"Between the kitty litter and the toothpaste, on a lonely aisle of your supermarket, they cry out for love. Highlander Untamed! Unleash the Night! To Pleasure a Prince! The Boss's Wife for a Week! Willingly Bedded, Forcibly Wedded!"So begins Brian Miller's piece in the Seattle Weekly, A Billion Dollar Romance Novel Industry, And its Lonely Black Author. Miller profiles the Seattle romance novelist Edwina Martin-Arnold and in the process gives us a peek into the world of Romance publishing.How big an industry is it:The genre accounts for 26.4 percent of all popular fiction salesIt annually produces around 6,000 titlesHarlequin, the...
Picador Breaks the Ice: Will issue hardbacks and paperbacks simultaneously
I was wondering how long it was going to take a major publisher to come to their senses and release the hardback and paperback at the same time.Joel Rickett at the Guardian is reporting that beginning in the Spring of 2008 Picador will "release all new novels in paperback editions, alongside a small run of hardbacks, breaking with the trade convention of staggered publication dates."Andrew Kidd, publisher of the prestigious Macmillan imprint says:"When are we going to accept that we live in a [paperback] country; that only a tiny handful of authors command enough reader loyalty to achieve viable hardback...
Top Ten Books People Donated to The Book Thing
As much as the reading habits of the members of society speak volumes about what kind of society it is, what books one wants to dispose of can leave us a few clues as well.Here is the top ten list of books donated to The Book Thing of Baltimore according to its founder Russell Wattenberg. The list appeared in a 2002 article in the Chicago Tribune.The Book Thing is a bookstore where all the books are free for the taking, sort of a Goodwill without the commerce or a stationary, less interactive Book Crossing.The Top Ten are:1. Iacocca by Lee...
Pull the Plug on Book TV
or at least let's change the name. How about Books and History; Books and Washington; Non-Fiction for the Masses.Book TV has as little to do with the diverse culture and life of books as the Bush administration has to do with democracy.Before you throw the book at me for this one head over to the Guardian to read Daniel Kalder's piece Literary TV to put you off reading forever.He amusingly reminds us how downright ridiculous much of Book TV is and how extended viewing can be seen as a low grade form of torture guaranteed to ruin your weekend.Book TV...
"A Book in a Store is Worth 20 on a Web Site"
Holland Cotter has an inspiring review of the NY Art Book Fair in Saturday's New York Times. His piece titled Art Between Covers, on Walls and in Your Hands is a refreshing reminder that there is still life in books."A book in a store is worth 20 on a Web site," is how he begins his story. Cotter then gives us three good reasons why the book in a public space experience is vital to the health of our culture:1- "you can check out the book’s contents and condition without buying."It doesn't matter how good a return policy the e-tailer's...