Category: publishing

“There is something oddly affecting about historical diary entries for the first day of January, so full of hope for a year that has long since vanished into the past, and often beginning the diary-keeping habit itself – for this was Woolf’s first entry in a diary she kept for another 26 years. In an age when social networking sites host perpetual updates on the mundane details of our lives, this unbending commitment to private writing feels heroic.”

“The percentage of adult Americans who read a book this fall fell to 75% from 78% a year ago, according to new survey findings by the Pew Research Center released December 27.”

“The exciting thing about digital books is that we actually get to test and price differently. We can even price on a weekly basis.”

“The true dinosaurs of the new age are authors. Once happily enclosed in the ‘stables’ of publishers willing to nurture and develop their talent, even if they never wrote a major bestseller, droves of so-called “mid-list” authors now find themselves roaming among the ever-present throng of wannabes flogging unpublished work in an indifferent market.”

A Canada Council spokesman noted that the main problem for our young writers now is “discoverability.” He suggested that our programs have done a fairly good job of supporting – for want of a better term “supply” – but we have left undone “demand.”

“In a British survey carried out in June, it was discovered that the average time since an adult wrote anything at all by hand was 41 days.”

“Published last October, a new Norwegian translation of the Bible has been one of the top 15 bestsellers in the country for 54 out of the last 56 weeks … The [Norwegian] Bible Society worked with Hebrew and Greek experts on the original text, and then involved literary writers … to perfect it.”

“The Booker judges went for Hilary Mantel, the Costa panel for Andrew Miller and the Orange team for Madeline Miller. But now the general public have spoken, and overwhelmingly voted for Fifty Shades of Grey as their book of 2012.”

“Dennis Lehane says he’ll name a character in his next book after whoever finds Tessa, who disappeared from the family’s home in Brookline, Mass., this week.”

“But if any patch of our culture can be said to be post-Christian, it is literature. Half a century after Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Reynolds Price and John Updike presented themselves as novelists with what O’Connor called ‘Christian convictions,’ their would-be successors are thin on the ground.”