Category: publishing

Magazine publishers are discovering the young black male. “The magazine industry has largely ignored the young black male reader. Publishers think they pick them up with music magazines like The Source, XXL and Vibe, so as a result there has been a void.” Some new magazines are cashing in on that neglect…

Once, designing new typefaces was a difficult proposition. But “computer programs like FontLab and Fontographer have allowed neophytes, as well as veterans, to create a new generation of digital type. During the ensuing digital typographic revolution of the 90’s, a slew of designers and illustrators who had never designed an alphabet before flooded Internet sites with bizarrely named, peculiarly styled and sometimes illegible faces. Typeface design became something of an expressive art.”

“As book sales fall flat and a national study suggests fewer people than ever read literature, the benefits of pleasure reading are far from obvious to overscheduled Americans with MTV attention spans. Teachers and public-service announcements pound the reading-is-good-for-you message into children from an early age. But by the time many people reach adulthood, they’ve lost sight of what marketing gurus might call the “takeaway value” of books.”

“The longlist is conventional enough in many ways – there are no obviously attention-seeking moves, such as the inclusion of sci-fi, crime, thrillers or overtly comic novels, which will add fuel to the usual criticisms that the prize’s definition of ‘literary fiction’ is too narrow. But it is, at least, far from being a list of predictable literary London insiders.”

What’s happened to fiction? “Until recently, fiction was the more dashing, glamorous side, where arguments broke out and fortunes could be made. Those who wrote and published factual books would never have expected stardom, glamour or fame; rather, they were more like craftsmen. Things have greatly changed. Although fiction still sells in great quantities and continues to produce stars, the attention of publishers and booksellers has moved elsewhere. Everyone in publishing agrees it is getting harder to sell a new novel, even by a distinguished name, in this country; book buyers seem interested only in non-fiction.”

“The 22 books that made it onto the longlist were chosen from a pool of 132 entries. The most distinguishing feature of this year’s lengthy longlist, which otherwise contained few great shocks, was the number of first-time novelists featuring in it – six out of 22.”

“Dick-lit” fits a familiar matrix: It takes the form of first-person memoir or first-person fiction, is set among striving young people in a large city (usually New York) and tells the story of a youngish man — a man who is starting to feel not so young — who works in the world of media, just like Bridget Jones. He has achieved a tolerable level of financial success and is bored or simply fatigued by the endless sexual possibilities of urban life. He is looking for a serious girlfriend and is frequently and amusingly disappointed. Career is not an issue for him, politics is not an issue, art is not an issue (indeed, art is usually dismissed as embarrassing, as cringingly pretentious and effeminate, a girly substitute for television). There are no philosophical questions at all in life other than the quest for a satisfying mate. In other words, it is exactly like chick-lit in every way, but with the genders reversed.”

You can’t make a living as a writer of short stories. “Oddly, though, you can still make a pretty good living by teaching other people how to write short stories. The form survives – and even thrives, in a forced, hothouse sort of way – because it has become the instructional medium of choice in most of our writing programs. The majority of people who enroll in these programs want to be novelists, but novels don’t lend themselves very readily to the workshop format, and so would-be novelists these days spend at least part of their apprenticeship working on stories.”

Customers of Barnes & Noble and Borders are complaining that the anti-John Kerry book “Unfit for Command,” has been hard to find in the stores. And they’re charging the stores with political bias against the book. The stores say they just haven’t been able to keep up with demands. The book, which went on sale Aug. 11 with a first printing of 85,000, will have 550,000 copies in print by next week, according to Regnery Publishing.

The British government has gone against author Anthony Powell’s last wish that his manuscripts should go to his school. Instead, the government will give them to the British Library. “These manuscripts are a national treasure and should be viewed by as many scholars, researchers and members of the public as possible. That is why I decided that the British Library would be the right home for these manuscripts. It is part of government policy to make works of art and important documents available to as many people as possible.”