Category: publishing

“Approximately four out of every five books published lose money. Or five out of six, or six out of seven. Estimates vary, depending on how gloomy the CFO is the day you ask him and what kinds of shell games are being played in Accounting.”

“In 1984, when Eduardo J. Padrón, the president of Miami Dade College, asked Mitchell Kaplan, owner of the fledgling Books & Books shop in Coral Gables, to help him start a book fair in Miami’s downtown area, the preferred ZIP code for prostitutes and vagrants, quixotic was a polite term for their vision.”

“The principle of fair use has come under so much fire in recent years that it’s nice to see someone supporting the idea that there is a public benefit to the widespread availability of content. And the ruling doesn’t prevent anyone from suing in the future if Google oversteps its bounds.”

Declares Isaac Fitzgerald, “Why waste breath talking smack about something? You see it in so many old media-type places, the scathing takedown rip. … [The online books community] understand that about books, that it is something that people have worked incredibly hard on, and they respect that. The overwhelming online books community is a positive place.”

Eleanor Catton, who last month became the youngest Booker laureate ever for her murder mystery The Luminaries, has now won Canada’s $25,000 Governor-General’s Literary Award.

Luckily for the fiercely independent publisher, fans were willing to buy in, showing up with cash and “happy to back the best book publisher in America, period” sentiments. All told, more than 2,300 people had contributed as of Tuesday, four of them even opting for the $2,000 pledge which snags them every Fantagraphics book put out in 2014.

“So can contemporary writers — and nonwriters who are overwhelmed by email, i.e., pretty much everyone I know — take away any lessons from our literary ancestors’ less fraught relationship with correspondence?”

Sam Sacks: “The death of the novel [is] a doomsday pronouncement so commonly invoked that it often seems more like a reflex than a reasoned argument. … This tendency to project one’s own cynicism onto the books that failed to magically prevent it has become a little too frequent these days, and it needs challenging.”

Tim Parks: “Style, then, involves a meeting between arrangements inside the prose and expectations outside it. You can’t have a strong style without a community of readers able to recognize and appreciate its departures from the common usages they know. … Style is predicated on a strict relation to a specific readership and the more that readership is diluted or extended, particularly if it includes foreign-language readers, the more difficult it is for a text of any stylistic density to be successful.”