Off the list this year are such classics as Alice Walker‘s “Color Purpleâ€; “To Kill A Mockingbird†by Harper Lee; “Catcher in the Rye†by J.D. Salinger; and Robert Cormier‘s “The Chocolate War.†Replacing them are books reflecting a range of themes and ideas that include “Brave New World†by Aldous Huxley; “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian†by Sherman Alexie; â€The Hunger Games†by Suzanne Collins; and Stephenie Meyer‘s “Twilight.â€
“While we firmly support the right of every reader to choose or reject a book for themselves or their families, those objecting to a particular book should not be given the power to restrict other readers’ right to access and read that book,†said Barbara Jones, director of ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom. “As members of a pluralistic and complex society, we must have free access to a diverse range of viewpoints on the human condition in order to foster critical thinking and understanding. We must protect one of the most precious of our fundamental rights – the freedom to read.â€
Google has just launched a new trivia game – A Google a Day – to the delight and perhaps even to the dismay of trivia lovers. Normally, when you quiz someone about their knowledge of historical facts, literary figures, capitals, sports champions, and other minutiae, the rules are “no cheating.” No looking up the answer in books. And certainly no Googling.
But the Google a Day puzzle encourages you to do just that,use the search engine to find the answer.
As publishers, we love getting good blurbs for our authors. At their most basic, they’re a simple marketing tool: for readers not familiar with an author, seeing a quote from another author they’re familiar with offers a way into a world they might not have exposed themselves to otherwise.
But there’s a trick to getting blurbs. It involves fostering the right relationships, leveraging contacts, calling in favors, and sometimes just plain extortion. Often enough, savvy readers understand this and no doubt many of them resist blurbs for just this reason.
Here is Mark Jude Poirier on blurbs:
A blurb from an author I actually know and dislike on a personal level—usually based on their abhorrent behavior in graduate school—means I will turn the book backward on the shelf in the bookstore or hide it under a stack of Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue.
A UK publisher’s lament: She loses more than £2 every time one of her books is sold on Amazon.
As Lynn Michell, publisher of the Scottish press Linen Press (“Great writing for women, by womenâ€), explains in a commentary for the Guardian,
Amazon takes 60% of my RRP [cover price] (in the book trade, the bigger the sales outfit, the bigger the discount they demand from the publisher: Amazon 60%; Waterstones 50%; independent bookshop 35%). On a £11.99 book, Amazon’s takings are￡£7.20. Mine are £4.80.
Out of this comes £2.50 to pack and post the book to Amazon, and the author’s royalties on a heavily discounted book reduced to 50p. My writers lose out on an Amazon sale, too. That leaves 82p for Linen Press, but the book cost £4 to produce. So I lose £2.18 on every sale by Amazon.
Every year, the New York Public Library award $25k to a writer under 35 based on a book she published the previous year. Here’s the full press release.
Here is this year’s list:
Citrus County by John Brandon (McSweeney’s)
Vida by Patricia Engel (Grove Press)
The Instructions by Adam Levin (McSweeney’s)
Death Is Not an Option by Suzanne Rivecca (W.W. Norton & Company)
