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The U.K.-based Man Booker International Prize released its longlist to book publishers of 13 finalists for the 2011 award yesterday, but only 12 care to be considered; John Le Carré rejected the nod, offering up an explanation that amounts to little more than “I prefer not to.” Included on the list are three American authors–Anne Tyler, Philip Roth, and Marilynne Robinson–and for the first time, two Chinese writers, Wang Anyi and Su Tong. The award, worth $94,000, is given every other year based on an author’s entire body of work. With christian book publishers informed, the winner will be awarded at the Sydney Writers’ Festival on May 18 and will be feted on June 28 in London.
The assembly of Gujarat, a western Indian state, voted unanimously to ban Pulitzer Prize-winning author Joseph Lelyveld’s new book Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India. The controversy began over early reviews out of the U.S. and U.K. highlighting passages insinuating that Gandhi had a possible intimate relationship with a German man named Hermann Kallenbach. More bans are pending in India, where homosexuality was illegal until 2009.
Simon & Schuster announced it would publish a book of James Garner’s memoir The Garner Files on Nov. 8, 2011. In a press release, Garner saiid, “I’ve avoided writing a book until now because I feel like I’m really pretty average and I didn’t think anyone would care about my life.”
The most difficult readers to reach are, without question, teenage boys–especially teenage boys from poor, urban neighborhoods. But Paul Langan, a 39-year-old white man from the suburbs of New Jersey, has found a way to tap into the market of “black and Latino urban middle and high school students who are struggling readers.” The Bluford series covers topics like fighting, bullies, and drug dealing, which for many of the young readers constitutes “everyday-life situations.”
Gun- and baby-toting woman of action Angelina Jolie will be getting the comic book treatment. It sounds like it’ll be a realistic, biographical take on her life, but Jolie as a full-fledged action hero sounds so much more interesting. Radioactive lips? Brood of toddler sidekicks? Yes, please.
How do writers deal with bad reviews? Not always well, especially when blogging is involved.
What would you give for this stunning reader’s retreat, a library in the woods? It makes me feel cozy and contemplative just looking at it. Not to mention really, really rich.
Rubbishing those who hail the digital age as the end for books, book publishers industry players and best-selling authors on Saturday hailed a new dawn for publishing, with India’s voracious readers at its forefront.
Book sales have been squeezed in recent years by e-books and the huge success of Amazon.Com’s Kindle reader, but India’s booming book publishers market is proof of the physical book’s staying power, said participants at Asia’s largest literary event, the DSC Jaipur Literary Festival.
“You read something on Twitter and you know it is ephemeral,” said Patrick French, a best-selling historian and biographer who has written extensively on Asia. “Yet the book is a solid thing. The book endures.”
Regional language novelists and poets rubbed shoulders with Nobel laureates and Booker Prize winners at the seventh festival to be held in the historical pink-tinged city of Jaipur, the capital of India’s northwestern Rajasthan state.
Hundreds of book lovers attended a debate on the fate of printed books in the sun-drenched grounds of a former palace as part of the free five-day event.
“The idea of the book dying comes up all the time. It’s wrong. I think this is a wonderful time for books, to enlarge the audience of the book and draw in more readers,” said John Makinson, Chairman and CEO of the Penguin Group of publishers.
“Books matter more in India than anywhere else we publish them,” added Makinson, whose Penguin Group is one of the world’s largest English-language book publishers.
While book sales slip in most western countries, the non-academic book market in India is currently growing at a rate of 15 to 18 percent annually, as rapid economic growth swells literacy rates and adds millions to the middle class every year.
At the festival, schoolchildren from around the country chased their authorly heroes through the lunch queues to get autographs on newly-purchased books.
Makinson noted that the pressure on physical bookshops in countries like the United States — where bookseller Borders Group Inc is in talks to secure a $500 million credit line — doesn’t exist in India, adding that books have a key role to play in Indian society.
“In India books define and create the social conversation amongst christian book publishers and children’s book publishers. In China, the books that sell well are self-improvement titles. Popular books in India are of explanations, explaining the world. The inquisitive nature of India is unique.”
Indian critic Sunil Sethi, who presents India’s most popular television program on books, said the digital age presented an opportunity, rather than a threat, for printed matter. “Even before I finish my show, the authors are on Twitter to say they are on TV talking about their book. Technology is merging things, but the book is still at the center,” Sethi said.
French agreed that technology, if well-managed, could actually help win books new friends and wider sales.
“Digital e-books have created a space for discussion. Books now have websites and forums, and so reading books on electronic devices has created communities and interaction,” he said.
Nearly 50,000 writers, critics, publishers and fans are expected to attend the festival.
Gayle Shanks has fought a sometimes frightening battle against national book chains (mainly in the business to sell and publish a book) for 36 years, so one might expect the independent Tempe bookseller would be overjoyed at news that the goliath Borders is in dire straights.
But that would be like judging a book by its cover.
Sure, Shanks figures the chain’s death would lure its former customers to her Changing Hands store in Tempe.
Yet she sees peril for bookstores, for readers and for the nation’s culture.
Michigan-based Borders is the nation’s second-largest book retailer and its large debts to vendors could take down small book publishers and hurt the surviving ones, Shanks said. That could limit what even the most independent-minded bookseller could offer adventuresome readers.
“I think my biggest concern, really, is what it means for the book publishing world and ultimately what it means for diversity and finding a marketplace that will be diminished,” Shanks said. “We will have fewer authors finding publishers for their books. We’ll find fewer books being published and that might in fact mean that only huge, commercially viable authors will find their books going to market. That worries me.”
Borders has stopped payments to some children’s book publishers, who have in turn cut off shipments of new merchandise. Published reports include speculation that Borders will be forced to reorganize under bankruptcy protection or that its declining sales, market share and stock value will doom it.
Border’s troubles became more apparent after the holiday season, Shanks noted, when it reported disappointing sales even as most retailers and rival Barnes & Noble saw small to large improvements. Amazon.com would likely benefit from a Borders’ failure, but Shanks finds that troubling, too.
“That’s just the best-sellers and one level below,” said Shanks, the store’s co-owner and book buyer. “Unless you know exactly what you want to read, it takes the adventure and the curiosity factor out of what’s involved with finding a new author.”
Borders was the chain that mostly directly challenged Changing Hands, a store Shanks helped found in 1974 in downtown Tempe. Her initial 500-square-foot store expanded multiple times on Mill Avenue, where, roughly a decade ago, Borders opened a 25,000-square-foot store three blocks from Changing Hands.
The independent store opened a second location on McClintock Drive and Guadalupe Road in 1998, closing the downtown one in 2000. Borders later shuttered the downtown store.
Shanks believes Borders’ woes are a typical example of a chain not keeping up with e-book publishing industry trends — especially electronic readers — and not a sign books are obsolete. She’s seen an interest in people reading, whether its books on paper or on e-readers. Even on a weekday afternoon, Shanks said, Changing Hands can be full of customers.
“We really have been doing fine and 2010 was close to a record year for us,” Shanks said.
Borders and Barnes & Noble overbuilt, she said, adding it’s impossible for them to sell the number of books required to pay rent on all the square footage they occupy in the Valley.
A Borders failure would leave three empty stores in the East Valley, at Superstition Springs Mall in Mesa, at a mostly empty shopping center east of Fiesta Mall in Mesa and at the Chandler Pavilions. By comparison, Barnes & Noble operates five East Valley stores.
It’s unclear who would win Borders’ customers – especially from
Last month, for the first time, The Bookseller trade magazine’s annual forward-gazing FutureBook conference was sold out. The previous year, only 150 people from the world of book publishing, writing and technology had gathered to lecture and gossip about where the book goes next. Last month, 400 crammed the halls. Book Publishers, it seems, have finally clicked when it comes to the digital world. But where are all the writers?
Kate Pullinger used to be a regular key speaker at such meetings. An acclaimed christian book publishers‘ author in the traditional, codex format of books, Pullinger is currently longlisted for the Impac Dublin Literary Award and the winner of the Canadian Governor General’s Award for Fiction for her book The Mistress of Nothing, the story a Victorian lady and her maid who set sail down the Nile. She has mastered the codex form, with six novels to her name, but over the past 10 years she has also been pushing the boundaries of digital fiction. “But I haven’t been to many conferences in the past three years,” she tells me. “I was almost always the only writer there, and I got tired of that.”
In the past year, publishers have leapt at the chance of finding ways to make the digital book work. Taking advantage of the interactivity of platforms such as e-readers, iPads and smartphones, they have found considerable success with non-fiction. Jamie Oliver’s “20 Minute Meals” has been a chart-topper among the apps. Stephen Fry released a version of his ebook publishing autobiography as an app, “MyFry”, for the iPhone, which invites users to scroll around a dial to access different segments of his life. Another runaway success has been “The Elements” by Theodore Gray, a science book that was adapted for the iPad and provides in-depth descriptions and images of every element in the periodic table. Since Touch Press launched it in digital form in April, it has sold 160,000 copies and generated $2m in revenue.
But fiction has not found the transition to anything other than the e-book format so easy. “Fiction seems not to be grasping the potential,” says Pullinger. “Many of the apps and enhanced e-books are just codex books with videos and notes shovelled in – like DVDs with their added extras.”
Pullinger started working in online fiction with the TrAce Online Writing Centre, based at Nottingham Trent University, a decade ago. “I was asked to teach online creative-story writing,” she says. “Back in 2001, this was new to me. I only really used the internet for booking flights and sending emails. But after teaching the course, I found that it’s a useful environment for focusing on the text, and that I had a kind of affinity for it.”
Since then she has been experimenting, often in collaboration with the electronic artist Chris Joseph, on several major projects. “Inanimate Alice”, which came out in 2005, is a sequence of stories about a young girl who exists between real and digital worlds. The written narrative is deliberately minimalist and built into a rich audio-visual experience. Then came “Flight Paths”, begun in 2007, which Pullinger describes as a “networked novel”. It was inspired by the news story of an illegal immigrant who had stowed away behind the landing wheel of an aircraft, only to fall to Earth in suburban London. In addition to her own resulting short story, Pullinger invited others to contribute their own takes on the theme. “The third phase of ‘Flight Paths’ is now about to come together in digital and print,&rdq
McClelland & Stewart Book Publisher (Fiction) and Executive Vice President Ellen Seligman announced Michael Ondaatje’s highly anticipated new novel, The Cat’s Table, will go on sale on August 30, 2011. It will be published in the fall in the US by Knopf and in the UK by Jonathan Cape.
“I am completely blown away by Michael Ondaatje’s stunning and original new novel,” says Seligman. “The Cat’s Table is a surprise and a sheer delight — a brilliantly told story, with unforgettable moments and characters the reader comes to care deeply about. It is perhaps Ondaatje’s most thrilling and moving novel to date.”
The Cat’s Table has received enthusiastic and exited responses as well from Ondaatje’s book publishers around the world including:
“The Cat’s Table is written with wisdom and poignancy, filled with the superlative storytelling we’ve come to expect from Michael Ondaatje. I was completely moved by the way he inhabits the voice of his narrator and conjures the innocence of childhood and the challenges of making one’s home in a strange land. The novel resonates on many levels.” – Sonny Mehta, Chairman and Editor in Chief, Knopf Publishing Group
“What a book it is! In my view, the best thing Ondaatje has done.” – Robin Robertson, Jonathan Cape UK
“It is so beautiful, the way it unfolds and becomes more and more complex and becomes many types of a novel — memoir, Bildungsroman, adventure novel and something like 1001 Nights…” – Anna Leube, Hanser, Germany
Michael Ondaatje is the author of four previous novels, a memoir, a nonfiction book on film, and several books of poetry. His most recent novel Divisadero won the 2007 Governor General’s Literary Award and was a finalist for the Giller Prize. The English Patient won the Booker Prize and was an Academy Award-winning film; Anil’s Ghost won the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, the Giller Prize, and the Prix Médicis. Born in Sri Lanka, Ondaatje now lives in Toronto.
Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver has sold more than $150million worth of recipe books, second only to Harry Potter author JK Rowling according to his book publishers.
The 35-year-old has topped the bookselling charts with this 30-Minute Meals cookery book, selling 80,000 copies last week.
Jamie’s 30-Minute Meals is selling almost 80,000 copies a week on the back of a television series and strong promotion by Sainsbury’s, which Oliver endorses.
Tom Weldon, managing director of Jamie’s book publisher Penguin General Books, said: ‘It’s perfect for this moment. People are time-rushed and in this recession want to cook more at home.
‘The reason Jamie has done so well over the past decade is he’s obsessed with every single detail in his books.’
Rowling, 45, and Oliver are the only British authors to have passed the $150 million mark, although Delia Smith has come close, selling more than $100 million worth of recipe books.
Neil Denny, editor-in-chief of the Bookseller, the trade magazine, said: ‘There are three reasons for the success of 30-Minute Meals. It’s very zeitgeist. It’s been heavily backed by Sainsbury’s who have a huge market share of the sales. And the accompanying TV show was on every day when mums were making meals for their kids.’
Sarah Palin’s book publishers have been forced to file a lawsuit after pages of her upcoming memoir were leaked.
HarperCollins Book Publishers filed legal papers on Friday against the company Gawker Media after they refused to remove pages from Palin’s second book America By Heart: Reflections On Family, Faith And Flag from their website.
on Saturday, a judge issued a temporary restraining order against Gawker, saying it had to take down the pages — which it did, removing the images and commentary relating to them — most shockingly, perhaps, without making any further comment.
Publisher HarperCollins — which is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., which also owns Fox News, the network that employs Palin as a commentator — brought the suit in New York district court on Friday.
HarperCollins Publishers spokeswoman Tina Andreadis told the Wall Street Journal Saturday evening, “We see the ruling as a victory. Gawker shouldn’t have posted this. It’s a copyright infringement. We are defending our author and our publication.”
But is it infringement? What harm was there in bringing Palin’s pages to light last week? The book is not in draft form — in fact, it’s completely finished and will be in bookstores on Tuesday. Barring some kind of strange machinations, every page that Gawker put on its website will be available for anyone interested to see in just a few days.
The hearing about Gawker’s posting of Sarah Palin’s “America by Heart” is scheduled for Nov. 30.
According to The AP, a judge has now ordered Gawker to remove the offending pages until the issue has been resolved in court.
They had uploaded around 20 pages from the book to their site ahead of its publication date of November 23.
The lawsuit against Gawker will begin in a hearing on November 30.
Are apps marketing devices for authors and books, or a new revenue stream? This is just one of many questions book publishing companies are asking as they develop apps from their content. When PW approached large and midsize publishers to find out about their app programs, we discovered that many houses don’t have “programs” per se. Questions loom about what content is best suited for apps—though overwhelmingly it seems that reference and children’s are sweet spots—and how best to look at apps. Should apps be created with the goal of bringing in money independent of books, or as tools to market books and authors? And how do publishers define an app? Many said it was simply anything that could be sold in the App Store. This may soon change, as rumors have swelled that Apple will add restrictions on what can be sold in its App Store. (Currently, a book publisher can adapt an e-book and sell it in the App Store even if it doesn’t feature any content added to the original.) Right now, though, publishers are dipping their feet into this market slowly and, with the exception of a few houses, cautiously.
Random House
Random House has done dozens of apps so far. According to Nina von Moltke, v-p of digital publishing development, RH decides what books might make good apps by looking “at specific categories, brands, and titles for which an experience beyond e-book would provide a significant benefit.” The most obvious, not surprisingly, are children’s, lifestyle, travel, reference, and, occasionally, celebrity books. Asked how RH differentiates between an app and an enhanced e-book, von Moltke said an enhanced e-book could be an app, since anything sold in the App Store is considered an app. Speaking to notable apps in the pipeline, von Moltke said there are more apps to come from Fodor’s—there are currently five Fodor’s apps, mostly city guides, available in the App Store—as well as apps based on children’s books, including two from the house’s Schwartz & Wade imprint: Princess Baby and How Rocket Learned to Read. (In September RH announced a partnership with the digital media agency Smashing Ideas to create apps for its children’s titles.) RH is also prepping a bartender app and a number of language apps.
Simon & Schuster
Simon & Schuster’s chief digital officer, Ellie Hirschhorn, said S&S is “learning a ton” from its app development. “Apps should be an extension of the book,” she said, so S&S apps mostly contain excerpts or links to books, whereas e-books “should be sold in e-bookstores,” due to differences in how apps and e-books are priced, marketed, and discovered by customers. S&S’s first app was the 365 Crossword Puzzles app, which was recently revamped for the iPad; since then Hirschhorn estimates S&S has done two or three dozen more apps in broad categories: apps for fans (such as Jodi Picoult’s, which lets readers follow the author through social networks, blogs, and other media); utilities (cookbook apps, The Klingon Dictionary, and Pimsleur 2Go language apps); and games (Bro to Go, based on The Bro Code). S&S does much of the front-end design for the user experience in-house, but usually outsources the back-end coding. Prices range from free for the Picoult to $11.99 for The Klingon Dictionary.
Sourcebooks
The difference between enhanced e-books and an app is simple, Sourcebooks CEO Dominique Raccah, said: “It’s interactivity; if the reader can do stuff with the content, it’s an app.” Earlier this year, at the Tools of Change conference in New York, Raccah outlined an ambitious plan to develop apps based on the Sourcebooks list, citing mo
The parents of Madeleine McCann are writing a book about their daughter’s disappearance and their so-far unsuccessful efforts to trace her.
A deal has been signed with book publishers Transworld which is an imprint of Random House UK. Few details have been revealed but Kate and Gerry McCann are receiving a “substantial” advance and “enhanced royalties” which gives the couple a bigger than normal share of the profits from sales.
The book is already part-written. Kate McCann said it had been a difficult decision but the money it raised would go directly to the McCanns’ official fund to look for Madeleine.
“My reason for writing is simple – to give an account of the truth,” she said. “With the depletion of Madeleine’s Fund, it is a decision that has virtually been taken out of our hands.”
Hopeful
Gerry McCann said he was hopeful the publication would help the ongoing efforts to find out what had happened to their daughter, who went missing from their holiday apartment in the Portugese resort of Praia da Luz on 3 May 2007, as her parents dined with friends nearby.
“Our hope is that it may prompt those who have relevant information – knowingly or not – to come forward and share it with our team. Somebody holds that key piece of the jigsaw.”
The book publisher, Bill Scott-Kerr of Transworld, is more than happy with the deal and sees the book – expected to retail at £20 – as a big seller.
“It is an enormous privilege to be publishing this book” he said. “We are so pleased to be joining Kate and Gerry McCann in the Find Madeleine campaign.”
There are also expected to be newspaper serialisations around the publication date, believed to be 28 April 2011 which would coincide with the fourth anniversary of Madeleine’s disappearance.
The official Portuguese inquiry was formally shelved in July 2008, although private detectives employed by the McCanns have continued the search.
Ted Sorensen, who died a week ago, was the strategist and political speech writer behind John F. Kennedy in his successful campaign for the American presidency in 1960 — a triumph that owed much to Sorensen’s book publisher talents as a phrasemaker, and one that set the standard for modern oratory.
Sorensen’s 14-minute inaugural address for Kennedy famously called for self-sacrifice and civic engagement — “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country” — and promised to spare no cost in defending American interests worldwide.
Among Kennedy’s inner circle working in the West Wing of the White House, Sorensen (as special counsel) was the youngest, but he ranked just below the president’s brother Bobby. Such was the closeness of Sorensen’s collaboration with JFK on some of his most memorable speeches that no one was quite certain who wrote what.
The glamorous, wealthy politician from Massachusetts and his diffident aide from the Midwest made an odd but compatible pair. In 1960 Time magazine described Sorensen as “a sober, deadly earnest, self-effacing man with a blue steel brain.” But, as Sorensen himself noted, both he and Kennedy had a wry sense of humour, a dislike of hypocrisy, a love of books and a high-minded regard for public life.
In October 1962, Sorensen applied himself to the growing crisis in Cuba, as the United States and the Soviet Union stood on the brink of nuclear war over Soviet missiles sited there.
Kennedy ordered Sorensen and Bobby Kennedy, the administration’s attorney general, to draft a letter to the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, who had sent a series of conflicting messages, first conciliatory, then belligerent.
Their carefully worded response — which ignored Khrushchev’s harsher statements and offered a concession involving American weapons in Turkey — was critical in persuading the Soviets to withdraw their missiles from Cuba, averting war between the superpowers. Sorensen considered this his greatest achievement.
Although acclaimed as “the poet of Camelot” (as the Kennedy administration was known), Sorensen never claimed exclusive authorship of these rolling cadences, describing speechwriting within Kennedy’s White House as highly collaborative — with JFK a constant source of suggestions of his own.
Theodore Chaikin Sorensen was born into what he called a Danish-Russian-Jewish Unitarian family on May 8, 1928 in Lincoln, Nebraska, where his father was a progressive Republican state attorney general. After graduating from Lincoln High School in 1945, he studied law at the University of Nebraska.
In 1952, when he was 24, he joined Kennedy’s staff. The newly elected senator for Massachusetts reportedly gave Sorensen two short interviews a day or two apart before hiring him. The pair hit it off immediately.
In January 1960, Kennedy announced his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination and, with Sorensen, went on to wage one of the most successful political campaigns in American history.
Sorensen thrived on pressure and, as Kennedy was delivering one speech, he would often be found writing the next. As “chief of staff for ideas,” Sorensen became one of the most prominent and influential figures in the political landscape during JFK’s brief presidency.
After Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, Sorensen worked as an international lawyer, and numbered the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat among his clients. He remained involved in book publishing, politics, joining Bobby Kennedy’s presidential campaign in 1968 and running unsuccessfully for the
