Age Labels on Children’s Books

Big debate going on over at The Bookseller about this.  I think people are getting worked up over very little… there are far bigger issues for authors to be concerned about at the moment.  If you don’t want the darn label on your book - tell your publisher!  Simple.  And move on to something [...]

Louis Vuitton, Corporate Wraithlords

Louis Vuitton are suing Danish art student Nadia Plesner for copyright infringement. Not for making the usual knock-off copies of their bags that can be seen on most high streets, but for something much more disturbing.
Plesner created the artwork for fund-raising t-shirts after reading the book ”Not On Our Watch” by Don Cheadle [...]

TFP - The Epilogue

Very perceptive “lessons learned” piece by Danuta Kean following the collapse of The Friday Project. While I don’t like to say “I told you so”, (OK, I do…) it was crashingly obvious, as blogged in these pages for many months, that their business model simply was not viable. Some of the comments following [...]

Spread The Word About Podwatch

Podwatch has gone straight into my “must listen” category of podcasts. Full disclosure – Podwatch was kind enough to give LITOPIA AFTER DARK a near-perfect 9.5 marks out of 10 in their recent review – so I suppose I’m not totally disinterested! However, since first learning about this review site/podcast (our podcast officer, [...]

Litopia After Dark - Caffeine Nights

This Friday’s LITOPIA AFTER DARK is going to be another good one – we have another special guest booked in the form of Darren E. Laws, who’s done what many authors have fantasized about, and set up his own publishing company, Caffeine Nights Publishing. “Caffeine Nights Publishing wants to be at the forefront of [...]

Modern Publishing Paradox

Thinking about a book proposal I’m helping to final-polish…
Publishers increasingly want authors with built in platforms, but authors with built-in platforms need publishers less and less…

Litopia After Dark - Backstage

As an experiment, we’ve started to stream the LITOPIA AFTER DARK pre-show planning sessions live on UStream every Friday. The first one was streamed by mistake, then we realized we’d got people watching… so we’re going to continue. You can access it on our UStream page here, from (approximately) the following times:

12:30pm London
7:30am New [...]

The Future of Agenting

If you’ve been following the trade press, you’ll know that I’ve had a few thoughts on this subject recently. 
Now comes news, via The Guardian, that the reformed agency PFD is to offer a  POD (print-on-demand) publishing programme, aiming to make their clients’ forgotten books available once more.  Although this is likely to produce next [...]

The Kindle - Part… er, something or other…

Trying not to repetitively mention the e-book / the Kindle / digital stuff every week on Litopia After Dark… it can get awfully tedious, and people soon run out of interesting things to say.  Here’s a note from Silicon Alley Insider about the continuing, and to my mind, rather monotonous line from Amazon about their [...]

RIP TFP

The Friday Project, darling of trade rag The Bookseller, has sadly come to grief. Today’s Telegraph reveals that an administrator was appointed on the 25th February (why didn’t The Bookseller tell us this?) and reports that HarperCollins are close to buying the publishing rights to The Friday Project’s book titles.
I first looked at TFP’s [...]

Edible Printing Systems

Bugger the e-book - this is what you need.

Eminem set to write autobiography

Sorry, but Em… who? A rapper writing his autobiography sounds, er. so… middle-aged. Does anyone still isten to Mr. Inem… and if so, will they buy a $20 book? One wonders.

Litopia After Dark podcast

photo credit: Bruce Moyle
We’ve just broadcast our eleventh LITOPIA AFTER DARK podcast and the weekly format has really come together (with much help from talented friends). I think we can officially say we’re out of beta now. The panellists are great, the live interaction via UStream as we record is hilarious, and [...]

The Friday Project – Part Two

photo credit: roujo
I’ve written about The Friday Project before, over a year ago, and promised a sequel. Well, here it is.
Today’s headline news in The Bookseller screams: “The Friday Project up for sale”. You might well ask why this constitutes headline news, but we’ll pass on that for the moment. It [...]

Over-Obsessing The E-Book

Sara Lloyd of Macmillan digital asks in their shared  team blog “Are publishers over-obsessed with eBooks?”  It’s a subject we’ve frequently covered on the LITOPIA AFTER DARK podcast, and we’ll continue to do so until a definitive answer is reached.
The e-book has had more false starts than Linford Christie.  Right now, there is no significant [...]

Here’s to the Writers…

Silhouettes and Shillelaghs

The hominid Peter Cox

Fantastic party last night to celebrate children’s publisher Egmont’s expansion into the US market. Egmont is a wonderful publisher, and are well ahead of the pack in terms of their ethical business practices, particularly with regard to their environmental impact - something of growing concern to many of my authors and indeed [...]

Eye Spy

I have a horrible feeling that, sooner or later (and very probably, far sooner than you’d expect) this technology will be used to provide editorial feedback on manuscripts. “Fantastic job, William darling! But the Eye Tracking says that people are skipping chapters 2 thru 20, can you just have a teensy little look at [...]

The Strike Gets Viral

As you might expect, members of the the Writers Guild of America, West are putting their talents to create some pretty powerful communications material while engaged in their dispute with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. I particularly like these three videos from YouTube. And what a great way to get the viral [...]

Judith Regan Sues HarperCollins

The publishing world loves a good soap opera – see, as proof, my recent piece about the current PFD debacle – and here is our next instalment. The larger-than-life Judith Regan, erstwhile publisher of the eponymous HarperCollins imprint, is suing her former employer for $100m. Judith also has to cope with the [...]

First Sight of The Joshua Files

The children’s publishing world is amazingly creative about book design, but I’ve rarely seen such a stunning book jacket as Scholastic ’s extraordinary cover for the hugely-anticipated THE JOSHUA FILES by MG Harris. This meeting, last week, was the first time I saw it in the [...]

Perfidy!

“When I arrived at the company in August there had already been two offers for the business in the region of £8m. The agents having sold their business to CSS Stellar for £12m were offering in the region of £4m and taking whatever persuasive measures they could, including mass resignations, to ensure that CSS had [...]

Quo Vadis, Miss Snark?

I’ve always rather slyly admired Miss Snark, the hard-bitten, hard-drinking and altogether hard nameless NY literary agent who has constantly blogged for these past two years.  What with one thing and another, I hadn’t looked at her blog for several months – and was saddened to see that she’s closed it, as of 20th May [...]

War Criminal Strikes Jackpot

And now for the least surprising book deal of the year:

Random House has won the battle for Tony Blair’s memoirs. The book will be published in the UK by Hutchinson, and by Alfred A Knopf in the US and Canada. The fee paid has not been disclosed but estimates reported in the UK press suggest [...]

Why Do Recondite Non-Fiction Books Work?

Books about failed mountain climbs, marine navigation and the weather all seem unlikely candidates for best-seller status… but all of them have topped the charts internationally.  Here are some reasons why this category of non-fiction seems to work so well:

The writing is compelling – often as good as literary fiction – like a high-class blockbuster
The [...]