To support Potty, Fartwell and Knob, Extraordinary but True Names of British People, which was a UK bestseller in 2007, the author Russell Ash has created some entertaining little gizmos on his admirable website.
Colin Cotterill has had an interesting kind of life. In 1972 he took a gap year and never came back. He has been a teacher in Australia, a teacher trainer in Vietnam and a social worker on the Burmese border. He has worked on UNESCO literacy projects in Asia, set up an NGO dealing with child prostitution in Thailand and has established a programme to bring books into Laos. Read more
Brian McGilloway’s Borderlands has just been published in America. For the veteran of eighteen months of submissions and 20 rejections, this must have been a great moment. Read more
Hilary Mantel is an intriguing example of an author who has written for many years and only recently achieved a breakthrough. Not only did she win the Booker Prize last autumn, but her book Wolf Hall has become the fastest-selling Booker winner since records began in 1998. Read more
The announcement that Gillian Flynn had been declared Specsavers International author of the Year last week was only the latest accolade awarded to her. Read more
With the publication of Inheritance Christopher Paolini has brought to a triumphant conclusion his epic sequence. In the UK this book had a first week sale of 76,000 copies and the series as a whole has sold 1.2 million books to date in the UK. It had a first printing of 2.5 million in the US. Read more
Darren Shan’s first book, Ayuamarca, was published in 1999 by Orion and didn’t have much impact. The sequel, Hell's Horizon, sold fewer copies than the first. Read more
Rosie Alison has just been shortlisted for the all-female 2010 Orange Prize for fiction with her first novel, a great vindication for this author whose first book was many years in the writing. Read more
'I was trained by poetry where you can just write ambience and atmosphere. But in a novel, if there's not a story that people are interested in, with characters that they care about, they'll close the book.'
In the third in a series on the implications of AI for publishing, Nadim Sadek argues that effective advertising is now feasible for everyone, and for all kinds of titles
A publishing friend of mine recently told me about a sales report they'd received from a major retailer in which some of their books had zero sales. It turned out that there had been plenty of sales, however-they just all went to counterfeiters. In case you think this is an outlier, it's not. Counterfeiting is a serious, nontrivial problem facing the industry.
If you read the recently unsealed materials from the federal antitrust lawsuit against Amazon, you'll see why the company wanted to keep them under wraps. According to the unredacted notes from one meeting, Jeff Bezos directed his team to stuff more ads into search results, even if it meant accepting more ads internally categorized as irrelevant to what users were looking for. Read more
The U.K. Publishers Association (PA) was established in 1896 and is a cornerstone of the British publishing industry, working with a diverse array of companies to promote innovation, collaboration, and commercial success. Read more
With English as a shared language, there is a natural relationship between the American and British publishing industries. Most of the world's top publishing companies, be they conglomerates or independent publishers, have operations in each country, typically in New York City and London. Literary traffic travels both ways across the Atlantic.
The UK is experiencing a boom in book clubs, according to new data from event listing companies.
Book club listings on the ticketing site Eventbrite increased by 350% between 2019 and 2023 - a "much stronger" growth than the overall increase in UK-based listings over the same period. Between 2022 and 2023 alone, book club listings on the site rose by 41%. Read more
"We don't understand the consequences of AI with regards to copyright," Brazil's Karine Gonçalves Pansa, president of the International Publishers Association (IPA), said, when asked to name the most important issues facing publishing right now. "We can say, very easily, that our content is being used, without permission, and without license, by AI."
‘The first thing you must remember: An editor does not add to a book. At best he serves as a handmaiden to an author. Don't ever get to feeling important about yourself, because an editor at most releases energy. He creates nothing.'