Joanna Zgadzaj & Nancy Roberts from Stork Press ask: 'What is the problem with books in translation? Is it really true that readers do not want to read translations? And where does this attitude come from? When we talked to a number of booksellers we were told people who buy books don't care if it's a translated title or not, just whether it has a good story...'
Links of the week February 25 2013 (09)
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:
4 March 2013
"I am wary of translations", comments one reader on the booklovers' website Goodreads, which begs the question: what is the problem with books in translation? Is it really true that readers do not want to read translations? And where does this attitude come from? When we talked to a number of booksellers we were told people who buy books don't care if it's a translated title or not, just whether it has a good story.
25 February 2013
Jason Boog, writing in Mediabistro US site for media professionals, particularly journalists, but also of general interest. Links to US media's coverage of itself. www.mediabistro.com
If you have dreams of selling your science fiction, fantasy or horror novel and getting filthy rich, you need to adjust your expectations. We've collected three testimonials from genre writers below to help aspiring writers to maintain realistic expectations
As Hilary Mantel carries off the Costa to add to her second Booker win, Sameer Rahim in the Telegraph comments: 'The richness of its language and psychological penetration cannot hide the fact that Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies can be read as posh Philippa Gregory.'
So it's Hilary Mantel, again. Bring Up the Bodies has won the overall Costa Book Award following Mantel's Man Booker victory in 2009 for Wolf Hall, and the same award for its sequel last year. It has beaten not only all the other novels of 2012, but also the best poetry collection, biography, first novel and children's book. Mantel's all-conquering Tudor saga, which last year sold 313,000 copies in this country, is well on the way to becoming a classic with a BBC and RSC adaptation already in the works.
A new model of ebook purchasing - instead of paying up front for a book you may never even look at, you download it for free and then only pay according to how much of the book you read.
Sometimes you encounter an idea that seems so obvious it's amazing that nobody has thought of it before. That's how Yoav Lorch feels about Total Boox, his intriguing new reading platform that is about to be unveiled this March. The idea is simple: instead of paying up front for a book you may never even look at, you download it for free and then only pay according to how much of the book you read. Yoav Lorch: "The idea came to me gradually. I was thinking about the potential of ebooks, and how to make books more interactive, the different types of books you could produce, but then the idea that you could pay as you read - well, that was far more interesting than everything else. So I did away with interactive books and all that. This seemed genuinely different."
Making niche special interest publishing work using the Internet.
"We found that growth was difficult in military because anything we did was cannibalizing ourselves," Smart explains. "Enthusiasts only spend so much per year. So we took a step back and asked ourselves what are we good at, and it came down to three things: publishing in niches, focusing on consumers and managing a brand. We decided to see what other areas we could apply that to." Rebecca Smart: "you only have a brand where it's a distinct niche."
The process began in 2007 with the purchase of heritage publisher Shire and was followed in 2010 by the acquisition of facsimile publisher Old House, described by Smart as "the best deal I'll ever do." Sales at Old House increased from £250,000 up to one million-plus, in part thanks to republishing Bradshaw's Handbook, a 19th-century railway journey guide that has iconic status in the UK and was used in a recent BBC TV series.