Category: publishing

“Booker Prize winner DBC Pierre and three other Booker nominees are on the UK’s Whitbread book prize shortlist. Pierre’s Vernon God Little is chosen in the first novel category, while Mark Haddon, Shena Mackay and Barbara Trapido compete in the novel category.”

In the 100th anniversary of George Orwell’s birth, there is still much disagreement over the man and his work. “Few would assert that Orwell the man is personally guilty of all the obtuseness that he is invoked to vindicate. Equally untenable is the position that Orwell was not responsible for his life and work. He did things, he wrote things, that can’t be explained away as objects of misinterpretation.”

“For once even Madonna seems uncertain how her new vocation as scribe and teacher fits into or builds on her pop identity. The awkwardness is palpable in Madonna’s second children’s book, Mr. Peabody’s Apples, a cautionary tale about ‘the power of words’ based on a kabbalah fable. Madonna has always demonstrated great faith in the power of word of mouth, but she’s never been what you might call articulate—methinks ‘Express Yourself’ was not about writing sonnets. But Apples tests the power of words carefully chosen: not in the text, which is dull, uninspiring, and poorly punctuated, but in the marketing that surrounds it.”

Today, the Guinness Book of World Records will sell its 100 millionth copy. In honor of the occasion, Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten is making an attempt to get himself into the book with “the shortest bylined newspaper story ever written.” (For the record, his blatant suck-up is 1/56 the length of this blurb about it.)

McDonald’s is complaining to dictionary publisher Merriam Webster for adding a new word. The word is “mcjob”, defined as low-paying, dead-end work. “In an open letter to Merriam-Webster, McDonald’s CEO Jim Cantalupo said the term is “an inaccurate description of restaurant employment” and “a slap in the face to the 12 million men and women” who work in the restaurant industry.”

“Surely, the thinking goes, if a publisher is really “behind” a book, the house will pony up the money and the arrangements for an author’s soon-to-be-triumphant national tour.” Yet the reality is that book tours today usually aren’t worth the effort or expense…

“M.G. Vassanji, who won the first Giller Prize in 1994, won for the second time — for his novel The In-Between World Of Vikram Lall — as the most celebrated literary prize in the country marked its 10th anniversary last night. Vassanji, a former physicist who grew up in East Africa, is the first two-time winner of the $25,000 fiction prize… The other finalists were John Gould for Kilter: 55 Fictions and John Bemrose for his first novel The Island Walkers.”

Book sales were sharply up in September, the book trade’s best month in a long time. “Children’s hardcover category continued to show the strongest gains as sales in September increased 62.1%. For the first nine months of the year, children’s hardcover sales were up 56%. Adult hardcover, which has had an up-and-down year, posted a sales gain of 31.7% in September, although year-to-date sales were off 5.8%.”

“Literature now is in a dangerous zone where there seems to be little separation between the private act of writing and the public performance demanded of writers,” says author Michael Ondaatje. “Books are judged today as successful or not depending on sales and jury short lists. Meanwhile the critical climate, for all the media coverage of writers, is random and manic… And with awards, the one thing we have to admit about juries is that they can often choose the wrong books.”

JK Rowling aside, authors who focus their efforts on the youth market are not in what you would call a moneymaking line of work. Most have day jobs, and few ever manage to earn a full-time income from writing children’s books. But children’s authors take themselves and their genre quite seriously, and they put as much time and effort into crafting a 200-word picture book as other authors put into an 80,000-word novel.