At a recent public event at England’s Newnham College, Cambridge, novelist Margaret Drabble recounted “tense conversations” with her publishers that led her to believe she was “being dumbed down [because] … there’s an agenda of how it should be in the marketplace.” According to a…
Self-described publishing “visionary” and, er, agent Richard Curtis has not just a blog but, as he calls it, a “special blog,” and on today’s special entry he discusses the announcement by Random House that, as the still-developing new business of selling e-books continues to take…
Okay, so it’s not a recession, let alone a depression. So even if it were, the book business and its not-so-expensive distractions are fairly depression-proof (hey, think Grapes of Wrath!). So Random House imprint Doubleday just “laid off” 10 percent of its workforce, including some…
An Associated Press wire story on last month’s memorium to David Foster Wallace held by friends and colleagues is updated in The Guardian. It notes “One of the evening’s most powerful moments came when the novelist Donald Antrim told of receiving a telephone call a…
Danielle Steel, author of so many pulp novels that no one seems to know for sure how many she’s written (best guess: 92), and for which she was decorated by the French government as a Chevalier of Ordre des Arts et des Lettres — so…
While the mainstream settles into huge sighs of abrupt relief and not-overly explained declarations of the wondrousness of the Google Inc.-Association of American Publishers settlement (fairly well summarized in this New York Times report co-authored by Miguel Helft and the one and only Motoko Rich,…
During my brief reign over the slush pile at Verso, and a more prolonged period as Commissioning Editor at The Drawbridge, I have, reluctantly, become used to writing rejection letters. As an “emerging” writer myself, I know the pain of receiving them, so I tend…
It’s been a long, hard-fought battle in a terrain that’s new and alien to all concerned, but yesterday, Google Inc. agreed to pay $125 million to settle two different copyright lawsuits brought against it by authors and publishers over the company’s ongoing scanning of books…
“A public figure can never be an arist and no artist should ever become one unless, his work being done, he should choose to retire into public life,” Cyril Connolly once decreed. And, as Gerry Feehily goes on to observe in a commentary for The…
The McCain campaign continues to insist that he’s the soul of integrity, but according to a report by Keith Olberman on the Daily Kos blog, Joe Wurzelbacher, aka Joe the Plumber, has been peddling a book deal — not by getting an agent and approaching…
While it becomes, more and more, the dominant bookseller of our time, even as it simultaneously sinks deeper in the red every quarter, Amazon.com has long been seen by many in the book business as automating thuggishness (go ahead, try selling your POD book on…
“A hundred years ago, Marcel Proust lost money in the stock market, too,” observes Robert Hiferty. “And, as he would in the epic In Search of Lost Time, he converted the stuff of life into art” — specifically, a book of pastiches called The Lemoine…
He’s negotiated some of the biggest book deals in history, such as a reputed $12 million for Bill Clinton‘s doorstopper, My Life. His client list includes Hillary Clinton, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, Bob Woodward and Tony Blair. And, as D.D. Guttenplan reports in this Financial…
A New Jersey Court of Appeals has ruled that it was alright for the author of a biography of Donald Trump to protect his sources in reporting that Trump is full of shit when he calls himself a billionaire. According to an Associated Press wire…
Tatiana Boncompagni Hoover, the wife of an heir to the Hoover vacuum cleaner fortune, has sued her own sister for stealing the manuscript of a novel off her computer, claiming co-authorship, copyrighting it and posting excerpts. The novel, Hedge Fund Wives, was slated for publication…
Tony Hillerman, famed for his mystery novels set on the Navaho Indian reservation and featuring primarily Navaho characters, has died in Albuquerque, New Mexico of pulmonary failure. He was 83. As a New York Times obituary by the paper’s mystery book critic Marilyn Stasio notes,…
A day after he manipulated the New York City Council into striking down term limits — at a raucous City Hall session and with people screaming “Liar!”, angered over the fact that the limits had been twice endorsed by city-wide voter referendum, and the mayor…
Iain Sinclair is absolutely furious. And no wonder; the London chronicler’s forthcoming book, Hackney, That Rose Red Empire, has been struck off the council library list three months before publication and Sinclair, a long term resident of the East London borough, is forced to hold…
I discovered the other day that Katie Price is Britain’s best selling novelist. Katie, aka Jordan, is a glamour model whose assets floated her to prominence. Her novels and memoirs (is 3 at 30 too many?) are interchangeable; all feature the misadventures of a misunderstood…
Mega-media-mogul Rupert Murdoch has become “embarrassed” by his Fox News franchise and shares the “general liberal apoplexy” about the network, and in particular, “he barely pretends to hide his feelings about Bill O’Reilly,” the network’s star, says a forthcoming authorized biography of Murdoch by Vanity…
It’s a story dominating European literary circles, but has yet to reach theses shores: Is superagent Andrew Wylie the anti-Christ of the book business? Open Letter Press publisher Chad Post — the Zelig of the book business (isn’t that him in that candid photo standing…
With a woman, a black man, and the oldest candidate ever having all had a genuine chance to become president, the campaign of 2008 may have seemed like the realization of an American truism: Anyone can become president. Not so, says John R. MacArthur, the…
French President Nicolas Sarkozy is threatening to sue K & B Publishing for its satirical biography of him that comes equipped with a Sarkozy voodoo doll, according to a BBC News report. “Users can stick the pins into choice quotes from Mr Sarkozy which are…
Prominent on the long list of Book Industry Mysteries That You’re Not Allowed To Talk About, right after What Genius Thought Up Returns? and just before Who Decided Price Discounting Was Something Other Than Slow Death? is the mystery of How Does Amazon Stay In…
YouTube videos featuring actors, Face Book pages for fictional characters — book marketing and publicity is going to lots of new places these days. But the use of social networking sites to promote new fiction — as with recent trendy titles such as The Overnight…
Campaign biographies were invented to facilitate a major change in the course of American history: the moment when the very notion of a political campaign for president was concieved. It occurred when military hero Andrew Jackson decided to run against incumbent John Quincy Adams. Up…
So what would it sound like if the gentle, warmhearted chronicler of that down-home stretch of middle America known as Lake Woebegone turned his mellow, compassionate gaze upon the current presidential race? “One stink bomb after another, and now Gov. Palin,” snaps Garrison Keillor, in…
A woman in Halsey, Oregon, doesn’t like a book her 13-year-old son checked out of the local library and so has announced she will burn it. According to this report from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Taffey Anderson says the problem is that the book, The Book…
Of all the stories coming out of this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair, the one the American press seems to have overlooked entirely is the one about Nobel Prize-winner Orhan Pamuk‘s inspiring opening address. But as widely noted in the rest of the world, such as…
Our newest poet laureate, Kay Ryan, gave her inaugural reading at the Library of Congress last Thursday, and you can watch it here. If you’ve ever wondered what previous awards she’s won, Librarian of Congress James Billington notes that she’s won too many to list,…
