Category: publishing

The New Yorker magazine has been promising it’s on the verge of profitability for years. Now it finally looks like the magazine is in the black and is expected to announce a profit of $1 million. “Since Si Newhouse took over The New Yorker 17 years ago, he’s sustained losses estimated at more than $215 million – including nearly $40 million over the past five years alone.”

George Orwell’s estate is protesting the publication of a parody of the author’s 1940s book Animal Farm. “The contemporary setting can only trivialize the tragedy of Orwell’s mid-20th-century vision of totalitarianism. The clear references to 9/11 in the apocalyptic ending can only bring Orwell’s name into disrepute in the U.S.”

It’s an honor to be a finalist for the prestigious Whitbread Award. Less interesting is to be shortlisted for the Bad Sex in Fiction Award. Hari Kunzru’s The Impressionist has been named for both prizes. “The aim of the [Bad Sex] prize is ‘to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it’.”

You can’t be a writer without getting rejection letters. But, as any writer knows, it’s how you’re rejected by that publisher that really counts…

We make a fuss about adult bestsellers. But classic children’s books keep selling year after year. “Chris Van Allsburg’s The Polar Express, which has sold more than 4 million copies since 1985, magically reappears on the bestseller list every Christmas. The Poky Little Puppy has racked up sales of more than 14 million since 1942. Goodnight Moon (1947) is still going strong at 6 million. These are among the books that never seem to date or disappear.”

A writer enters a poetry competition, then is surprised at how bad the winning poem is. “What most of the other poets I met didn’t know is that the Famous Poets Society is a vanity publisher that heaps praise on even the worst poems to sell anthologies and convention tickets. The letter about the coveted Shakespeare trophy and poet-of-the-year medallion went to roughly 20,000 people, 500 of whom made the trek to Florida. Some of the poets, thinking this was a once-in-a-lifetime honor, paid for the trip with help from church groups, city councils or Rotary Club chapters.”

“The third time was the charm for Robert A. Caro, who finally won the nonfiction prize for the third volume of his majestic Lyndon B. Johnson biography, The Master of the Senate (Alfred A. Knopf). Caro was a finalist in 1975 and 1983. Other winners include: for fiction, Three Junes by Julia Glass; for young people’s literature, The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer; and for poetry, In the Next Galaxy by Ruth Stone.

Michael Kinsley ought to have known what was expected of him when he agreed to be a judge for this year’s National Book Awards. “It served me right when the books started rolling in and I realized with horror that I was actually expected to read them: 402 in all. Three FedEx men and our local UPS woman had been retired on full disability by the time all these packages were lugged up our front steps. If you lined up all these books end-to-end, you would just be putting off having to open one and get cracking. Who are you trying to kid?”

Art isn’t the only thing Nazis looted. Millions of books were also stolen by the National Socialists during their cultural raids. “These are books stemming from the private libraries of Jews, who either were forced to emigrate or deported, but also books from collections that were seized by the National Socialists in occupied regions.” Though many have been returned, too many have not, and the search for rightful owners has been slow.

A new website is putting thousands of children’s books from countries around the world online. And it’s free. “When it’s completed in about five years, the International Children’s Digital Library will hold about 10,000 books targeted at children aged three to 13. ‘There are places in the world where you’re going to find a computer way before you find a library or a book store’.”