Karl Sabbagh says small publishers face with huge obstacles with selling books and even letting anyone know they exist; plus a descendant of Dr Miles Marley sets the record straightWith reference to your leader on literary fiction (28 December), as a small publisher we are faced with huge obstacles in the way of selling our books or even letting anyone know our titles exist, however good they are. Last year we published an excellent novel called To the Lake, by a Russian writer, Yana Vagner. This had sold over 100,000 copies in Russia, and is being made into a TV series there. It has won prizes throughout Europe, and been translated into half a dozen languages, with sales outside Russia running into tens of thousands. We paid an advance to the author, a fee to a translator, and typesetting, cover design and printing costs, a total of about £9,000. We sent at least 50 copies out to major periodicals, newspapers and broadcast media in the hope of getting reviews, but there were none. The one thing we couldn’t afford was advertising, at a cost of £1,000 or so for a quarter page in a literary journal and far more in widely selling newspapers. So far, we have sold 64 copies. Can anyone wonder why we don’t publish more such books?Karl SabbaghManaging director, Skyscraper Publications• Dr Christopher Goulding (Letters, 26 December) may regard Barry West’s “theory” about Dickens’ use of the name Marley as tenuous; in our family we regard it as long-established fact. I am a... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'
[ The Guardian | 2017-12-28 00:00:00 UTC ]
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A new non-fiction book club on Claudia Winkleman's weekly BBC Radio 2 "Arts Show" is to launch this autumn, as part of The Reading Agency partnership with the station. The book club follows on from the Radio 2 Book Club on Simon Mayo's show, and a children's writing competition called 500 Words... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2015-04-22 00:00:00 UTC ]
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James Horobin, previously group sales, marketing and publicity director at Simon & Schuster, is to join the recently launched Bonnier Publishing Fiction division as executive director with responsibility for sales and marketing. Horobin, who left S&S last month, will take up his new... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2015-04-15 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Passion! Mystery! Crime! After the Australian government banned the import of American pulp magazines at the onset of the second world war, publisher Frank Johnson stepped into the market with a flurry of crime, adventure and romance novels. Drawn from his archives, a collection of cover art,... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2015-04-15 00:00:00 UTC ]
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HarperCollins has hired Claire Ward as fiction art director, joining from Transworld where she has worked for 25 years. Ward, who will begin at HarperCollins in July, has designed covers for titles such as Before I Go to Sleep, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, The Book Thief and The Girl... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2015-04-11 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Authors Haruki Murakami, Erwin Mortier and Daniel Kehlmann have made the shortlist for the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. Also shortlisted for the £10,000 award are two writers whose work has been translated from Spanish into English for the first time: Tomás González and Juan Tomás... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2015-04-09 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Daredevil can't see you, but he knows you're coming. His new show is so good, it might catch comic book fans by surprise. Continue reading at Baltimore Sun
[ Baltimore Sun | 2015-04-07 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Authors including Philip Pullman, Michael Rosen, John Dougherty, and Alan Gibbons have signed a letter saying baseline assessment tests should not be brought in to primary schools. The tests, to be introduced in September 2015, will take place in the first few weeks after a child starts in... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2015-04-02 00:00:00 UTC ]
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I’d written a crime short story under one of my pen names for a collection to be published by Macmillan (Writers tell couple who remove ‘filth’ from books where to stick their app, 28 March). The late Lord (George) Hardinge of Penshurst was in charge of their crime fiction at the time and he... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2015-04-01 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Powers is the first series to come from Sony PlayStation's original programming push, a partnership with Sony Pictures Entertainment, and it's not rated "E" for everyone. With comic books as its source material, the racy superhero cop drama from crea... Continue reading at Engadget
[ Engadget | 2015-04-01 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Canongate has signed a new work of non-fiction from Man Booker Prize-shortlisted and Orange Prize-winning author Kate Grenville. Editorial director of fiction Louisa Joyner signed UK rights in One Life from Michael Heyward at Text Publishing. The book tells the story of Grenville's mother... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2015-03-14 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Novelist Marilynne Robinson and cartoonist Roz Chast were among the winners at the National Book Critics Circle. Continue reading at BBC News
[ BBC News | 2015-03-13 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Karl Ove Knausgaard and Haruki Murakami are among the authors whose work features on the longlist for the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. Meanwhile books originally written in German take five of the 15 spots, and Quercus has three titles on the selection. The Independent Foreign... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2015-03-12 00:00:00 UTC ]
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The Totally Entwined Group has signed a three-book fiction deal with “The Only Way is Essex” star Jess Wright for its Celebritease imprint. Claire Siemaszkiewicz, founder and c.e.o. of Totally Entwined Group, said: “We are delighted to be working with the gorgeous Jess Wright on her first... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2015-03-11 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Deepak Chopra's 10th novel continues his quest to explore spiritual mysteries through stories. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2015-03-11 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Canongate has created a spin-off company to further develop its Letters Live series of events. Five shows, which will feature actors Benedict Cumberbatch and Louise Brealey, will run at the Freemasons’ Hall from 31st March to 4th April 2015. The live events will celebrate the “enduring power of... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2015-03-10 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Andy Robb founded the UKYA Blogger Awards to salute all the teen and YA book bloggers who work so hard, for nothing but free books and the odd signature, to tell the world about the books they love, here’s whyOur guide to becoming a book bloggerTop 10 teen/YA book bloggers by... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2015-03-06 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Waterstones and HarperCollins will host a joint literary festival celebrating crime fiction, with a combination of virtual and literary events. The Killer Crime Festival will be held over the 13th and 14th March, with live events taking place at Waterstones stores alongside an online festival... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2015-02-25 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Atef Abu Saif, Jana Elhassan, Lina Huyan Elhassan, Shukri al-Mabkhout, Ahmed al-Madeeni and Hammour Ziada are the six authors shortlisted for the 2015 International Prize for Arabic Fiction. The shortlisted was revealed by a judging panel chaired by Palestinian poet and writer, Mourid... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2015-02-14 00:00:00 UTC ]
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In popular genres such as sci-fi and fantasy, fan fiction based on the Wattpad model could easily disrupt the publishing industryFor a few years in the mid 2000s, I was the young librarian who got sent to schools to convince kids they really did want to read books. The truth of my experience was... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2015-02-13 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Headline has signed The Letter, a debut novel by Kathryn Hughes which hit number one on the Amazon Kindle chart as a self-published ebook. The Letter, which tells the story of two women whose lives become entwined when one discovers a letter that was written in 1939 but never sent, was... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2015-02-12 00:00:00 UTC ]
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