Stop the Presses? by Sara Nelson - 12/01/2008
When we heard last week that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt had put a ban on acquisitions, it was hard not to feel that, finally, the sky was about to fall. As disturbed as we've been for weeks about disappearing credit, tottering banks and a dead retail sector, this was the first (semiofficial) announcement that BookLand itself might be on the verge of something very bad.
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Book Your Holiday by Sara Nelson - 11/17/2008
“To get pleasure out of Christmas shopping, begin early and make your selections gradually. It is quite time to begin now. There are no gifts so satisfactory and lasting as well-chosen books, and none so flattering to the taste and intelligence of the recipient.” Reading these words, you might be forgiven for thinking they've come from the folks at IndieBound, who just this week lau...
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Reading the Election by Sara Nelson - 11/10/2008
You don't have to be an Obama supporter, or even a Democrat, to have been inspired by the presidential election last week. The highest voter turnout on record, gracious concession and acceptance speeches, and the sheer joy expressed at Obama's victory, here and around the world, was enough to move all but the most cynical.
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Book Abuse by Sara Nelson - 11/03/2008
Last week, amid disturbing news of layoffs and contractions at all kinds of media businesses—Reader's Digest, the Los Angeles Times and our own beloved Doubleday, among many, many others—the story that struck me was the one about the little book from tiny Tricycle Press that has become exhibit A in an ad campaign supporting Proposition 8 in California, which aims to overturn legaliz...
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First, Break All the Rules by Sara Nelson - 10/27/2008
How do you make a bestseller? That's one of the most important and oft-asked questions in BookLand. We don't know the answer, so, of course, we've established some rules: Rule #1: Never publish an author posthumously: publicity tours, whether satellite or in person, are key, and dead people don't travel well.
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Gott und Mammon by Sara Nelson - 10/20/2008
Where else but in Frankfurt could this happen? It's nearing midnight on the Tuesday night before the Buchmesse officially opens. Hundreds of well-dressed publishing folk, fresh from wine-soaked meals and many publishing cocktail parties, cram into three stately reception rooms at the Frankfurter Hof hotel and jockey for a good view of some television screens put up for just this occasion.
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A Mite Too Radical? by Sara Nelson - 10/13/2008
Sometimes the ironies of the book business are almost laughable. Consider, for example, what happened last week when we wrote about independent bookseller Carol Besse's “call to arms” at the Great Lakes Independent Booksellers Association fall trade show. Besse, GLIBA's outgoing board president and co-owner of Carmichael's Books in Louisville, made the admittedly “radical prop...
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In These Lean Times by Sara Nelson - 10/06/2008
“The publishing business has always been rather stable. It doesn't soar when things are going crazy and people with a lot of money are spending it. . . By the same token, when everything goes to hell, books become one of the cheapest forms of pleasure.” Like most people in BookLand, I'd like to take comfort from these words, written by legendary publisher Bennett Cerf in his 1977 m...
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Brave New Blood at Holt by Sara Nelson - 09/29/2008
Starting a publishing house in the middle of a recession is nobody's suggestion of a good idea— and yet, in a way, that is what's happening at Macmillan with Henry Holt. Yes, Holt has existed since its founding in Baltimore by, yes, Henry Holt, in 1873; since 1986, it has been part of the Holtzbrinck Group.
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Postmodern but Classic by Sara Nelson - 09/22/2008
To say that David Foster Wallace's suicide last week, at age 46, is a tragedy for his family and friends is, of course, a colossal understatement. To say it is sad for his legions of fans is similarly obvious. But while I didn't know Wallace personally and knew only some of his work—I'll admit to never having gotten through Infinite Jest, though his take on lobstering (“Consider the...
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Our Burning Issue By Sara Nelson - 09/15/2008
Given that we're all “book people,” I assume that most of us got several copies of the list of books supposedly banned by Sarah Palin that circulated on the Internet last week. At last count, I received a dozen e-mails with the list attached, some of them from friends wanting to share the pain, and some suggesting I run the list in PW.
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The Summer of POD by Sara Nelson - 09/08/2008
Let others wax nostalgic about their seasons of the witch, their winters of discontent. For us, the summer of 2008 will go down in publishing history as its own kind of water shed: call it the summer of POD. It all started, fittingly, right after Memorial Day—BEA weekend, in fact—with the publication of Scott McClellan's recovered memory of his time with the Bush administration.
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The Audacity of Hype by Sara Nelson - 08/25/2008
Ah, publishing: that sleepy business rich with irony. On August 15, tiny but politically mighty Chelsea Green Publishing announced it will crash Obama's Challenge: America's Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency. Margo Baldwin, publisher of the Vermont-based house, said her objective was to get the pro-Obama book by journalist Robert Kuttner out in time for this week's De...
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What Price Caution? by Sara Nelson - 08/18/2008
Is anyone surprised that Ballantine canceled publication of Sherry Jones's historical novel, The Jewel of Medina, due out last week? According to the house's prepared statement, the decision—prompted by concerns from several Islamic scholars (one of whom, perhaps not incidentally, is under contract with Knopf, like Ballantine an imprint of Random House for a forthcoming Islam-related boo...
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Breaking Trust? by Sara Nelson - 08/11/2008
In Bookland the mention of “returns” usually refers to the longstanding practice of booksellers shipping back to publishers all unsold books for full refund. It's a quaint practice, one that most forward-thinking book people lament but seem power- less to correct. The discussion about returns this past week, however, has meant something different: apparently there's a very vocal gro...
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More than Zero Sara Nelson - 07/28/2008
If this isn't a case of déjà vu all over again, I don't know what is. The announcement last week that the Hartford Courant is laying off its books editor and that the Los Angeles Times
will no longer publish a freestanding Sunday book review evoked a reaction that was more than a little familiar.
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Read My Lists by Sara Nelson - 07/14/2008
Asking people about their reading habits is only slightly less dicey than asking them to tell you how much money they make or how often they have sex. While choosing books may seem less personal than those other two activities, it's actually pretty similar: what one says about one's behavior is complicated, revealing and often inflated to impress.
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Visions of Cody's by Sara Nelson - 07/07/2008
It's heartening that there is some good news in the independent bookstore world—or at least indications that all is not lost. Consider: the lively demonstration at BEA of the ABA's IndieBound program, which suggests that going global is so five minutes ago and that buying local is the wave of the future.
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E-Dreaming by Sara Nelson - 06/30/2008
“Global e-book sales at Amazon could reach $2.5 billion by the year 2012.” No, this hyperbole doesn't come from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who has always been famously circumspect about discussing his business. Instead, it was the prediction of an independent analyst (for an outfit called Pacific Crest) named Steve Weinstein, as quoted last week by the Washington Post.
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Reading Habits by Sara Nelson - 06/23/2008
But enough about the business. Let's talk about the books. As PW suggested last week—and as our senior editor Dermot McEvoy followed up brilliantly on NPR right after—summer reading no longer means guilty pleasure romance novels or quickie detective stories; by the looks of the lists, we are entering a very political summer.
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