Category: publishing

Aspiring writers everywhere have submited fiction to The New Yorker in hopes of getting published. Indeed, the magazine gets some 4000 unsolicited manuscripts every month. So will submissions to the slush pile have a shot at getting into the NYer under new fiction editor Deborah Treisman? “Someone who’s submitting themselves directly to the fiction editor probably isn’t all that savvy about publishing and probably not about writing either.” Hmmmn…guess not.

Why is Britain sliding into “imaginative impotence”? Novelist Ben Okri says its because the country’s writers have little status at home. “Our novelists and poets are unappreciated in their own land, beaten down with defeatism and saddled with an inferiority complex in comparison to their lionised American counterparts, the Nigerian-born author of The Famished Road claimed. ‘It is all very well celebrating the dead, but we are deaf to what living writers are saying, particularly about the war situation we now find ourselves in’.”

“Last week, the English-language version of Wikipedia, a free multilingual encyclopedia created entirely by volunteers on the Internet, published its 100,000th article. More than 37,000 articles populate the non-English editions. Unlike traditional encyclopedias, which are written and edited by professionals, Wikipedia is the result of work by thousands of volunteers. Anyone can contribute an article – or edit an existing one – at any time.”

In this age of corporate publishing monoliths and high-tech innovations such as on-demand publishing, is there any room left for those old, traditional leather-bound tomes that lined your grandfather’s library? Boston’s Harcourt Bindery thinks so, and its president is still running a highly profitable business by appealing to the indulgent side of the reading public. “In the world of handmade bookbindings in leather or cloth, tooled with gold, the line between classic and contemporary is hard to find. It’s all based… on ‘the economics of desire.'”

Why don’t more people read poetry? American Poet Laureate Billy Collins says he knows: “There’s a waiting audience out there that was frightened away by Modernist poetry in school. You feel alienated from your own language, which is unpleasant. There’s a syllogism at work here. The syllogism goes like this: I can read and understand English; this poem was written in English; I can’t understand this poem.”

Claire Tomalin wins the £30,000 Whitbread book of the year award for her biography of Samuel Pepys, “just as her husband Michael Frayn [also nominated] had predicted all along.”

American public libraries are in a funding crisis. “We can no longer afford to be silent about the drastic cuts forcing libraries to close early, lay off experienced staff, eliminate periodical and book budgets and reduce programs and services. Library services have gone up dramatically as the economic downturn has kicked in. That is creating a funding nightmare.”

How will cultural coverage change at the New York Times under its new Arts & Leisure section editor? “You have a special burden when you are writing about the arts because your subject is all about creativity and narrative skill and wit and style and deep meaning, so you have to incorporate all those elements in your coverage, whether it’s straight reporting or criticism or something in between. You have to be a little showbiz about it, and I don’t mean that in a cheap or superficial way. On the one hand you are certainly not going to be competing with your subject, but you shouldn’t pale beside it either.”

Every time a new Harry Potter book comes out, kids flock to libraries to check out copies. That will be more difficult this summer. “Because of budget cuts, libraries are struggling to have enough Potter books. In New York City, for example, the number of ordered copies has dropped from 956 for the last release, ‘Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,’ to 560 for the new one.”

Only two weeks after she was fired by Random House, Ann Godoff has has been hired by Penguin as the president and publisher of a new book imprint. Will she bring over some of the big authors she published at Random House? “These are people who I have a longstanding relationship with and I would be surprised if we were not able to work together again at some time.”