Publisher Henry Holt and two German-based Holtzbrinck companies agreed in an order submitted along with the US Attorney General’s office to a Federal Court in Virginia that they would not pay out any proceeds to Edward Snowden or his representatives earned by his book Permanent Record prior to April 1, 2020. (For now that simply aligns with a normal royalty accounting schedule, though that is not mentioned in the order.) The submitted file does indicate that Holt licensed rights to the book from the German-based HIM Holtzbrinck 37, which is the originating contractual party with Snowden.
Authors
People, Etc.
After withdrawing the inventory and postponing publication of Naomi Wolf‘s disputed OUTRAGES in June, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and the author have terminated their contract. They have “mutually and amicably agreed to part company” according to releases provided to the AP. (HMH had said previously they needed “time to explore” the questions raised about the book’s historical accuracy.) At the time, Wolf disputed the postponement: “I stand by my work…. More responsiveness and more transparency are the right answers to criticism, and not the complete withdrawal of a text.” Wolf also ended her relationship with Brockman Inc. at the end of […]
Amazon’s CreateSpace Continues to Devour Self-Published Print Market
Bowker released their statistics charting ISBN-carrying self-published print and ebooks for 2018, showing continued strong growth for CreateSpace, which has eaten nearly the entire, still-expanding market (regulators, take note). CreateSpace issued 1.416 million self-published titles in print-on-demand editions in 2018 — up more than 52 percent from 2017. With that growth, they went from 85 percent of the market in 2017 to 91.5 percent share in 2018. As we have noted previously, Bowker does not have counts for the Ingram Spark program, since Ingram directs customers to register for their own ISBNs directly. That’s likely included in the miscellaneous “small […]
Booker Prize Awarded to Both Atwood and Evaristo
The Booker Prize judges broke with the award’s firm policy and jointly conferred this year’s award on two novels: The Testaments by Margaret Atwood and Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo. Evaristo is the first black woman to win the prize, and at 79 Atwood is the oldest winner. (Atwood won the award in 2000 for The Blind Assassin.) “We’ve both got curly hair,” Atwood said in receiving the prize, indicated she was surprised, thinking she was “too elderly, and I don’t really need the attention. It would have been embarrassing if I was alone here,” she said to Evaristo. […]
Nobel: English Version of Tokarczuk’s “Masterpiece” In the Works, PEN America Denounces Handke Awards
Nobel winner Olga Tokarczuk’s THE BOOKS OF JACOB will be published in English in late 2020 or early 2021 by Riverhead, again translated by Jennifer Croft, translator of FLIGHTS. Croft is still at work on the roughly 900-page book, winner of Poland’s Nike Literature Award in 2015, “delves into the life and times of the controversial historical figure Jacob Frank, leader of a heretical Jewish splinter group that ranged the Habsburg and Ottoman empires and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth seeking basic safety as well as transcendence.” Croft writes for the Paris Review, “Considered by many to be her masterpiece, The Books of […]
Pasternak’s Niece Accuses Novelist Prescott of Plagiarism
Attorneys representing Boris Pasternak’s great-niece Anna Pasternak served notice through a letter to Lara Prescott, author of THE SECRETS WE KEPT, alleging copyright infringement of her 2016 book Lara: The Untold Love Story and the Inspiration for Doctor Zhivago. According to London’s Sunday Times, Pasternak’s attorneys charge that Prescott’s novel includes “an astonishing number of substantial elements” copied from Pasternak’s nonfiction book. Those similarities, they write, “exceed the mere inspiration a novelist may legitimately draw from a work of non-fiction.” Pasternak also takes issue with Prescott “passing off” her novel as the “untold story” of Boris Pasternak’s longtime mistress. UK […]