What do Hard Times, Middlemarch, Crime and Punishment, War and Peace, and many more of the greatest novels ever published have in common?
When they were first published, they were not published as books. They were published serially.
Our new feature links to interesting blogs or articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on in the book world:
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What do Hard Times, Middlemarch, Crime and Punishment, War and Peace, and many more of the greatest novels ever published have in common?
When they were first published, they were not published as books. They were published serially.
People unfamiliar with the history of something tend to assume that what they've always known is the way things have always been. That's why most people think the 20th-century model of publishing, which favoured the publication of novels in book rather than serial format (I call it the "Doorstopper Model"), is a "traditional" form of publishing. It's not. It's also why we've more or less abandoned the basic ontological distinction between the novel and the book. They are not the same thing. The Brothers Karamazov (also published serially) is a novel; like all novels, it's a book only in a secondary sense, if and when it happens to be produced that way.
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Children's books are boosting the global publishing industry. Here's what you need to know to capitalize on this opportunity.
Despite modest growth or even decline in adult book sales in many countries, children's books are selling well around the world. Why is this and what can publishers do to maximize this opportunity? At the second Nielsen Children's Book Summit in New York on Wednesday, these (and many other) questions fueled the day-long discussion.
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More literary authors, from David Mitchell to Jennifer Egan, are turning to Twitter to publish fiction, a form that mimics both poetry and serialization.
But can a serious work of fiction emerge from a series of tweets? Professor of Digital Humanities at University College London, Melissa Terras, told The Atlantic that all literary forms come with their own forms of constraint, and "Twitter is simply the latest restriction." "It's the role of literature to play with forms," she said. "In poetry you have very rigid forms, and people have to operate within those constraints." (Think about Shakespeare's sonnets for example.) "With Twitter fiction, people are taking the limitation of 140 characters and doing something creative. It's a slightly different art form and it creates a different experience of fiction."
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Lauren Parsons of Legend Press says that when acquiring a debut author for a UK list, one needs to believe the book can compete with the established brands.
The word "debut" can be the ultimate taboo in the UK market. Debuts propose risk, the unknown, and if a reader has never heard of the author before, how on earth are we going to sell them the book? It's probably best to stick to a winning formula. Keep churning out formulaic fiction, a lot of similar looking books and similar, predictable plot lines.
There is, of course, a need to make money, but we shouldn't shy away from a challenge. Major publishers pride themselves on having at least one fiction debut each year and they are proud of it. One. Maybe two. Out of hundreds of titles published that year.
Imagine if the same marketing and publicity budget that was allocated to a bestselling author's fifteenth novel were applied to an unknown name. A nobody with a big talent.
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Are people reading the e-books they purchase from companies such as Amazon, Barnes and Noble or Kobo? There is growing research data that is supporting the notion that people are not reading the digital titles they buy online and for the most part, they are never even opened.
I am of the belief that people are not buying literary fiction or poetry on their e-reader. Instead, they are buying guilty pleasures such as hardcore erotica and gay fiction because they are too bashful about being seen in public reading the paperback. In other cases people buy e-books similarly in the same type of fashion as people who are in airports who buy a throwaway pulp novel by Tom Clancy or something, fall asleep on the plane and end up throwing it out.
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The death of legendary literary agent Carmen Balcells will reverberate for weeks in the lead up to the Frankfurt Book FairWorld's largest trade fair for books; held annually mid-October at Frankfurt Trade Fair, Germany; First three days exclusively for trade visitors; general public can attend last two.. Balcells was one of the most powerful and influential figures in Spanish publishing of the last half-century, after setting up her agency in 1956 in Barcelona). represented such literary giants such as Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez, Camilo José Cela, Pablo Neruda, Miguel Ángel Asturias and Vicente Aleixandre. She was so important to Spanish literary cultural heritage that in 2010, the Spanish Ministry of Culture bought approximately 50 years of her personal archives for three million euros.
"Carmen Balcells was a formidable force of nature bursting always with new projects, jotting down brilliant ideas and thinking always of her authors. Over the last ten years, I had the immense fortune of getting to know her her and enjoying long conversations at her apartment over a great meal every time I would visit Barcelona. Before that, she trusted me to work directly with authors like Manuel Vázquez Montalbán and Gabriel García Márquez, the highest honor of my life.
"Carmen, single handedly, changed the course of literature in Spanish in the 20th century. Apart from promoting and representing the most amazing group of Latin American writers, the "Boom," she embodied the figure of the Agent in Spanish, changing forever the relationship between authors and publishers."
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There's a tendency to think of self-published books as a bit of a joke, and it's true that the poorly thought-out ebook covers unearthed by the Guardian in March this year gave us all a bit of a giggle. As reputations go however, this one is a bit unfair. Although it's true that some authors, left to their own devices, can create rather dodgy designs, the majority of the authors I work with at CompletelyNovel.com take a professional approach to their books that matches high industry standards.
So when we launched a competition to find the "Lord of the Book Covers" from an international pool of self-published authors, the skeptics might have been surprised by the entries we received. When we announced the shortlist last week (see some of these covers below), there was't a misplaced alien or sub-standard concept to be seen. These book covers were no joke. They were actually really good.
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