Category: publishing

Britain’s National Archive is busy putting thousands of historical documents online. “Shakespeare’s will reveals how he bequeathed his second-best bed to his wife, Anne Hathaway. Wills from Jane Austen, Sir Christopher Wren and Horatio Nelson – the latter’s with a personal diary – can also be viewed at DocumentsOnline. The documents span six centuries of British history from 1384 to 1858.”

A trove of Arthur Conan Doyle’s papers – including a record of the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes – has been uncovered. “The archive, which contains more than 3,000 items, including letters, notes, manuscripts and artefacts, disappeared more than 40 years ago during legal disputes over his estate.”

JK Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix has won this year’s WH Smith People’s Choice Book Award. “Some 148,000 readers cast votes via book stores, the internet and libraries to select winners in eight categories.”

A new report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism reports that the news business is in the midst of enormously challenging changes. “The news business is ‘in the middle of an epochal transformation, as momentous probably as the invention of the telegraph or television,’ the report says. ‘Journalism is not becoming irrelevant. It is becoming more complex’.”

The American magazine business is in trouble. In the most recent quarter, seventy percent of magazines were down in newsstand sales. “The most horrible set of numbers I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been tracking [circulation] for 25 years.”

“Ask a literary agent about the prospect of selling Canadian fiction at an international book fair, and what would you expect? A gleam in the eye as they talk about the chance to hustle in the big leagues? An adrenalin-fuelled soliloquy as they praise new discoveries? A dazzling grin as they recall the Champagne downed to celebrate the deals they’ve brokered? Try suicide metaphors.”

Things have changed in the publishing business in the past decade. “That’s the real cultural revolution: the shift in the balance of power from the publisher to the bookseller. Thatcherism, which made the market king, empowered the bookseller and put the publisher on the defensive. For the past 10 years at least, most published writers in Britain and America have enjoyed a golden age of remuneration, publicity and, yes, sales scarcely dreamed of before. In 2004, the author’s lot, though far from ideal, is better than it has ever been.”

Politiucal books are hot. But who reads them, and do they change anyone’s political opinions? A researcher tracked buyers and discovered there is little overlapping of political ideologies among readers. In other words, conservatives buy conservative books and liberals buy liberal books…

What accounts for the popularity of recent books on grammar? “They are tapping into a widespread feeling that English is being debased by things such as computers, especially email, which have led some to do away with punctuation altogether. ‘Text messaging, of course, has just about wrecked the English language’.”

A new study of the UK publishing business reports that the industry is overwhelmingly white. “It says that nearly half those questioned felt they worked in a white, middle-class ghetto whose employees were drawn from a small ethnic pool. The findings in the survey, which was conducted by the Arts Council and the Bookseller, are supported by several senior publishing executives who say that nothing will change until recruiters look beyond Oxford and Cambridge.”