Category: publishing

Analysts are speculating that the online magazine Slate could sell for $10 million – $12 million, or twice the publication’s annual revenue. “Whereas magazines generally sell for an amount equal to or just above their annual revenue, the ‘prestige value’ of Slate will probably warrant a significantly higher price tag.”

Two of Billboard Magazine’s former top editors are suing the magazine. “The suit alleges, among other things, that they had faced a hostile working environment tainted by sexual harassment, internal office sabotage, and the sacrificing of “editorial integrity for the sake of financial interests.”

Nebraskan poet Ted Kooser has been chosen as the next US Poet Laureate. “Kooser has written 10 collections of poetry, most recently “Delights & Shadows,” published this year. His 1980 collection, “Sure Signs,” received the Society of Midland Authors Prize for the best book of poetry by a Midwestern writer published in that year.”

In Canada, 19 writers from across the country participate in writing a novel – each contribting 600 words before passing it along to a colleague. “As the chapters crossed invisible borders, the initial linear plot took bizarre turns as creative visions clashed, and as they erased and re-introduced plot changes, such as the female protagonist’s ever-changing pregnant condition. ‘The book is not art, it’s a game. I don’t think the writers were very generous with each other, you would do something, and then the next character would undo it’.”

After 800 author interviews, Brian Lamb is quitting his BookNotes show on C-Span. Why? “He spends 20 hours each week reading books in preparation for “Booknotes,” he estimates. That’s 1.8 years of his life that have been dedicated to reading since the show debuted April 2, 1989. Now he wants to reclaim some of that time for his personal life. Has it come to this? The author-interviewer, arguably the most quirky and dedicated on television, the creator and curator of one of TV’s few institutions for avid readers — has he finally tired of books?”

University presses are essential for academics who need to publish to advance their careers. Yet university presses are underfunded and endangered. “One proposed solution now gaining ground is that universities and other institutions that support academic research create a pool of money to provide subsidies for authors to help offset the costs of publishing.”

Is Norma Khouri’s “proof” that she lived in Jordan during the time she said she was there in her book, a fraud? “As part of what she called her “proof” that she had lived in Jordan from 1973 to 2000, Khouri sent photocopied pages from a passport. However, a source who has seen the material told the Herald that the pages came not from Khouri’s passport, but from her husband, John Toliopoulos’s Greek passport.”

Author Norma Khouri is preparing to sue over claims about the authenticity of her best-selling book Forbidden Love. “Ms Khouri had been overseas collecting evidence to back her book after the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age published damning allegations last month that her so-called memoir of life and hardship in Jordan was a lie.” The book was pulled by publishers after the allegations.

250 pages of unpublished poems by Philip Larkin have been discovered in the library archives of the poet’s hometown. “Larkin, who died in 1985 aged 63, was chosen as the [UK’s] best-loved poet of the last 50 years in a 2003 survey by the Poetry Book Society.”

Some of Germany’s biggest news publishers are abandoning state sanctions that “reformed” the spelling of German several years ago. The publishers say that the spelling reforms were a “public disaster”, saying their introduction had confused Germans so much that “parents write differently from their children, children write differently from the authors whose works they read at school and authors write differently from the newspapers and magazines in which they are printed.”