Category: publishing

McClelland & Stewart, which used to bill itself as “the Canadian Publisher,” is selling off a small but prestigious press it bought three years ago. “If no buyer can be found, the rights to its backlist of some 60 titles — as well as future projects already in the works — will revert to McClelland & Stewart and MW&R’s core employees will lose their jobs. Non-fiction (MW&R’s specialty) has been an increasingly hard sell, and the company “blames the loss of book review space in newspapers and magazines, new book-unfriendly programming by the CBC, and fewer and more tough-minded booksellers for the failure of many good non-fiction books to find their intended audience.”

“Books for younger children about gay relationships are rare. A recent book “Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin” has caused a big debate in England. “Is homosexuality such a tricky subject for parents that they must tactfully broach it through books? I doubt it. I remember my older son asking when he was eight or nine, unprompted by any book, whether love could exist between people of the same sex. And when I said it could, he was curious, unjudgmental. Unlike adults, children accept the world as they find it.”

At more than 1000 pages, the new Harry Potter – due to hit stores in June – is already big. And it sports a big price too – $29 for a children’s book. The first print run will also be huge – 6.8 million copies are being printed. “J.K. Rowling’s previous Potter novel, ‘Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,’ came out in July 2000 with a first printing of 3.8 million. It sold out within 48 hours and now has over l6 million copies in print.”

American poets are becoming an unexpectedly vocal opponent of a war with Iraq. “On Wednesday, in the kind of coordinated grass-roots action unseen since the Vietnam era, poets and writers will stage more than 50 readings in bookstores, libraries, churches and meeting houses across the country, inspired by poet and Copper Canyon Press publisher Sam Hamill, who in an e-mail late last month asked 50 friends and colleagues to dedicate the day to ‘Poetry Against the War.’ How did one e-mail launch a nationwide protest movement that will stage events through the month and beyond?

A new generation of women running British literary publishing imprints is making a big success of them. “So what differentiates these women from the men who came before them? Perhaps the fact that they represent ‘joined-up’ publishing. The new hierarchies comprise editors who understand business, or business people who appreciate books. Unlike their predecessors, they can safely be introduced to an author without saying anything embarrassing.”

Amazon has decided to dump its TV and print advertising. “Last year, the company spent just under than $50 million on its TV campaign, mainly in big cities right before Christmas. But it ran ads most of last year in Minneapolis and Portland, Ore., to see whether advertising increased sales in those areas.” The results? The ads helped push business, but only a bit. Reducing prices was much more effective in driving sales…

The American book industry is buzzing about a review that ran in The New York Times Book Review January 26 of Whitewater figure (and Clinton friend) Susan McDougal’s new memoir. What’s amazing about the review, notes Gene Lyons, is that it’s quite obvious the reviewer never read the book. “Assuming minimal competence, Lowry simply cannot have done so.”

Young men in Ottawa public libraries are logging on to hard-core porn in full view of other library patrons. “The beleaguered librarians, feeling they have been left to deal with the problem by see-nothing, do-nothing managers, have filed grievances through the Canadian Union of Public Employees. And they’re not alone. Behind it lies a major philosophical dispute about what libraries are for. Management, whose views are reflected in the stance of the Canadian Library Association, see this as an intellectual-freedom issue. They are afraid that censoring even the worst pornography will start a slippery slope, and eventually all sorts of Internet content will be banned, including a good deal that is legitimate and essential.”

A new series of movies about writers raises the question: “Can famous writers work as fictional characters without the fictional characters getting in the way of their work? Dramas about authors are encouraged by the high sales of biographies and tend to concentrate on their lives rather than their writing. But this isn’t just because of a cultural preference for gossip over substance, fact above fiction. The process of turning thoughts into prose is passive and private, and the metaphors for it – balled-up foolscap, scrunched-up brows – have rightly become derided movie cliches.”

“Poets may rightly grumble that they aren’t read or paid enough, but in times of crisis it’s the poets, of all the artists in all countries, who suddenly seem the most important. Robert Lowell was a face of protest during the Vietnam war. Rupert Brooke and Robert Graves were among those who, writing from the trenches in World War I, best conveyed the anguish of war in what was not protest but patriotic poetry. So now, hardly surprisingly, we have our poets stepping forward to protest war, at what appears a fairly late moment. Why are poets the leading dissenters?”