Category: publishing

Although the American book-buying public is considerably larger that that of Great Britain, it buys fewer books about art than the British.”

Publishing mogul Felix Dennis is on a crusade for poetry (at least as he defines it). “In his newest chapter, the British multimillionaire is on a crusade to challenge the obscurity of modern poetry, by reclaiming old-fashioned values of rhyme and meter. His flair for marketing, and his bankroll, are giving him unusual success. His first volume of poetry, “A Glass Half Full” got barely any attention from serious reviewers but sold all 10,000 copies printed in Britain.

Book tours suck. With the demise of truly local TV in most major markets, authors making the rounds are forced to spend most of their days in bookstores, signing endless copies of their tomes for marked-up sale to the type of book junkie who likes that kind of thing. “A signed book [has quickly become] a sine qua non for collectors. The best comparison I can think of is to the dust jacket. Until 50 years ago, the book’s paper wrapper was there to draw attention in a store, and to protect the book until someone actually sat down and read it. At that time it was commonly discarded—which is why so few books with intact dust jackets survive from those early days.”

“Pulitzer Prize winner Lanford Wilson and fellow playwright Lynn Nottage were honored with literary awards announced Sunday by the PEN American Center.”

“Australia’s premier prize for writing, the Miles Franklin Literary Award, has arguably its strongest shortlist in recent history and its most lucrative prizemoney. The six novelists on the list include a Nobel Prize winner, a Booker Prize winner and a US National Book Award winner”.

“For obvious cultural and plainly practical reasons, it runs counter to logic that Spokane should have a better literary festival than Seattle does. The disparity between what Get Lit!’s organizers have to work with and what Bookfest’s organizers have to work with is staggering. Bookfest has name recognition, a 10-year history, and a $600,000 annual budget. Get Lit! has hardly any name recognition, a six-year history, and a $180,000 budget. And don’t forget that it takes place in Spokane. So how is it possible that Bookfest fails on so many levels where Get Lit! succeeds? How can it be that Spokane, a city so putatively inferior, does this book-festival thing so much better than we do?”

A new National Endowment for the Arts program aims to teach soldiers how to write. The program will involve some popular literary stars. “Workshops in fiction and non-fiction will be open to U.S. military personnel and their families, at bases across America and elsewhere in the world. The instructors will include poet Marilyn Nelson, as well as Tom Clancy, the author of best-selling technothrillers, and the award winning novelists and short story writers Bobbie Ann Mason and Tobias Wolff.”

New e-book readers are hitting the market. But “if the e-book is going to be a hit, a few things have to happen. First there has to be a good selection of material to read, and, for publishers, that means taking the risk that their best titles may wind up being distributed for free on the Internet. The recording industry has struggled with this problem in ways both overt and subtle: It has sued batches of pirate downloaders but also circulated its own falsely labeled music files intended to frustrate and dissuade would-be pirates.”

Some six million copies of The Da Vinci Code have been sold in the past year. Now there is a wave of books coming to refute the idea that “Christianity was founded on a cover-up — that the church has conspired for centuries to hide evidence that Jesus was a mere mortal, married Mary Magdalene and had children whose descendants live in France. More than 10 books are being released, most in April and May, with titles that promise to break, crack, unlock or decode “The Da Vinci Code.” Churches are offering pamphlets and study guides for readers who may have been prompted by the novel to question their faith. Large audiences are showing up for Da Vinci Code lectures and sermons.”

What is it about Lynne Truss’little book of grammar “Eats, Shoots & Leaves?” “The slim volume, subtitled The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, is storming bookshops in country after country, entrancing pedants everywhere from Saudi Arabia to South Korea. It has soared to number one in Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore and South Africa.”