Category: publishing

Police fear that the 7000+ copies of the new Harry Potter book stolen from a trailer earlier this week “will be illicitly distributed throughout the north-west, jeopardising the launch. The books will have a high currency among criminals because Harry Potter fans have had to wait almost three years to read the latest adventures of the boy wizard.”

Thousands of copies of the new Harry Potter book were stolen from a trailer in Northern England. “A trailer containing around £1m worth of books was stolen from Newton-le-Willows trading estate on Merseyside at around 10.30pm on Sunday. The trailer was recovered yesterday in Salford, Greater Manchester, minus its load.”

In yet another bizarre story of Potter-mania, a Montreal woman somehow managed to purchase a copy of the new Harry Potter book from her local Wal-Mart this week. The book is scheduled to go on sale Saturday. Since the woman was only planning to read the book, and not, y’know, post it on a web site or something, the publisher just laughed it off as an innocent mistake. HA! No, of course they didn’t. In fact, Raincoast Books, the Canadian distributor of the Potter series, offered the woman $5000 if she would return the illicit copy. She said that Raincoast could have her copy back once she’s finished reading it.

“The bulging bookshelf has become a tradition in most British households – a sort of intellectual trophy cabinet, each spine potentially revealing something about the owner. For some, the bigger the bookshelf, the bigger the brain. Research has shown that few of us ever look at our old books, but at the same time would never dream of throwing them out.”

Gay bookstores were one of the hallmarks of the first twenty years of the Gay Rights movement. So why are so many of them dying off now that homosexuality is more widely accepted in mainstream society? “In the past 10 years, well over half of the GLBT bookstores in the country have closed, leaving about 40 to carry on a tradition that was crucial to gay liberation. There is no gay bookstore in Chicago; only three survive in New York City.” The reality may be that such niche stores have become victims of the success of the movement that spawned them. In an era when gay-themed titles are enthusiastically stocked by national chains and mainstream independents alike, it’s difficult for the niche stores to hold on to their clientele.

The last Harry Potter book threw the publishing business into turmoil when a second printing of 3 million copies was ordered within 48 hours of the book’s release. “Some publishers were as much as six weeks late taking delivery on their fall lineups because the printers who make their books were too busy producing ‘Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.’ Even though it has an all-time record first U.S. printing of 8.5 million copies, ‘Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix’ is not expected to upset the publishing business as its predecessor did. Book sales overall are low so there is more press capacity available, and because the book is overdue, North American printers have had more time to figure out how to handle it.”

Chick Lit is a big thing. But is there a male equivalent? Not really, writes Steve Almond. “The last time I checked, 70 percent of readers were women, and I’d put the percentage who read relationship fiction (the broader province of Chick/Dick lit) to be in the high 90s. Almost the entire crowd at the panel on Singledom was female. And the vast majority of my own readers — from what I can tell — are women. This is because women are more likely to struggle, in a conscious way, with the problems that beset romantic relationships, to talk about these problems, and to seek out writing that makes them feel less alone with the psychic tumult of affairs of the heart.”

What’s the next great idea in magazines, asks Russ Smith? Obituaries. It’s a winner, he writes. Everyone’s interested in dead people. “It’s long been a truism that the most popular features of a daily newspaper are the sports pages, comics and death notices. In many cases, people over 40 turn to the day’s obituaries first, not only for morbid fascination, but because they recognize the names of famous men and women or, on a local level, neighbors and friends. Obviously, there wouldn’t be a shortage of material for such an enterprise.”

The release of the new Harry Potter installment is as big as publishing gets. “The launch of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, at midnight on Friday, is going to make the launch of an Apollo rocket look like a shamefaced sidling-away. It is the largest such event in bookselling history. Bloomsbury, JK Rowling’s publisher, is not saying exactly how big the first print run is going to be, but it has been estimated at two million in this country, 8.5 million in the States.”