Category: publishing

“You’re an impoverished author with a third novel coming out. The broadsheets aren’t reviewing it, your literary agent isn’t taking your calls and you’re paying for your own book launch… Well you could try FedEx-ing it to Brad and Jen. Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston are major players in the literary world.” And of course, the close connections to the type of folks who can quickly turn even a mediocre novel into a $100 million blockbuster film don’t hurt, either.

The Onion, America’s satirical newspaper known for pushing the comedy envelope and treading the knife edge of good taste, is expanding. The paper, which is based in Manhattan these days after years in Wisconsin, recently introduced a local edition for the Minneapolis/St. Paul market, (it already publishes local editions fro Chicago, Madison, Boulder, Denver, and New York) and plans other offshoots in large cities around the country. The Onion currently has print circulation of around 320,000 and its web site gets a whopping 3.6 million unique visitors every month.

“Fark.com, one of the most popular blogs on the Net, has been accused of selling out — joining a growing list of new-media outfits willing to bend old-media rules. According to a veteran new-media publisher, Fark has been selling preferential placement of story links without informing its readers… There is a growing trend in publishing, online and off, in which the walls between advertising and editorial are breaking down. Last year, Ford paid British novelist Carole Matthews to feature the Ford Fiesta prominently in her next two novels. And Forbes.com recently began including paid-for keyword links in news and feature stories.”

Fans of popular children’s book author Margaret Peterson Haddix have been contacting her recently to ask if she is aware that filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan has appropriated the plot of one of her novels for his new suspense film. In fact, the plotline of The Village, which grossed more than $50 million in its opening weekend, is srikingly similar to that of Haddix’s 1995 book, Running Out Of Time. Shyamalan was also accused of stealing the plot of his 2002 film, Signs, from a Pennsylvania screenwriter.

The New York Times has been publishing fiction this summer alongside its news reports. (No Jayson Blair jokes, please.) Specifically, the Times is trying to single-handedly bring back the phenomenon of the serialized novel, printing entire well-known works of literature in its pages over the course of a week or two. (The serials are apparently running only in New York editions of the paper.) The paper is waiting to review the circulation numbers before deciding whether to continue with the program.

Minneapolis/St. Paul’s alternative weekly paper turns 25 this month, and what better way to celebrate than to go back through the years and rip your own critics to shreds? The current issue of City Pages features a piece in which the paper’s various art, music, and theater critics apologize for specific wrongheaded judgments they’ve made over the years.

“James Truman, editorial director of Condé Nast, has developed a prototype of a luxe and glossy fine arts magazine that he hopes to begin publishing in 2006. The magazine is designed, he said, to bring visual art, or at least a magazine about it, to the masses.” The philosophy of the as-yet untitled magazine will be to treat art pieces as just one more type of desirable object to be coveted by consumers. Rather than adopt the high-minded intellectual tone of most art magazines, Truman plans on using his publication to tell what he calls “curated stories” about art and the people who create it.

“The Montreal publisher of a controversial book about serial killer Karla Homolka is suing Random House of Canada for alleged copyright infringement.”

The National Endowment for the Arts’ new writing program for soldiers “seeks to address a seeming cultural paradox. War stories, after all, occupy one of literature’s longest, weightiest shelves, and American fighting men, from Ulysses S. Grant to Anthony Swofford, have set down their battle-forged memoirs, but these days the military and literary worlds barely overlap. The program, called ‘Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience,’ is aimed at preserving stories from the battlegrounds of Iraq and Afghanistan. The endowment expects to hold 20 or so workshops at American military installations between now and next spring.”

The Da Vinci Code is a worldwide publishing phenomenon. “Around the world it has sold in excess of 10m, nearly 8m of those in hard covers, making it the best-selling hardback novel ever. Why is this book such a smash? I suspect the triumph of the Code tells a larger story. First, it confirms that people are prepared to believe the worst of the church – even in America, the most “churched” society in the world…”