LongPen in The Scotsman:
WHEN Margaret Atwood first had the idea of a machine that could allow a writer to sign personalised copies of her books at a distance, many people thought she was just having a dig at the gruelling schedule publishers tend to set for their touring authors.
Not so. Her invention, LongPen, produced by Unotchit (“you no touch it”), a company she set up last year, has already passed the prototype stage and will, she reveals, be ready for a full demonstration at the London Book Fair (5-7 March 2006).
“You can’t be in five countries at once and someone’s always feeling left out,” she explains. “This might help. I could sign in one country, there’d be a video feed to another country, and the machine would produce my signature and any requested message there.
Atwood is – patently – a genius and should be seen at all costs when Mr Byng’s Myths masterclass rolls into Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum on Monday. And get a copy of her new book, The Penelopeiad – signed, if possible, in the old-fashioned way – while you still can. (See feature, page 6.)
GHOSTLY CONTACTS
Margaret Atwood is something of a sore point with me, as she writes novels (THE HANDMAIDEN’S TALE) that are by any reasonable definition science fiction, but are not shelved that way. Why do some “literary” authors who write inferior science fiction get a free pass into the “mainstream”? It’s a mystery.
Now Atwood has invented a gizmo. Not just any gizmo, but a long cylindrical rocket-shaped gizmo that provides authors with the ultra-cool and highly science-fictional capability of telepresence.
How much longer can she hide out in the literary fiction ghetto? Let’s start shelving Margaret Atwood where she belongs!
This is a nice find. I love blurbs.
Writers’ Representatives, LLC: The Greatest Blurb of All Time:
The Greatest Blurb of All Time
By R.W. Emerson
Concord, Massachusetts, 21 July, 1855
DEAR SIR—I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of “Leaves of Grass.” I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit & wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile & stingy nature, as if too much handiwork or too much lymph in the temperament were making our western wits fat & mean. I give you joy of your free & brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment, which so delights us, & which large perception only can inspire. I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying & encouraging.
I did not know until I, last night, saw the book advertised in a newspaper, that I could trust the name as real & available for a post-office. I wish to see my benefactor, & have felt much like striking my tasks, & visiting New York to pay you my respects.
R. W. Emerson
Publishers Marketplace: Recent Deals reports:
Christine Kole MacLean’s PULLING OUT, an edgy coming-of-age story about a high school senior from a fundamentalist Christian home, who gets swept off her feet by a college professor, to Andrew Karre at Flux, in a nice deal
That “swept off her feet” is pretty strange coming in between “high school senior from a fundamentalist Christian home” and “college professor.” Explain to me how this isn’t a novel about something close to statutory rape? The age difference and power imbalance are compounded by the perception that the young woman has a sheltered background.
Independent Online Edition > Business News:
Harry Potter and the half-baked print run: 2.5 million books unsold in the US
Now, Scholastic’s chairman, Richard Robinson, whose father Robbie founded the firm in 1920, admits bookshops have been left with 2.5 million unsold copies….
…However, unlike franchises such as The Lord of the Rings, where the film sparked a boom in sales of Tolkien, the opposite appears to be the case for Harry Potter. It seems Potter films mostly attract those who have already read the book.
Last year, when Warner Brothers released the film Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, reaping $761m (£428m) at the box office, a mere 60,000 copies of the book were sold.
… far from guaranteeing high profitability, Scholastic’s performance since the first Potter in 1998 has been woeful, even though it has netted $600m in revenue from the franchise.
Over the past three years, Scholastic’s share price has halved, losing 10 per cent this month, and operating margins have dropped from 9 per cent to 6.4 per cent. …
Wow, that’s embarrassing for Scholastic.
Returns are the Avada Kevadra of the book business.
For sale: Britain’s underground city – Sunday Times – Times Online:
WELCOME to Cold War City (population: 4). It covers 240 acres and has 60 miles of roads and its own railway station. It even includes a pub called the Rose and Crown.
The most underpopulated town in Britain is being put on the market. But there will be no estate agent’s blurb extolling the marvellous views of the town for sale: true, it has a Wiltshire address, but it is 120ft underground.
The subterranean complex that was built in the 1950s to house the Conservative prime minister Harold Macmillan’s cabinet and 4,000 civil servants in the event of a Soviet nuclear attack is being thrown open to commercial use. Just four maintenance men are left.
Property developers looking for the ultimate place to get away from it all need not apply. The site has a notional value of �5m but there is a catch. It is available only as part of a private finance initiative that involves investing in the military base on the surface above.
And what is today’s plan B?
Death on strike in Nobel laureate Saramago’s novel – Yahoo! News:
“All my books without exception deal with the improbable and the impossible,” the Portuguese writer said at the novel’s launch in Sao Paulo, Brazil, on Thursday night.
The story depicts Death as a woman who goes on strike because she is fed up with being hated by people.
Chaos follows. Hospitals fill up, people keep growing old without dying, and the pension system overloads. Soon the church campaigns for Death to return.
“In the end we discover the only condition for living is to die,” said Saramago, who will turn 83 next month.
“It is an extremely funny book. The reader will smile many times and even chuckle,” he said.
A couple of thoughts.
1. It is ominous when the 82-year-old author says his book is extremely funny. Laff-a-minute, I’ll bet …
2. This author is writing fantasy and science fiction in Portugese, and he’s got a Nobel Prize. Terry Pratchett is writing about the same material in English. I’m sure Saramago is good, but I’m also sure he’s not as good as Pratchett. Why isn’t Pratchett getting the Nobel Prize?
Update: Grumpy Old Bookman calls Pratchett “the best living UK novelist.”
A nice Da Vinci blog for travellers, real or virtual.
The Da Vinci Code Online: “The Da Vinci Code Online
Links to the organisations, places and people
referred to in Dan Brown’s ‘The Da Vinci Code’”
This is a fascinating article, well worth reading in its entirety as a glimpse into the craft and the business of writing the best-sellers that are presented to today’s book-lovers.
Along Came a Lot of Money to Invest – New York Times:
Mr. Patterson said he often worked with co-authors because he believed that he was more proficient at creating the story line than at executing it.
“I found that it is rare that you get a craftsman and an idea person in the same body,” Mr. Patterson said. “With me, I struggle like crazy. I can do the craft at an acceptable level, but the ideas are what I like.” He said the co-authors received a flat fee and, most often, credit on the book cover.
Mr. Manning, who worked with Mr. Patterson at J. Walter Thompson for more than 20 years, said that there was a parallel between Mr. Patterson’s book career and his work in advertising. “He is the leader of a creative team, which is similar to what he did as a creative director where he came up with what an advertising campaign needed to accomplish,” he said. “Then the team executed it and he evaluated it.”
In novel writing, as in advertising, Mr. Patterson wants the final say. Once there is a first draft of a book that has a co-author, “I may ask the collaborator for a polish,” he said.
“Then I do the remaining rewrites,” he added – sometimes as many as seven.
and:
He has become so successful in publishing that the Harvard Business School has used him as a case study in brand management. In marketing that brand, he is ferociously competitive. He agreed to pay half the salary of a brand manager at Little Brown & Company, his publisher, who does nothing but track the marketing and releases of Mr. Patterson’s hardcover books to avoid conflicts with his paperbacks and new releases from other top authors.
Mr. Patterson designed the cover for “Along Came a Spider,” his first best seller, in 1993, and has done so for every book since, with oversize lettering that a browser cannot miss. And he works with a branding and advertising company called the Concept Farm that produces his TV commercials. Its owners once worked for him at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency.
Publishers Marketplace: Recent Deals:
Foreign rights to John Gibb’s WHO’S WATCHING YOU? What is Opus Dei? Who Are The Illuminati? Who Really Runs The World?, one of the first six in a series of Conspiracy Books, to Petra Ljevak ay Ljevak in Croatia and Ismini Lampoudou and at Livani in Greece, in a nice deal, by John Conway at Essential Works.
I sense a conspiracy to drown the world in Opus Dei books.
Publishers Marketplace: The Latest Deals:
Entertainment Weekly’s chief TV critic Gillian Flynn’s SHARP OBJECTS, pitched as The Virgin Suicides meets Dolores Claiborne, follows a journalist whose disturbed family history, including a sister who died young, unfolds as she returns to her small hometown to report on a series of murders, to Orion, in a pre-empt, by Karin Schulze at Crown.
I wish people would stop with these bastardized X meets Y pitches.
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