Category: publishing

“Why determine the season via autumn leaves or diminishing daylight? When the best-seller list is as packed with brand names as it is now, it becomes its own kind of calendar.”

Alcoholism is not an entertaining disease, and let no one claim that it is. “But drunks do make great literary characters. They are quest-driven and tragic, marked for a destiny they cannot escape, and full of passion… Like all great literary subjects, drinking is transformative; it changes the metabolism of the alcoholic, even the very structure of his cells. It allows for carnivalesque abandon and provides the novelist with a catalyst for visionary truth… The best writing about alcoholics manages to explore the degradation the disease inflicts while respecting the dignity of its victim.”

Amazon has apparently scaled back its nifty new search engine which allowed surfers to search texts within books. “The program had allowed users to print for free each excerpt and a few pages surrounding it. That capability led critics, chief among them the Authors Guild, to protest that Web users would forgo buying books from which they could print large chunks of copyrighted material.”

Canada’s Giller Prize for literature is ten years old. In a short time it has gained stature as a major literary prize that has elevated Canadian writers. “This year’s 10th anniversary edition of the Giller Prize will be broadcast live Tuesday in prime time on the CBC national network in addition to its regular home on Book TV, the first time it has had that level of exposure. Authors who have won the Giller have become internationally celebrated, and those on the short lists have gone from marginal to famous figures.”

Philip Marchand has not been a fan of literary prizes. But he has to admit: “Like it or not, our literary culture has discovered that it can’t do without prizes. And the success of the Giller Prize, in this country, has been remarkable — at least success measured in terms of public awareness. How has this come to pass? One explanation is television.”

Asne Seierstad story “The Bookseller of Kabul” about Shah Mohammed Rais and his family, is a big bestseller. But the subject of her book is furious, and not sitting still without complaining. “In a nightmare scenario for any writer, her one-time ally has not only hired a high-flying lawyer, but flown out to Oslo to rally support. After welcoming Seierstad into his home after the fall of the Taliban, Rais says he is outraged by his portrayal as a tyrannical traditionalist bent on imprisoning women, including his teenage second wife.”

Amazon’s new searchable book service has been widely praised. But Google looks like it’s trying to get into the act too. “For the last few months, Google has been courting publishers, hoping to convince them to turn over book content that could be used in Google’s database, say people close to the discussions. How that content would be presented is not clear, but it would likely not be provided in excerpted passages to customers, as it is on Amazon. Instead, the material would go into a database that Google spiders would comb, then turning up relevant links. If a user clicks through, they would be sent to a separate page that contains a book abstract and the opportunity to buy the title.”

The British Library is going to begin archiving websites. “The archive will comprise selective ‘harvesting’ from the 2.9 million sites that have ‘co.uk’ suffixes. This new legislation will now mean that a vital part of the nation’s published heritage will be safe.”

Los Angeles’ literary scene is getting increasing attention. Indy writers there “don’t discuss six-figure advances and movie deals. Their artistic touchstones include pop music, art, drugs, sex, and what seems to be a prevalently southern California curiosity about murder. Most important, many of L.A.’s contingent of talented underground writers are influenced by, if not graduated from, the art programs at this city’s increasingly prestigious art schools – Cal Arts, Otis College of Art and Design, and the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. The writing coming from these programs is something like the art – there’s a tendency to use frank, bold, anti-intellectual forms to filter raw, sometimes lurid, content.”

It’s no secret that evangelical Christianity has a strong hold on America these days, and religion in general is said to be of great importance to most Americans. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the publishing industry is looking for new ways to tap the market. One of the more successful strategies thus far has been the combining of tangentially religious subject matter with existing literary sub-genres, such as the post-feminist grouping known as “chick lit.” Think Bridget Jones without all the drinking and carousing.