Category: publishing

“Ciaran Carson, the Belfast writer who has spent his life pondering the perfect fry – bacon, eggs, sausage, black pudding with fadge [fried bread] and soda farls, cut in triangles, washed down with Punjana tea, and a cigarette – wins the Forward Prize, poetry’s answer to the Booker.”

The phenomenon known as “blogging” is creating a new breed of writer, and a new way for magazines and publishing houses to identify their future stars. “Back in the Dark Ages, starting out in journalism used to mean late nights covering school board meetings or writing features about the circus coming to town.” But many young writers are bypassing this early part of the typical journalistic career trajectory by getting themselves noticed with cheap and popular online repositories of their work.

Wal-Mart is the biggest single retailer of magazines’ newsstand sales, “accounting for what industry executives peg as at least 15% of all such sales. It holds that place despite some selectivity in choosing which magazines to stock in its stores.” That “selectivity” includes a “moral” standard that now has a big impact on how magazines are sold.

Booker favorite Monica Ali is the object of much speculation about her ethnicity. “The cult of the ethnic author is infuriating for the simple reason that it takes the focus away from the work. Who cares if Ali is ‘black’ or ‘white,’ or whether she was closer to her Mum or her Abba? People have been so wrapped up in Ali that few have bothered with critical examination of the book.”

Ten thousand new words made it into the new Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Editors are constantly monitoring language for new words to include. “If ‘cowboy up’ or other promising newcomers – at the moment, ‘blog’ and ‘senior moment’ are coming up fast on the outside – appear in a wide range of published sources over a sustained period of time, they could land a spot in the next edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary a decade or so from now. If not, they will meet the fate of such former up-and-comers as “vidiocy” and “cable-ready,” which now sit forlornly atop the citation files in brown cardboard boxes marked “rejected,” or old standbys like “long play,” which was dropped from the dictionary because CDs have supplanted long-playing records.”

Giant book seller Borders is hoping to convince publishers not to print prices on their books. “Bookselling is one of the few retail environments where the price is fixed by the supplier of the goods and not by the seller. When the retailer can control pricing, we have the opportunity to use price as a lever to accomplish all kinds of positive objectives that benefit the publishers, customers and the retailer.”

“In the troubled world of bookselling, Abebooks is one of the most astonishing success stories not only in Canada but in the world. Profitable from the day it started, it has become the world’s largest marketplace for used, rare and out-of-print books,With subsidiaries in Germany (Abebooks.de), Britain (Abebooks.co.uk) and France (Abebooks.fr), Abebooks.com is a virtual storehouse of more than 45 million books originating from 12,000 independent booksellers in 42 countries. Each day, it sells between 15,000 and 20,000 books — $134 million worth of books a year.”

Canada’s Giller Prize picks this year’s shortlist. “The jury read 97 submissions before making their selection. They picked Atwood for her futuristic Oryx And Crake (also on the Man Booker list) and Vassanji for The In-Between World Of Vikram Lall set in Kenya after it won independence. Also shortlisted is Ann-Marie MacDonald’s second novel The Way The Crow Flies, about murder and Cold War politics; The Island Walkers, a first novel by John Bemrose about workers organizing a union in an Ontario mill town; and Kilter: 55 Fictions by John Gould, a writer of extremely short stories who is director of the Victoria School Of Writing in Victoria, B.C.”

Most of the Giller shortlist was predictable, stuffed with the usual Canadian literary heavyweights. But the inclusion of virtually unknown author John Gould caught many people by surprise, including John Gould. “Gould’s second collection of short stories, was published by Turnstone Press of Manitoba in June, and the only major Canadian paper to review it so far was The Winnipeg Free Press, which said it offered a ‘multitude of pleasures.'”

“The market for books in Spanish, already among of the most promising in the publishing industry, is about to get a lot bigger. Barnes & Noble Inc., is adding thousands of new books to its Spanish-language sections… Books in all categories will be added, from self-help to literary fiction. And Barnesandnoble.com has started Libros en Espanol, an online service that includes author interviews, a best-seller list — topped by the Spanish edition of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s memoirs — and a guide to Barnes & Noble stores that sell works in Spanish.”