Category: publishing

The publisher of The Da Vinci Code says that in its first year the book has become “the bestselling adult novel of all time. Doubleday announced Thursday that after 53 printings – including 14 consecutive weeks in first place on The New York Times bestseller list – there are 6.8 million copies in print.”

Charles Holland has resigned as president of the Writers Guild of America’s Western branch after only two months on the job. Questions have persisted about “the accuracy of claims he made about his past.”

Blogging is no longer a mere blip on the cultural radar screen. In the last year, blog readership has nearly tripled, and bloggers focusing on everything from politics to culture to wartime survival have become fringe players in an increasingly crowded and diverse global media scene. Traditional media sources are predictably wary of bloggers, who have no obligation to follow traditional journalistic codes of conduct and who frequently bring strong biases to their work, but there’s no denying that the online journals are becoming increasingly powerful in the information-delivery game.

“The British Library is urging that the planned sale of 3,000 personal documents of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle this May by auction house Christie’s in the United Kingdom be halted until a dispute over the papers’ true owners has been resolved. The British Library has argued that some of the papers… actually belongs to them since Conan Doyle’s daughter Jean Conan Doyle bequeathed some of the documents to them when she died in 1997. Meanwhile, the Toronto Public Library is concerned that the Christie’s material… might actually have been part of a legacy from Conan Doyle’s daughter-in-law, Anna Conan Doyle, who left five items to the library’s Arthur Conan Doyle Collection, the largest publicly accessible collection of Conan Doyle items in the world.”

What will Sam Tanenhaus’ appointment as editor of the New York Times Book Review mean for the publication? “Tanenhaus said he would re-examine the Book Review’s approach to fiction, which he said had long been ‘the great conundrum of the Book Review.’ And while he has no plans to abandon fiction—contrary to the fears of many in the publishing world—his enthusiasms seem to lie more in nonfiction. ‘We’re living in really an exemplary age of nonfiction narrative, and to some extent nonfiction has taken over some of the earlier attributes of the novel, which is story-telling’.”

A strange phenomenon in Italy has caught the attention of publishers worldwide. At least one day a week, many Italian newspapers have begun offering discounted books of poetry and prose to anyone who buys the paper, and the promotion has been a rousing success. “The sales have helped raise circulation modestly and have given an unexpected infusion of cash to newspapers.” The strategy itself – using culture to sell the mainstream media – doesn’t seem to raise too many eyebrows in Italy, but in America, where consumers frequently have to be bribed to pick up a book, it seems like a complete reversal from the usual relationship between media types and artists.

The much-maligned borough of Queens, in New York City, is in need of a new poet laureate. “The winner must be someone who has lived in Queens for at least five years and has written, in English, ‘poetry inspired by the borough.'” The trouble is, in three months of searching, the borough has yet to find a single writer who fits that description.

“Irish literature, that glorious outpouring of eloquence and wit created by great men such as Jonathan Swift, William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Sean O’Casey and George Bernard Shaw has in our time fallen into mainly female hands.”

Lit Idol was conceived as a way to spark interest in writers (well, Pop Idol has done pretty well for ___ “Some 1,400 aspiring authors entered the Lit Idol contest. Five judges, including Curtis Brown’s Ali Gunn, narrowed the field to five finalists. About 900 people voted online, which counted 25 percent. The final tally was taken at the book fair Monday night, where about 150 publishers, agents and authors cast their votes after the finalists read.”

The literary version of Pop Idol was crowned in London this week. “Paul Cavanagh was named winner of Lit Idol, a contest designed to unearth Britain’s ‘hottest fiction talent’. Cavanagh, from Ontario, Canada, secures representation by the literary and media agency Curtis Brown after winning the contest, the first of its kind, with his work, entitled Northwest Passage. The 1,466 entries were asked to submit up to 10,000 words from the opening chapters of a novel and a two page synopsis when they entered the competition.”