Another round of Twilight interest is building with the release next Friday of the movie version of New Moon, and a rare appearance on Oprah today by author Stephenie Meyer. Time looks to chart the takeoff portion of Meyer’s career. Publisher Megan Tingley recalls when the book was published in fall 2005, “All the signs were there, but at the beginning they were modest. The sales kept getting a little higher each week. It wasn’t a gigantic phenomenon overnight — I think people think that now, but it wasn’t.” A year later, New Moon launched with a slightly higher print […]
How Publishing Works
Menaker Looks Book at Publishing's "Negative Culture"
Former Random House executive editor-in-chief (he admits to conjuring the odd title in a dream) Daniel Menaker writes in the Barnes & Noble Review a series of observations about modern publishing, concluding, “I have to say I’m glad to have left this all behind, except in the tranquility of recollection.” Menaker starts by describing how “publishing is often an extremely negative culture” and the 12-point list primarily recounts negatives. “The sheer book-length nature of books combined with the seemingly inexorable reductions in editorial staffs and the number of submissions most editors receive, to say nothing of the welter of non-editorial […]
Speakers Bureaus Beef Up Publishers' Profit
Just five years ago it was almost unheard of for a publisher to have an in-house speakers bureau. Now all of the Big Six houses – Hachette was the last holdout, but they partnered with the Greater Talent Network to form a speakers bureau in May. And Publishing Perspectives discovers they are “turning out to be surprisingly recession-resilient” what with publishers and authors splitting speaking fees between $5000 and $20,000. “representing a welcome source of found money,” even in the midst of an economic downturn. Ellis Trevor, who runs Macmillan Speakers, looks beyond the fees and points to bureaus acting […]
Julia Child's Climb to the Top of the Bestseller List, 48 Years Later
When a book reaches #1 on the New York Times Bestseller List almost 50 years after its initial publication, as Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking did with the August 30 list, naturally news outlets – especially the NYT – are going to take notice and figure out why this would be so, and especially why it would be selling more than 22,000 copies in a given week, more copies than were sold in any full year since the book’s appearance, as per Knopf. “In a month, I’ve sold almost seven times what I sell, typically, in a […]
P&W Q&A With Agent Georges Borchardt
The latest in Jofie Ferrari-Adler’s series of interviews for Poets & Writers is with literary agent Georges Borchardt. Over a fifty-year career he’s represented authors ranging from Tennessee Williams, Aldous Huxley, Samuel Beckett, T. C. Boyle, Robert Coover, David Guterson, Anne Applebaum, Stanley Crouch yet is deemed a “hidden gem” in the publishing industry for being “cherished by their colleagues and peers but barely known outside of the business.” On why his background is different from others in publishing: “most literary agents in America have English as their native language. But I started out without knowing the language. I grew […]
The Dan Brown Media Extravaganza Begins
We’re less than a month away from the publication date of THE LOST SYMBOL and that means the onslaught of quasi-meaningful articles attempting to analyze Dan Brown as a cultural phenomenon is well under way. The Guardian wonders if the simultaneous ebook release will “spell the end of the printed word,” though evidence is limited to a few people’s speculations: “The ebook is very quickly becoming a publishing reality and The Lost Symbol will be one of the fastest-selling books of recent times,” said Joel Rickett, editorial director of Viking UK. “Once people can flip between books, look up references […]