Category: publishing

In the heyday of Oprah’s Book Club, the lucky author whose book was picked for the club hit the jackpot. After Oprah stopped her club, it seemed like every other TV show on the air started its own club. How have the clubs fared? They’re no Oprah, but they help – the sales increase for a selected book is “about 20 percent of what an Oprah would do.”

The magazine business is changing in a big way. The pace is speeding up, and new titles spout as older ones fall away. “Publishing has become like show biz. There is no longer the wait-and-see attitude that there used to be. If advertisers think something is connecting with consumers, they will jump right in.”

So the dependable crankers-outers of blockbuster bestsellers are seeing their book sales sag. Your Tom Clancys, your Stephen Kings, your John Grishams – “the old guard is visibly sagging. Like childbearing, delivering blockbusters every year takes it out of you. King’s latest reads suspiciously like a Christine retread (old cars with strange powers). Clancy (with his fantasia of papal assassination) bet the store on John Paul II dying, and the pontiff perversely didn’t (despite Cardinal Law’s best efforts). So, too, with Turow’s and Grisham’s legal thrillers. It’s all deja lu; been there, read that.”

So why are blockbuster sales down? “One explanation is that traditional bookstores are suffering because the big supermarket chains have moved into bookselling. Another is that all the big releases were bunched together to avoid the anniversary of 11 September, and with only so many book buyers to go round it was inevitable sales would drop. Price could also be a factor, with hardback novels in the US costing $25 or more – steep in these recessionary times.”

“The Cat in the Hat” transformed the nature of primary education and the nature of children’s books. But it wasn’t just a simple story that became phenomenally popular. It was a product of its time and made an impact on American education all out of proportion to its simplicity. Louis Menand parses the good doctor’s layers.

Lots of poetry, books on war, and biographies published this year. Some two dozen critics from the pages of The Observer tick off their favorite reads of 2002.

Historian Michael Bellesiles has been vilified by the political right, ostracized by his colleagues, and forced out of his professorship since charges of falsified research in his controversial book on America’s “gun culture” hit the front pages several months back. Now, Columbia University is stripping Bellesiles of the prestigious Bancroft Prize it awarded him when the book was originally published. For the record, Bellesiles continues to stand by his research.

Everyone agrees young writers need whatever help they can get. But really… for the older writer looking on (probably just as much in need of some help), this obsession with ferreting out the young is dispiriting. “Anyone who wanted seriously to improve the state of British writing could start by endowing half-a-dozen bursaries for pensioners and sponsoring a Best of British Senior Novelists award. There are other decent talents out there whose only fault is that they happen to be the wrong side of 50, scribbling on in undeserved obscurity.”

New Jersey’s governor tried to fire him, the state legislature has been debating ways to remove him. New Jersey lawmakers are angry at state poet laureate Amiri Baraka for his poem that “implies Israel had advance knowledge of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.” After trying to oust him, now legislators are working on a plan to abolish the post of poet laureate altogether…

Where does Hollywood get many of its ideas? Why from books of course. But the pipeline of movie-worthy books seems to have dried up. “For book scouts-those literary eyes and ears of A-list Hollywood bosses like Tom Hanks and producer Wendy Finerman, who plumb the publishing world for movie material-it’s tough going these days.”