Category: publishing

Heru Ptah, 23, didn’t have a publisher for his book, so he took to the New York subway, selling copies at $10 a pop. Then MTV Books bought the book and sold another 25,000…

“On the streets of Washington and across America, a war is being waged between popular novels and literary fiction. In this increasingly aliterate society – acrawl with people who can read but don’t – the battle for readers is a high-stakes campaign.” Publishers – and writers – are caught up in definitions of literary success…

When George Plimpton died last fall, many feared that the Paris Review, which Plimpton founded and edited, might not survive. But “now, after two months of soul-searching and rallying-round, The Paris Reviewintends to name a new editor next week. She is Brigid Hughes, the current managing editor.”

“Download fever sweeps the nation, audio stores are the hottest thing on the Internet, and this week’s hottest track is … ‘Hegemony or Survival,’ by Noam Chomsky? That’s right. The killa, must-have MP3 is thrown down by an MIT linguistics professor, at least if you spend time in the expanding universe of downloaded audiobooks.”

Why did Lynne Truss’s book on punctuation become such a major hit in the UK? “Among the legions of the surprised are the executives at her publishing house, Profile Books, who ordered a modest initial printing of 15,000 books, but now have 510,000 in print; and Ms. Truss’s friends and family.” But why is it such a phenomenon? “Maybe Ms. Truss has indeed touched a nerve of latent pedantry in a world in which, as she writes, increasing numbers of people ‘don’t know their apostrophe from their elbow’.”

“In the heydey of Scottish literary openness – the early to mid-nineteenth century – there was eager reciprocity between nations with, say, Walter Scott producing the first English translation of Goethe, along with other German ballads, and German literature in turn being influenced by Scott’s own fiction.” Sadly, that’s no longer true, and it’s very difficult to find translated literature on Scottish shelves.

Artists have always used materials at hand for their work. Now, “a few bold souls are trying to fashion art from electronic found objects. Their battle cry: From spam, poetry. Taking phrases from the deluge of junk mail as their raw material, they assemble the verbal detritus into poems.”

Fiction written by fans of already-existing literary characters is now a major phenomenon. “Despite a threat of legal notices and continued aloofness by the more upright literary community, this work is flourishing. Harry Potter-inspired fiction has even given rise to its own stars, some of whom rival Rowlings’s own talent for rococo prose and colossal word count. These exuberant HP writers are the latest heirs to a literary tradition known as fan fiction, or fanfic. The genre is staffed by fans of a specific book, television show or movie. Using established characters and surroundings, writers arm themselves with a healthy sense of creative entitlement and let it rip.”

“Just over five years ago, the London Review of Books began running personal advertisements, in the hope they would provide a platform for like-minded people to find love, or sex, or at least a suitable reading group. One might have expected the advertisements to be more literary and erudite than the norm, but no one was quite prepared for the first ad… Today, the back page of this learned journal is a compulsive read, a bizarre and often hilarious competition in wit and intellect and flat-out perversity.”

Creative Arts Books had a long and distinguished history of publishing. But when times turned tough, the owner made deals with authors promising much but delivering little. When the publisher finally declared business and went out of business, dozens of writers were left bilked out of effort and money they’d poured into their projects. Now they’re banding together trying to get back rights to their work.