Category: publishing

More and more academics are getting into blogging. The online journals are a great way to trade information, opine on work in progress and interact with colleagues. “What blogging offers is immediacy. Compared to what we’re all used to in academia, where you submit something and then maybe when you have grandchildren you’ll hear whether it’s going to be published, the immediacy is something that we’re all unaccustomed to. I think a lot of people feel sort of like kids in a candy store.”

UK children have voted Anthony Horowitz’s “Skeleton Key” as the best children’s book of the year in the Red House Award. The award is the only publishing prize voted on by kids. “Around 25,000 children from all over the UK took part in judging this year through book groups organised by the Federation of Children’s Book Groups and via the award’s website. Previous winners of the award, now in its 23rd year, include Quentin Blake, Roald Dahl and JK Rowling.”

Some writers manage to attain reputations that outlive them. “But most of the time, death for poets is what it is for the rest of us – the beginning of that slow, inexorable process of being forgotten. Take the case of Robert Lowell. When he died, in 1977, Lowell was by far the most famous American poet of his era. The only figure of comparable renown was Allen Ginsberg, but Ginsberg was never embraced by the critics the way Lowell was; with his ohm-ing and his finger cymbals, Ginsberg had become a kind of self-caricature. Lowell was cool, but he was also dignified, and his reputation seemed secure and indelible. Within a couple of decades, though, he had all but fallen off the map.”

In Scotland, where the new Harry Potter book will hit shelves on Saturday, the postal service is concerned about the health of its carriers, who will be expected to deliver thousands of the books preordered from online booksellers in a single day. At issue is the unusual size of the fifth Potter tome – the UK edition runs 768 pages, and weighs in at a full kilogram. So what’s the solution? The Royal Mail may be forced to dispatch a special fleet of vans just to deliver Harry.

“There are many puzzles attached to James Joyce’s Ulysses, not the least of which is its reputation of being unreadable. It might be the greatest novel in the English language, so it goes, but who can read it? For those who can, there is no puzzle: Joyce’s account of one day in the life of his antihero, Leopold Bloom, is as spellbinding as the entire history of Odysseus’s journeys during the Trojan wars in Homer’s Odyssey, on which it is loosely modelled.”

Saddam wasn’t just a dictator, of course, he was a best-selling author whose books were greeted with rapturous reviews. Of course now that he’s out of power, the critics have reformed their judgment of Saddam’s literary efforts. “Ali Abdel-Amir, a writer, has pronounced his former leader?s novels ‘shallow’. The female characters are ‘always unfaithful and were either Kurds or Iranians’, he said.”

The last time a new Harry Potter book came out, an independent bookstore in Toronto got the jump on the sale date and began selling it early. That led to recriminations from the publisher, the lawyers got involved, and … tens of thousands of dollars and a few years later, the publisher wants to know if the bookstore wants a piece of the new Harry. Not a chance, says the bookstore owner. “The whole thing was totally ridiculous. You put an embargo on Saddam Hussein, not on children’s books.”

With 17,500 magazines published in the U.S. across countless genres and directed at dozens of different demographics, is it even possible to select a list of the top examples? The Chicago Tribune thinks so, and is out with a ranking of the top 50 magazines. #1 might surprise you, #2 probably won’t, and #3 will probably appreciate the thought, since its editor is currently a bit distracted by some pesky legal problems.

The New Yorker is out with its new special fiction issue. “After a year’s hiatus the ‘Début Fiction’ issue is back, and under Deborah Treisman’s watch it’s a gentler affair. Ms. Treisman has done away with the glammy author photos that were a hallmark of the buzzy Buford era…”

Hillary Clinton’s book has sold a record number of copies for a non-fiction book in its first day. ” Barnes and Noble, one of the US’s biggest book retailers, said the record was set after it sent out more than 40,000 copies to its stores and online customers in the first 24 hours. First-day sales for the memoirs, called Living History, were said to be more in keeping with best-selling fiction than a political memoir.”