Category: publishing

“The organisers of the Booker Prize for Fiction have launched a new £60,000 international literature award. The Man Booker International Prize will be handed out every two years from the middle of 2005… The existing Booker Prize is open to citizens of the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland. The new global prize can be won by an author of any nationality, providing his or her work is available in the English language.”

“In an ever-tougher business environment for independent booksellers, the town of St. Johnsbury, Mass., population 7,571 as of 2000, is offering startup money and a break on rent to a qualified person willing to open a bookstore downtown. The word is out in the book trade, and St. Johnsbury officials say calls are coming in.”

A Princeton student has figured out a formula to determine what gets a story chosen to be published in the New Yorker magazine. She “read 442 stories printed in The New Yorker from Oct. 5, 1992, to Sept. 17, 2001, and built a substantial database. She then constructed a series of rococo mathematical tests to discern, among other things, whether certain fiction editors at the magazine had a specific impact on the type of fiction that was published, the sex of authors and the race of characters. The study was long on statistics and short on epiphanies: one main conclusion was that male editors generally publish male authors who write about male characters who are supported by female characters.”

“Bookfest’s board of directors has decided to discontinue Seattle’s embattled fall festival of books and authors. The festival’s office will close June 30, and its two remaining staff members will be let go. Many factors contributed to the festival’s demise, but the final blow was the requirement to come up with the $220,000 needed to mount this year’s festival, which would have been its 10th. Bookfest successfully eliminated its deficit — as much as $60,000 — during the last two years, but faced the prospect of going back into debt if it attempted to produce another edition of the festival.”

Circulation of broadsheet newspapers is shrinking. Some say readers are put off by the unwieldy size of the pages, so some newspapers are reinventing in smaller formats. “At Britain’s Independent, total circulation has risen by about 15% from last year thanks to its small edition. This month it dropped its broadsheet edition altogether. As many as 30 papers from around the world are thinking about doing something similar.” Can the key to circulation health really be that simple?

Prolific children’s book author William Mayne recently confessed to having sexually abused little girls who came to visit him. “Will anyone, having read such details, want to read stories by Mayne again? Or want their children to read them? Even if they are innocent as can be, his stories for younger readers, about a bobbed, big-eyed seven-year-old called Netta, can hardly escape being contaminated by the interest we now understand he took in eight-year-olds. Then again, a book cannot be judged by its author.”

JK Rowling has given her blessing to the flourishing genre of web fan fiction that uses her characters in new stories. “Thousands of fans have written their own stories based on the world of Harry Potter, which are published on the net. The release of the third Potter movie is expected to boost the already hugely-popular fan fiction phenomenon.”

Indigo Books & Music, the publishing giant that has been bankrolling the Canadian industry’s lawsuit against the Amazon.ca, has abruptly pulled the plug on the suit, withdrawing its support and cutting off funding. Industry officials say that they simply cannot afford to continue the legal battle against Amazon, which is being allowed to operate its site without complying with rules governing foreign-owned bookstores, because it has no ground-based Canadian presence.

The setup seems perfect for a novel: a tony New England family with seven children, living in a mansion by the sea; a mother who dies in a car crash; a father’s descent into alcoholism and eventual death from cancer; and the various sufferings and melodramas of the children who must go through life contending with each other and their family history. But the Minot family is no fictional invention. The seven children do indeed exist, and no fewer than three of them have now published supposedly fictional books based heavily on their own lives. The latest to publish is George Minot, spinning a dark tale of murder and alcoholism, and, as has become a habit with the Minots, some of the author’s siblings are furious.

The new magazine Walrus was supposed to reinvigorate the Canadian periodical scene. But the mag’s first editor quit after only a few months, and now, new editor Paul Wilson and managing editor Gillian Burnett are quitting as well, saying that they can’t work with ultra-hands-on Walrus publisher Ken Alexander.