving behind his passion for reading, or his efforts to call attention to deserving authors.

Earlier this year TV critics named Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” the best newscast on TV. Now Publisher’s Weekly has named his satirical book “America (the Book), a Citizen’s Guide to Democracy Inaction,” its book of the year. “The magazine said, in its issue to be published on Monday, that, ‘in a year defined by political polemics, it seems fitting that PW’s Book of the Year be one in which the authors survey the entire political system and laugh’.”

A new edition of Syvia Plath’s last collection of poetry – restored to the author’s intentions – has been published. It includes a forward by the author’s daughter…

The British Library is putting Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s first literary effort on display. “The contents have never been made public or published since Conan Doyle wrote the book while he was working as a doctor in Southsea, probably in the early to mid-1880s, soon after he finished his training at Edinburgh, the city of his birth.”

An Alabama legislator is proposing legislation that would ban books with gay characters or themes from libraries in the state. “Our culture, how we know it today, is under attack from every angle,” Gerald Allen says. “Allen said that if his bill passes, novels with gay protagonists and college textbooks that suggest homosexuality is natural would have to be removed from library shelves and destroyed. ‘I guess we dig a big hole and dump them in and bury them’.”

For the first time, Amazon, which began in the books business but has steadily diversified in recent years, has sold more of other products than books. “During the four-day Thanksgiving weekend, consumer electronics surpassed books as Amazon’s largest sales category. The milestone, set at a time when its book business also posted record sales, is an important indication that Amazon can diversify beyond media products.”

An unpublished first novel by Truman Capote, long thought lost, has been found in a box of photographs and documents abandoned by the author in 1966.

A scientist has analyzed Iris Murdoch’s later work and suspects that she may have been suffering from Alzheimer’s. The analysis “found that her vocabulary had dwindled and her language become simpler. Alzheimer’s is difficult to establish with certainty until after death, but the evidence was there in her last work, diagnosed by computer-based analysis of word use, Dr Peter Garrard reports in the December issue of the journal Brain.”