Archive for the ‘publishers’ Category
Friday, November 6th, 2009
According to The Bookseller (via Beattie’s Book Blog) there’s been a massive slump in non-fiction hardback sales…
Could it be that everyone wants a little less reality after a year of battling recession? Or perhaps everyone finally got over the myriad of crappy celebrity memoirs that were being pumped out? Or maybe its a reality TV backlash?
Retailers are concerned about the performance of hardback non-fiction books in the run-up to Christmas, despite hardback fiction books “muscling” in to replace some of the lost revenue. Sales of this year’s top 10 non-fiction books in October were down 52% year on year, while sales of hardback fiction titles have soared by 90%.
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Monday, November 2nd, 2009
The complex and meaningful genre of chick lit has evolved a new theme - fat chick lit, according to The Observer.
I kid you not.
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Friday, October 23rd, 2009
The next J.K. Rowling is an Australian kitchen saleswoman says the Wall Street Journal. C’mon, journalists should know better than this. How many next J.K. Rowlings have we seen over the past five years?
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Thursday, October 1st, 2009
The cover of Sarah Palin’s blockbuster-that-hasn’t-even-been-released-yet has been unveiled and the AP story also reports the memoir isn’t published until November 17. Sales of red fleeces could go through the roof in the meantime.
Going Rogue is subtitled ‘An American Life’. Wait a minute, wasn’t Ronald Reagan’s autobiography called An American Life? Hang on, there are countless books called Something, something: An American Life. Usually the subject’s name is inserted. It would appear to be the title used when a publisher is in a real hurry to get a book in the shops or can’t think of anything particularly clever or catchy. Palin’s publisher gets zero out of 10 for originality but she is in the company of some famous names. I wonder if anything links Palin with all these other folks.
Mark Schorer wrote a biography called Sinclair Lewis: An American Life but Lewis, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature and criticised American capitalism, and Palin aren’t really on the same page.
Walter Isaacson wrote a biography called Benjamin Franklin: An American Life. I don’t think we can compare Palin to Franklin just yet. Let’s just say Palin and Franklin are linked by politics. Will we see Palin’s face on $100 bills in the future? Counterfeit bills perhaps? They’d use them in Alaska.
Isaacson also wrote Kissinger: An American Life. (How can you simply repeat the title of a previous book? That’s just lazy.) Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize but Palin did finish third in the 1984 Miss Alaska pageant.
Richard Schickel wrote a book called D.W. Griffith: An American Life. Griffith helped to bring cinema to the masses and is a legend in the entertainment industry. Well, let’s just say the Sarah Palin/Katie Couric sketch on Saturday Night Live was amusing.
William J Baker wrote a book called Jesse Owens: An American Life. Owens humiliated Hitler and the Nazis in Berlin with his athletic genius. Palin has…perhaps travelled abroad sometime during her life. Maybe.
The list goes on and on.
Tom Crouch edited a book called Charles A. Lindbergh: An American Life. Kate Buford wrote a book called Burt Lancaster: An American Life. There are other biographies but I hadn’t heard of the people who were being written about.
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Monday, September 28th, 2009
Nicholas Clee recounts the history of the paperback in The Times. He explains how Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin, didn’t invent them but popularised the format in the face of disbelief from the rest of the publishing industry. Back in 1935, publishers was resistant to change and stuck in the mud. And in 2009, it’s….oh.
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Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009
The Guardian was riffing on book subtitles this morning, and for good reason. Rarely do they add much that you couldn’t already figure out but they cause needless clutter on the front covers of an otherwise beautiful book. However as they rightly point out, with their William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies example, publishers are getting a little over zealous with their use..
Picture the scene at Faber & Faber. Carey’s manuscript has been delivered, and the book is in production. Then, at some routine sales meeting, the worm of doubt starts to creep in. Up pops some bright young spark. Excuse me, says the BYS, I’m not sure that some of our younger readers will actually know who William Golding is. I mean, he’s been, like, dead since 1993, and most of his books are out of print.
Consternation! All at once the majestic progress of a great literary biography from the teeming mind of its author to the tumultuous traffic of the marketplace is thrown into question. Perhaps the BYS is right. Perhaps no one does know who William Golding is any more. Suddenly Golding, the gilt-edged Faber stock, is the literary equivalent of a junk bond. Something must be done – and quickly. A subtitle must be applied like Band-Aid to the wounded cover art. And let’s have a subtitle, cries the marketing meeting, that advertises what’s on the tin. Thus is born “The man who etc”. Now at least the reps can hold their heads high when they go in to sell the book at Waterstone’s and Borders.
The Guardian are right on the mark with this but they missed one MAJOR point of contention that I have with the subtitle and that is the recent tendency for books to use the subtitle as a place to jam internet search keywords. Bloggers learnt long ago that no matter how important keywords are to your title you must never sacrifice readability for the sake of keywords. It seems though publishers are still ten years behind the search engine times.
For an example, one of the worst offenders is Fleeced: How Barack Obama, Media Mockery of Terrorist Threats, Liberals Who Want to Kill Talk Radio, the Do-Nothing Congress, Companies That Help Iran, and Washington Lobbyists for Foreign Governments Are Scamming Us … and What to Do About It by Dick Morris.
It boggles my mind, it really does.
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Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009
Stephenie Meyer has some new competition.
While vampire books have been the lifeblood of the publishing industry during the recession, their hot status is being challenged by the latest publishing trend - fallen angel books.
Striking while the iron is hot, first-time author Becca Fitzpatrick’s Hush-Hush, an angel-themed tale of forbidden love has had its release date bumped up to next month from next spring. Going Bovine, Libba Bray’s book featuring a punk angel was released this month as was The Unfinished Angel by Sharon Creech. And in time for the holiday shopping season, Fallen, the first in a planned four-book series by Lauren Kate, will come out in December.
“There’s still steam in vampires,” says Trevor Dayton, vice-president of Kids and Entertainment at Indigo Books. “But angels offer a more interesting palate, from the fallen all the way through guardian angels. They can be quirky and more human in their feelings.”
Who will win the battle of fangs vs. wings? I guess we’ll have to wait and see what the sales figures say…
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Thursday, September 10th, 2009
When posting major bestseller lists to the site, I am always amazed that James Patterson is pretty much consistently on the list. And not just that he’s on the list, but nearly always it seems to be yet another new book. In 30 years of writing, how does he do it?
Well whatever it is he does, he plans to keep on doing it. Patterson just signed a 17 book deal with Hachette Book Group. The deal runs through to 2012 - yes, that’s 17 books over the next 3 years, or just under 6 books a year. Impressive.
The books will run the gambit of Patterson’s popular series including Alex Cross, Michael Bennett and the Women’s Murder Club and six of the books will be for young readers.
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Thursday, September 3rd, 2009
Get set for bestsellers from Dan Brown (The Lost Symbol on Sept. 15), Mitch Albom (Have a Little Faith on Sept. 29) and Michael Crichton (Pirate Latitudes on Nov. 24). USA Today has the full story.
Now, I know I am supposed to be very positive about all things bookish but I’m completely underwhelmed about the books from these authors.
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Thursday, August 20th, 2009
Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Love, Pray, will publish a new book in January and it’s all about marriage, reports the NY Times. It’s going to be called Marriage, Argue, Divorce - actually, it’s going to be called Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage, which is a deeply rubbish title.
Ms. Gilbert, 40, said the book, which recounts how she came to marry the Brazilian-born Australian lover she met in Indonesia in “Eat, Pray, Love,” was not just a straightforward memoir of what happened and how she felt about it.
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Tuesday, August 18th, 2009
If you have never ‘travelled’ through Heathrow Airport then this news won’t interest you. Heathrow Airport is like the travel version of Hell. A) It’s actually bigger than Hell, B) Hell has better signage, C) The staff in Hell are politer, D) And the line-ups to get through security and into Hell are shorter.
Oh how I smiled when British Airways bumped me off a flight to Dusseldorf one time because it was overbooked. Oh how I giggled when I lost my car in a car park bigger than Berkshire. Oh how I grinned when my baggage ended up in Barcelona when I was going to New York.
I’ve always loved to hear how tourists and foreigners think Heathrow is in central London for them to discover it’s miles away in the suburbs (wait until they find out where Gatwick, amusingly called London Gatwick, is). In a previous job in the 1990s, I spent many a long hour marooned at Heathrow Airport while IRA bomb threats closed the whole place.
Anyway, Alain de Botton to going to write book about Heathrow Airport, says the Daily Telegraph, and I’ll probably read it.
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Thursday, August 13th, 2009
Penguin is to republish In Praise of Older Women by Hungarian emigré Stephen Vizinczey - a 1960s novel that’s been out-of-print for several decades reports the Bookseller.
The début novel—a coming-of-age tale about a young man’s sexual education following his departure from Hungary in 1956—was originally self-published in 1965 when the author was a writer and producer working for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. It went on to become the first and only self-published novel to top the bestseller lists in Canadian literary history.
The book was subsequently published in the US and in the UK, where Pan brought out a paperback in 1968. Around 600,000 copies were sold, with rave reviews coming from the likes of Margaret Drabble and Michael Frayn.
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Tuesday, August 11th, 2009
The before and after book covers for Justine Larbalestier's upcoming novel, Liar
Someone over at Bloomsbury made the ridiculous decision to use an image of a white girl with long straight hair on the cover of a book about an African-American girl with short “nappy” hair.
Liar, Justine Larbalestier’s first thriller, is written from the point-of-view of Micah, a compulsive liar and is scheduled for publication in October of this year.
Bloomsbury has apparently heard the outcry of the masses protesting the mismatch between book and cover and have now agreed to redesign the cover using an image that reflects the race of the book’s protagonist. (Shouldn’t that have been a no-brainer?!)
Larbalestier discusses the Liar book cover fiasco and the lack of author input in cover diesigns in general on her blog.
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Monday, August 10th, 2009
With a price tag of 100,000 Euros, La Dotta Mano probably won’t make the bestseller list but it has the distinction of being the most expensive new book available. And the New York Public Library has the distinction of receiving a copy which they will put on public display.
The book which depicts the life and work of Michelangelo takes six months the create and has a cover made of white marble from Michelangelo’s favorite quarry, in Carrara. Handmade red silk velvet from the same shop as the main stage curtains at The Metropolitan Opera and Milan’s Teatro Alla Scala covers the binding. The book is no light-weight either - it weighs in at 62 pounds.
“This book is meant as a provocation,” says Marilena Ferrari, the Italian publisher producing the book. “Books are being destroyed by the Internet, they’re losing their identity - it’s the modern, Internet version of burning books. Today, things last so little before they disappear. ”
Ferrari makes her point by offering the book with a 500-year warranty - the length of time Michelangelo’s work has lasted.
Display books have been donated to the New York Public Library, the Prado museum in Madrid and to the city of Bologna. Another 20 books have been purchased by private buyers around the world.
The book goes on display at the New York Public Library as of tomorrow and can be seen there until December 8.
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Monday, July 20th, 2009
On Thursday, Beth posted about a new book set to be published by Quirk called Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. It would seem that Beautiful Books is also jumping on the bandwagon and just signed a deal for a rejigged Jane Austen book. This time it’s an Austen meets Agatha Christie blend.
Murder at Mansfield Park, by Lynn Shepherd will be available for your reading pleasure in April 2010. Regarding her book, Shepherd said: “What intrigues me about Mansfield Park is how unlike Jane Austen it actually is. One of the reasons so many readers are dissatisfied with the novel Austen did write is that they find her heroine at best insipid, and at worst, downright irritating.”
Hence the change in some of the original characters; Unlike the original book, character Fanny Price is “ambitious, scheming and relentlessly focused”, while Mary Crawford “suffers great indignities from her mean neighbour”.
Also on the mash-up bandwagon is Hodder & Stoughton who announced last month that they signed a deal for Queen Victoria: Demon Hunter. Also along those lines, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies author, Seth Grahame-Smith has said that he’s working on Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. Watch out Buffy!
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