Almost thirty years ago, an American graduate of Kings College, Cambridge, reinvented the university’s old magazine, Granta. This week, it’s one hundredth issue is in the wild on both sides of the Atlantic.
Category Archives: Publishing
For a writer without a publisher, this is just about the last straw
The fact that he’s going to have his memoirs published probably surprises me less (in today’s media world) than the fact that he’s still alive at all.
Via Blue Crab Boulevard: Cheetah, the chimp from the Johnny Weismuller movies, will finally tell all.
Expect a heart-wrenching account of a life-long struggle against speciesist stereotypes.
“I never got the girl,” the hominid will complain. “I really wanted to direct, but I couldn’t get past the glass ceiling.”
Coming Soon to a Bookshelf Near You
Buzz Girl has news on a few new books coming out this year. Here are ones I found interesting.
- The U.S. Poet Laureate has a book of poems coming in April.
- Buzz Girl writes about Ursula K. Le Guin’s new novel, “Unlike anything Le Guin has done before, this is an imagining of Lavinia, the king’s daughter in Vergil’s Aeneid, with whom Aeneas was destined to found an empire.”
- She says there will be a marketing splash made by Master of the Delta by Thomas H. Cook, a “literary mystery by a writer’s writer.” I haven’t heard of Cook, but I’m interested in literary mysteries and strong writing.
- She reports “HarperOne is the new identity for HarperSanFrancisco, publishing books on religion, spirituality and personal growth.” They have a couple books on politics and faith or religion coming soon. First, Jim Wallis thinks he’s gotten something to say in The Great Awakening: Reviving Faith & Politics in a Post-Religious Right America. I don’t care if the “religious right” label goes the way of the world, but if Wallis thinks the country has rejected conservative faith as exercised in government, he needs to get around more.
- Second from HarperOne is God in the White House: A History–1960-2004: How Faith Shaped the Presidency from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush by Randall Balmer. Could be interesting.
- Bart Ehrman, author of Misquoting Jesus, continues to criticize his Creator and display his twisted faith in secondary sources with a new book, God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question–Why We Suffer. Perhaps this one will inspire several response books too, just as his other one did.
In other news, Andrew Kalvan’s next book is coming this summer. Empire of Lies deals with a man with strong faith and a solid family who came from a violent life which comes back to haunt him. He is thrown into “a murderous conspiracy only he can see and only he can stop—a plot that bizarrely links his private passions to the turmoil of a world at war.”
Book news: Brandon Sanderson will finish Wheel of Time series
News from SFWA today:
Brandon Sanderson to finish Jordan’s Wheel of Time series
Tor Books announced today that novelist Brandon Sanderson has been chosen to finish the final novel in Robert Jordan’s bestselling Wheel of Time fantasy series. Robert Jordan died September 16th after a battle with the rare blood disease amyloidosis.
The new novel, A Memory of Light, will be the twelfth and final book in the fantasy series which has sold over 14 million copies in North America and over 30 million copies worldwide. The last four books in the series were all #1 New York Times bestsellers, and for over a decade fans have been awaiting the final novel that would bring the epic story to its conclusion.
Jordan had known the ending of the series for a long time and, according to a blog posting by his cousin, Wilson W. Grooms, Jr., had a few months ago revealed secret details about the end of the series to close members of his family which he had never discussed before.
Delivery of the manuscript is scheduled for December 2008, with a planned publication in Fall 2009.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch…
FYI: I learned, via the Christian fandom e-mail group, about this new E-zine featuring serial Western fiction.
Suing Father Brown
Here’s an odd, and somewhat troubling, story from my own state.
It seems a boy was killed in 1957 in what appeared to be a car accident. Years later, a priest investigated the matter and decided the boy had in fact been murdered. He wrote a book that claimed to prove his theory, substituting fictional names for the real characters he blamed for the death.
Problem was, it was set in such a small community that the fictionalized characters were easily identifiable.
So the people the characters were based on sued the priest. They have now won a settlement out of court.
I guess that without a judgment, this doesn’t create a legal precedent, but it’s bad news for authors. It should be noted that just changing a person’s name and giving him a different hair color doesn’t necessarily protect you from a libel suit.
I’ve never heard of this book. I doubt it was a bestseller, so there can’t have been a lot of royalty money in the pot. I suppose the priest’s order ended up paying the lion’s share of the settlement.
That must be frustrating. This time (for a change) the priest wasn’t even accused of the crime.
Authors Sue Publisher
Mr. Holtsberry posts news that conservative authors are suing their publisher over the claim of low royalties.
Authors Jerome R. Corsi, Bill Gertz, Lt. Col. Robert (Buzz) Patterson, Joel Mowbray and Richard Miniter state that Eagle Publishing, which owns Regnery, “orchestrates and participates in a fraudulent, deceptively concealed and self-dealing scheme to divert book sales away from retail outlets and to wholly owned subsidiary organizations within the Eagle conglomerate.”
That means the authors believe the Eagle is undercutting what money they could earn from their books by distributing the books through books clubs, which they say is nothing in some cases.
I have to agree with Mr. Holtsberry on this. The authors appear to have identified a real problem, but shouldn’t this have been worked out in contract? Perhaps this situation is only a dishonorable, if that, choice by the publisher and something unforeseen by the authors. Are publishers competing with authors, or are they their compatriots? No doubt, it varies.
Athol Dickson on Christian Fiction
“I believe Christian fiction in general is now at least as good as all the other genres. I think this is slowly becoming an accepted fact, even among publishers and critics outside the Christian world. In fact, it seems to me most of the opinions one still reads to the contrary are from Christian writers who have not managed to get published, and one suspects their motives, to say the least. I say this as an extremely demanding reader. I do not finish about half of the novels I start, because I cannot bear poor craftsmanship or boring stories, regardless of the message. I will not support a Christian artist simply because he is a Christian. That would demean Christianity itself. But these days I find myself abandoning non-Christian novels with about the same frequency as Christian ones, so yes indeed, we have come a long, long way.” Thus spake Athol Dickson earlier this year.
Choice, Choice Everywhere! When Will It End?
So it’s Banned Books Week for the American Library Association, and people are taking to the streets to ban or burn their favorite books. What? That’s not happening in your neighborhood? Well, don’t just sit there. Go to the library and complain about something. Freedom of choice in reading starts with you.
So have you read a “banned book” lately? Funny how you got hold of one. Black market book fair, I guess?
Speaking of choice, O.J. Simpson’s book, So What If I Did It?, has been published, and Barnes and Noble apparently announced that they would not distribute it. The public arose to say they wanted it, and the bookseller recanted. As Charles Kaine writes, “Barnes and Noble, on a daily basis, declines to carry dozens, if not hundreds, of titles, and yet we do not get a daily press release from them announcing what they won’t be carrying. Why did they choose to make this one book so special?” Why? They were trying to win some publicity points, of course. Maybe they did.
Still, Kaine argues against their initial decision. “When large corporations start making choices for us,” he says, “deciding for us what we can and can’t read based on what they perceive to be the popular opinion, we, the American public, are in serious danger of losing our right to choose.” But isn’t that the nature of the publishing process, people at large and small corporations deciding whether a manuscript should be published? If we had all the choice we could stomach, every writer would be published, and that would not be a victory for the American or world reader. (Enter The Blog to glut the reader’s stomach.)
Books are published from a community, are they not? The publishing community, composed of editors, writers, managers, designers, publicists, printers, and booksellers, take a manuscript from idea to print. Some of them hold the reigns on every potential book, holding it at standstill or spurring it forward to publication. There are good stories that are not being published and bad ones that are. Do we want more bad stories to choose from or responsible editors to hold them back?
The real battle over choice is in the news business. In that arena, editors filter stories through a condescending elitists grid. Where’s the choice there? And public education–where’s the choice there?! Okay, I’ll stop.
New Discovery House Website
Discovery House Publishers has revised their website and is offering free shipping on all orders through Sunday, October 7.
In other info tidbits, if you are looking for the WaterBrook Press site, follow this link, not this one.
And if you’re longing for another of those books about books, something along the lines of a “hilarious epic fantasy” involving a city which is akin to “a gigantic second-hand bookshop,” you could do worse than cracking open The City of Dreaming Books.