Category: publishing

Vernon God Little, a novel by DBC Pierre (a pseudonym,) was listed at 1,124 on the UK’s bestseller lists two weeks ago. Then, Pierre was awarded the Man Booker Prize, and his satirical poke at American life shot up to 18th on the list. Not a bad upgrade, but Pierre still trails last year’s winner, Yann Martel, which remains at #10.

Seattle’s Bookfest saw attendance this drop to 9000 this year – less than half its regular number, after the festival instituted a $10 ticket fee. Now organizers are pondering whether this is the end for the 13-year-old event. “Bookfest’s continuing travails may seem surprising in a city that boasts one of the country’s most active book cultures. But Seattle’s prominence as a book town has been a blessing and a curse for Bookfest.”

Book Magazine is going out of business. “The magazine, which was founded in 1998, has lost more than $1 million this year and needed more cash. Barnes & Noble, which invested $4.2 million in the publication in 2000 and gave the operation a loan of $2.5 million a year later, has decided to make no further investment.” The magazine once had as many as 1.4 million subscribers, but only because B&N gave free first-year subscriptions. Lately its subscriber base was only 150,000.

Why are all these celebrities writing children’s books? “Everyone agreed there was lots of money and publicity to be made in kid lit. It was a time, after all, when a young British woman — who didn’t have a famous name when she started — wrote a series of books about a boy named Harry and, legend has it, became richer than Madonna, and richer, even, than the Queen of England.”

“The International Festival of Authors will be launched tonight in Toronto with a lavish party at Harbourfront Centre’s Premiere Dance Theatre, proof positive that it has survived the summer cataclysm of founder Greg Gatenby’s ouster. His successor, long-time festival manager Geoffrey Taylor, has cobbled together a 2003 festival that, like some literary fable, contains elements programmed by Gatenby and others by Taylor, with nobody able to tell which is which. That’s because neither party feels free to speak.”

“Online retailer Amazon has reported a quarterly profit for the first time outside of the key Christmas sales period. The company said free delivery offers and a new sporting goods store had helped boost revenue by 33%… The results – only the third time in its history Amazon has made a quarterly net profit – were slightly better than most Wall Street estimates.” Still, many industry observers believe that the bookselling supercompany is performing far below its potential, and analysts continue to warn that the company’s stock is dangerously overvalued.

“This is not an age of miracles. There are no contemporary giants at work in our midst. From the international premier league, the Man Booker shortlist, as reliable a guide as any, could only muster Margaret Atwood. Even in America, to which British readers often look for signs of a new dawn, it is hard to think of a single new novel which, in the past year or so, has registered more than a temporary frisson. Nothing wrong about this, of course. Cultural innovation tends to happen cyclically. The boom of the 1980s and 1990s was bound to be followed by a lull. Perhaps we are in a kind of literary Sargasso sea. It certainly feels that way this week. And yet, looking at the bigger picture, these are momentous years for book publishing.”

“Children’s literature has become such a powerful, dense mass that its gravity is sucking in everyone in sight. Madonna, whose last published work, Sex, involved explicit photographs, stream of consciousness pornography and rape fantasies, has followed it up with English Roses, a tale of four little girls jealous of their beautiful classmate, Binah. Peter Ackroyd, author of biographies of Sir Thomas More and William Blake, has embarked on explaining the world to ten year-olds in a series of children’s educational books for the publisher Dorling Kindersley, while the latest “blow-in” to the genre is Philip Kerr, the Scots thriller writer and author of A Philosophical Investigation and The Shot.”

Why do American textbooks often cost as little as half the price outside the US as they do at home? Publishers say prices are cheaper abroad because students in other countries can’t afford American prices. But some American students are catching on and buying their textbooks outside the US for deeply discounted prices. “To the despair of the textbook publishers who are still trying to block such sales, the reimporting of American texts from overseas has become far easier in recent years, thanks both to Internet sites that offer instant access to foreign book prices.”