Category: publishing

“Ever since Amazon began ripping apart the book business, the largest houses have been looking for a way to fight back. If this merger is any indication, they have chosen an old-fashioned strategy: Size.”

“The challenge of writing a biography about a person who is still alive is that an author must first establish trust and a comfort level with a subject, to get access and a free flow of information. But the biographer is still expected to evaluate and expose unsparingly.”

The Iliad has been translated into dozens of languages, including more than 70 versions in English, over the past four centuries, by scholars, poets and even a British prime minister. Only one has the word braai, South African for barbecue.”

Colm Tóibín: “The novel is actually a secular space. The novel is not made for miracles. It’s made for ordeal. It’s made for material things. … This almost needed none of that. It needed a sense of grandeur that normally the novel doesn’t entertain. It’s all voice, but the voice is heightened.”

“Amazon’s share was up from 45% in the second quarter of 2010 and 48% in the second period of 2011, and the increase was aided by the release of the Kindle Fire.”

“Experts have estimated that the Random Penguin company, as outside observers clearly prefer it be called, would own about 25 per cent of the global market for books aimed at a general audience.”

“Two pieces released this fall were written late in life by the science fiction/fantasy master, who died in June at age 91.”

Sci-fi and crime (oh yes, we used to call them “mystery”) novels have busted out of their imposed genre confines, onto the literary landscape. Why hasn’t horror?

” A print publication remains the basic requirement for newspaper reviews, journals and major prize entries, despite the vast range of work available online and in ebooks. The whiff of vanity publishing still clings to independent publishing and the digital-only text.”