Category: words

Reversing five years of growth, employment for writers on TV and movie projects dropped last year. Total employment of writers was down 2.7 percent to 4,419. – Inside.com

Is Amazon.com in trouble? Some analysts think so. “Can you really imagine a world without Amazon? No purchase circles, an Amazon invention where you can learn that folks in Shepherdstown are reading ‘Magical Mushrooms, Mischievous Molds’ and readers in Upper Marlboro prefer ‘A Setback Is a Setup for a Comeback’? What would life be like for obsessive authors without hourly updates on bestseller lists? And collaborative filtering software telling us that customers who ordered ‘Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire’ are also clamoring for Seamus Heaney’s translation of ‘Beowulf’?” – Washington Post

“Now sprouting at every portal, community forum and chat room near you, online book discussions have been lauded as the ”stickiest” thing since grape Bubble Yum.” But, are they really any more popular than the old coffee-klatch variety? Are they really getting people to read more? And, most importantly to publishers, is all the marketing of online book clubs doing anything to boost sales? – Inside.com

By the time he died in 1992, author Alex Haley had amassed boxes of research for another novel in the tradition of his “Roots” epic. His estate went searching for a writer to take over the project, and came up with a novelist who writes in the supernatural suspense genre and is a former Miami Herald feature writer. – Chicago Tribune

The president of McClelland & Stewart, donates 75 percent of the company’s shares to the University of Toronto. He says he made the extraordinary donation in order to avoid a sale that would see the legendary publishing house – one of Canada’s largest publishers – broken up into smaller pieces. – CBC

• AN ASTONISHING THING TO DO: Gift has “astonished, befuddled and ultimately impressed the Canadian publishing community.” – National Post (Canada)
• MANEUVERING BEHIND THE GIFT: For years, regulations have made it legally impossible for a foreign firm to buy majority control of a Canadian-owned publishing company. The theory is that Canadian culture flourishes best in institutions owned by Canadians, and M&S has been the spectacular proof: Many foreign firms operate here, but not one of them has ever approached the contribution of M&S to Canadian literature. The new arrangement does not violate the rules, but it uniquely allows Random House to play a part in the company’s future. That opens the deal to criticism that it violates the spirit though not the letter of the regulations. – National Post (Canada)

Canadian bookseller Chapters has yanked this year’s Robertson Davies Prize for books. The man who won, believing the judges wanted a woman to win, submitted his entry under a pseudonym. When the Chapters people found out, they pulled the prize because they say they were “elaborately and deliberately misled by the author.” – CBC

Simon & Schuster has an idea about how to get into the digital world in a big way – find articles, novellas and speeches of between 15,000 and 40,000 words by its writers and authors to be e-published on the web. One catch, though – the giant book publisher wants to pay $1,000 a piece. ”I’m trying not to be outraged,” says one well-known S&S author who was invited to e-publish. But, this writer admits, the $1,000 offer is insulting, and far less than most established authors get for magazine articles that are usually much shorter. – Inside.com

Several recent magazine articles get converted into lucrative book contracts. There is, of course, nothing new about turning articles into books. But “the question really is whether these concepts would have as quickly and as lucratively become books had they not been prominent magazine articles and instead were peddled only through the traditional method of authors’ agents submitting written, often lengthily, book proposals to editors and publishers.” – New York Times

It’s estimated that only about one percent of the graduates of creative writing programs go on to have successful writing careers. This despite a thriving business to educate writers. “Writers have become dependent on academies for the peace and funds with which to pursue their art. Once in the university, they have had to do something in return for the funds, and what they have done is to set up programs in creative writing. At last count there were more than 300 such programs granting more than 1,000 degrees a year. “Together they’ve probably turned out 75,000 official ‘writers.'” – The Idler