Female authors have managed to avoid including bad sex scenes in their novels this year - at least according to the Literary Review, which has announced an all-male shortlist for that least-coveted of literary prizes, the Bad sex in fiction award.
The spokesperson for this year's Bad Sex in Fiction Award explains why literary copulation is so often terrible.
While most people can pretty deftly articulate the elements of bad sex-premature ejaculation, vaginal dryness, crying-the elements of bad sex writing can be harder to pin down, even if you know it when you see it.
In the past year, the Earth has traveled around the sun, the moon has waxed and waned, the tree leaves have sprouted and fallen again, and more terrible sex writing has been produced. Read more
The sweat, the groans, the spasming muscles, the licked ears and other bits, the pendulous breasts and other bits; it can only be time for the bad sex prize, established 23 years ago by the Literary Review "to draw attention to poorly written, perfunctory or redundant passages of sexual description in modern fiction, and to discourage them". Read more
Ben Okri has won the 22nd annual Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Award, for The Age of Magic (Head of Zeus). The prize was presented by the Reverend Richard Coles, former member of chart-topping band The Communards, presenter of Saturday Live and latterly a Church of England priest who served as the inspiration for TV's Rev. 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."