It's been a pretty good year for publishers. Bertelsmann revenues were the highest for seven years, although admittedly its profits were down and the acquisition of Penguin is part of the mix. Read more
It's a sign of the times that previously unknown British author E L James has topped the New York Times bestseller list with an erotic romance, Fifty Shades of Grey. Read more
This week's there's an interesting story from the US about writer Kate Alcott, whose first novel The Dressmaker has just sold 35,000 copies in hardback and been sold for translation in five countries. It seems explicable in terms of the subject-matter because The Dressmaker is about a seamstress who goes on board the Titanic as a lady's maid, is wooed by two men from Read more
The staggering number of 285,000 new titles and editions were self-published and published by community presses in the US last year, balanced against a slightly lower figure of 275,000 coming from traditional publishing houses. Read more
So how does the world look as we venture forth into the new decade? This week we'll look at the US and next week at the UK publishing worlds in an attempt to assess how the turmoil in the book trade is affecting writers.
This weekend the Javits Center in New York has been thronged with the thousands of people attending BookExpo, the biggest annual book show in North America. It's clear from the coverage that a mass of interesting author events and the usual promotional round are making this BookExpo seem as busy as ever, and attendance figures are only slightly down. Read more
How is the economic slowdown affecting books? We've managed to stay off the subject of the recession for over two months, so now is the time to have another look at how it is affecting the book business. Read more
No sooner had the dust settled on Bertlesmann's surprise appointment of German print supremo Markus Dohle to succeed Peter Olson as CEO of Random House US, than another unexpected change hit the American publishing world. Jane Friedman, the successful and popular head of HarperCollins, also announced her immediate departure. Read more
In News Review of 5 Novemberwe noted the beginning of the Writers' Guild strike in the US. Since then there have been occasional stories in the media about tv companies being forced to put out a diet of reruns and American audiences deserting their tv screens. Read more
‘Poetry is definitely having a renaissance. There's been a real sea-change in terms of how it's seen, especially in lockdown. Poetry is the perfectly transportable art form. Owning a book is all you need to experience it. Poetry doesn't necessarily give us the answers, but it does give us the tools to think with and helps us process issues.
"If you would be a poet," Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a man who would know, wrote in 2007, "create works capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times, even if it means sounding apocalyptic...."
A few years ago at a Radcliffe Institute exhibit, I came across photos of a draft of what would become Angela Davis' autobiography. A foundational Black literary text, bare-boned and vulnerable, is not something you often get to see. The manuscript bloomed with the strokes of a blue pen, notes from the editor on what needed to be changed. Read more
In early February, after a month of lockdown, William Sutcliffe wrote on Twitter: "I have been a professional writer for more than twenty years. I have made my living from the resource of my imagination. Last night I had a dream about unloading the dishwasher." Read more
Sales of print books continued to ride a hot streak into February with units jumping 25.7% in the first week of the month over the first week of February 2020 at outlets that report to NPD BookScan. The increase was the highest yet this year, and unit sales of print books were up 22.1% through February 6, 2021.
Even if-as per my last essay for Lit Hub-we know how to read, there remains the equally vexed question of what we should read. If the 21st century is notable for anything much at all when it comes to literature-and I use the term in its broadest sense, as will become clear-it's the spiking of formerly big literary guns, and the dismantling of what used to be understood as the canon. Read more
Book-to-screen deals are reported by the Hollywood trades in pieces that dutifully mention the novelists, directors and actors involved but often leave out the people who actually made it happen - the agent or manager who hooked up the players, the producer who optioned it years ago, the book scout whose secret source shared the proposal before book publishers had even seen it.
There is a new app. It distills books, both classics and modern bestsellers, into brief, accessible summaries. You can listen to audio versions of summaries, or read them on your phone. The app is called Instaread-or it's called Blinkist, or it's called GetAbstract or Joosr or 12Min or StoryShots or SumizeIt or CatchUp. Read more
When Sarah Pinborough's thriller Behind Her Eyes was published in 2017, even she described it as a "Marmite book". Her publisher slapped on equally dire warnings, hyping it with the hashtag #WTFthatending.
'Remember: when people tell you something's wrong or doesn't work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.'
'Having imagination, it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that, if you were unimaginative, would take only a minute. Or you might not write the paragraph at all.'