Category: publishing

The New York Times has named Jodi Kantor as its new editor of the paper’s Sunday A&E section. Kanto comes from the online magazine Slate. “At Slate, Ms. Kantor, 27, had the assignment of developing ways to use the Internet to write about the arts, ranging from short, argumentative ‘Culturebox’ essays to online slideshows and a weekly e-mail exchange between professional therapists about developments on ‘The Sopranos.’ In the past, Ms. Kantor has contributed several pieces to The Times Book Review.”

Why did Peter Olson fire highly respected Ann Godoff from her perch as the president of the Random House Trade Group? “Mr. Olson’s motives are a matter of great consequence in the book business, where Bertelsmann’s Random House division is the largest consumer publisher in the world. He said his public condemnation of Ms. Godoff’s performance simply reflected honesty about a ruthless devotion to the bottom line: publishers who repeatedly fail to meet financial goals must go.” She failed, so she was out.

“Some 13,000 new novels are published each year, a 45 per cent increase since 1998. But the deluge conceals a depressing reality for new writers. The slush pile – the derogatory term for unsolicited manuscripts that land on publishers’ desks – has been all but abandoned in this efficient age of corporate accounting and executive accountability. Publishers no longer read novels by unknowns. Nor, increasingly, do literary agents. If you are a first-timer, your chances of getting into print are almost non-existent.” Enter a new form of literary life – literary development agencies that for a fee will read and critique your work and make recommendations…

Within days of the announcement that the new installment of Harry Potter would be published in June, Amazon reported 30,000 orders. Book stores plan to be open at midnight on the first day the book is sold, and already it’s a bestseller before a single page is printed. But this installment looks to be more than 1000 pages long. Isn’t that a little long for a kid’s book?

How is it that George Orwell is interpreted in such contradictory ways? “Legacy is not the best word to use to describe Orwell’s influence. He was a contradictory fellow: people read him in his own time in part because they didn’t know what he would think about an issue, and he often took positions against the conventional wisdom of even the political groups with which he was most closely allied. So it is impossible to know what Orwell would have said about anything. Yet people have been playing that game for fifty years.”

There were some changes in the types of books that made the bestseller lists in 2002. Of 120,000 books published last year, 421 books made the bestseller lists, “down a bit from the record set in 2001, when 433 books made a first landing. The previous high was 385 books, back in 2000. The only weekly list that had more players in 2002 was hardcover nonfiction, where a record 90 books made an appearance, breaking the record of 83 books set in 2001. There were 126 hardcover fiction first appearances last year, down just one from the record 127 in 2001.”

Why is Random House cutting up one of its most-praised divisions? The literary world is apalled. “Despite the many core strengths of the Random House Trade Group, they have been the only Random House, Inc. publishing division to consistently fall short of their profit targets. To ensure its publishing continuity, it has become imperative to improve the Random House Trade Group’s financial success.”

So is Frank Rich’s move from the New York Times’ Op-ed page to the A&E section a promotion or a demotion? “Knowing that I had no interest in running a department and never had,” Rich says, NYT editor Howell Raines said “he would exploit my ideas to advise him and a new culture editor.” Which makes Erlanger the manager and Rich, essentially kibitzing, a sort of “nanny-in-residence” to the former Berlin bureau chief, as one Times reporter put it.

“After 20 or more years of consolidation and commercialization, the book publishing industry and most of its components — authors, agents, publishers, marketers and retailers — have resigned themselves to the businesslike, margin-driven culture of the industry today. Even if some still pine for the gentlemanly days of gentlemen editors, most are too busy trying to get the attention of Oprah Winfrey or NBC’s ‘Today’ show to waste time on nostalgia.”

Do novelists have a responsibility to make their fiction true? That is – is it permissible to change historical dates of events to fit the stories you tell, even if they’re the historical dates or events aren’t “accurate”?