World Book Night: Is It Easier to Give Away a Book or a Flower?

By Judith Rosen

I felt like one of those women handing out cigarettes in yesteryear. If you’re too young to remember them, you may have seen pictures. Except I have a couple years on most of those women, o.k. all of them, and rather than a sexy outfit, I chose a heavy down jacket over which I wore a sandwich-board sign, and I use the term loosely, made with a reflective vest covered over with a couple World Book Night flers in clear page protectors. I don’t know if it helped, but I wasn’t too cold last night, given the drizzle and chill.

Last year when I was a “giver” at World Book Night, I chose a spot across from the Central Square T station in Cambridge, Mass., and found it difficult to break down people’s resistance to taking a book. They thought I was trying to foist a Bible on them, or maybe I was part of some cult. This year I was determined that it shouldn’t be so hard to give away 20 books. To get in the mood I used the pre-WBN kick off event at the Cambridge Public Library with Vanessa Diffenbaugh (The Language of Flowers), Lisa Genova (Still Alice), and Neil Gaiman (Good Omens, with Terry Pratchett) as a pep rally. It certainly got the high school students in the row next to me wound up. They wanted to sign up then and there to be givers. So did a former educator who had read Still Alice in her book group and had never heard of WBN.

I was especially pleased to get to hear Diffenbaugh, since I had chosen her novel to give away.  A debut novel by a local author seemed like an easier sell than many of the more “classic” books on last year’s list. Plus I had one other trick for getting people to take my books. Since her book is so interconnected with flowers, I decided to buy 20 carnations from Brattle Florist, the same florist shop in her acknowledgments, to handout with each book. That was before I learned from Gaiman’s talk that April 23 marks Cervantes’s death and in Spain men give women a rose, and women give them a book on that day. The first Book Day, as it is known, was held on Cervantes’s birthday (October 7) in 1926, then moved to April in 1930.

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Terry Pratchett: ‘Fantasy is uni-age’

Despite his Alzheimer’s diagnosis, Terry Pratchett is still marvelling at the world and still writing. He tells Stephen Moss about his new scientific direction, battling Hollywood executives – and why he doesn’t fear death.

Terry Pratchett’s entourage has taken over a corner of the White Hart hotel in Salisbury, a long-standing haunt of the writer, who has a house just outside the town. There’s his PA, Rob Wilkins, whose role has become more demanding since Pratchett announced in 2007 that he had a rare form of early-onset Alzheimer’s; a publicist; and Mr Boggis, a fan who describes himself as ”PA to the PA”. Mr Boggis is named after a character from Pratchett’s Discworld series; he says he has read all 39 books. I never do discover his real name.

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Fourth Pratchett nomination for Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize

Sir Terry Pratchett

|By Charlotte Williams

Doubleday has two authors on the shortlist for this year’s Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, with Sir Terry Pratchett being nominated for a fourth time.

Pratchett is nominated for his novel Snuff. Also in contention are John O’Farrell and Julian Gough, for their works The Man Who Forgot His Wife (Doubleday) and Jude in London (Old Street Publishing) respectively, both appearing on the list for a second time. John Lanchester and Sue Townsend, both newcomers to the list, are nominated for novel Capital (Faber) and The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year (Michael Joseph) respectively.

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Inside Books: The bother of embargoes

Terry Pratchett

By Emily Rhodes

Last week there were a few bookish grunts of dissatisfaction when Terry Pratchett beat Martina Cole to the Number One slot.

Pratchett’s Snuff sold 31,904 copies and Cole’s The Faithless only 31,136, yet there were cries of foul play. This was because some bookshops had broken the embargo on Cole’s book and sold it the week before publication. The feeling was that if only those bookshops had played by the rules and held off, then the previous week’s sales of 1,473 would have been added to the 31,000 and Cole would have beaten Pratchett to the top. (The fact that this was, in any case, the second week for Snuff – with staggering first week sales of 54,687 – is apparently beside the point.)

At first glance, one can see why Cole and her publisher Headline were miffed. Publishing a major title, with huge marketing and advance investment, only to be pipped to the post by Pratchett must be irksome to say the least. And knowing that they could have won, if only a few naughty booksellers hadn’t sold copies ahead of publication date, must make it all the more galling.

But, on closer inspection, what is there really to be so sniffy about? It’s not as though those 1,473 copies don’t count. Headline and Martina Cole still get their respective shares of sales revenue. Moreover, as those copies were sold in bricks-and-mortar bookshops, rather than on Amazon, the share for the publishers would have been rather a lot bigger. Thanks very much for the extra cash, I’d say, who cares about Number One?

As a bookseller, I have never, ever, been asked which book is Number One. Some customers, of course, ask for the bestsellers, or for one particular book I’d recommend, but never for the national Number One. It’s not like music’s singles chart – after all, no one tunes in to the radio on Sunday night to listen to the countdown for books. They can read it in The Sunday Times but that’s more-or-less it. (Incidentally, chart positions inside bookshops tend to reflect nothing more than publishers’ marketing budgets.)

Really, the only people who care about whether or not a book is officially Number One are the publishers. When I worked for a big publishing house, if a book from our division reached the top, an excited email was sent around announcing champagne in the breakout area at 5pm. For the abysmally-poorly-paid underlings such as myself, this was one of the most glamorous moments of the job. Champagne! And some – invariably beige – snacks. (Sadly, as the recession hit, the champagne changed to wine and beer, and the snacks to crisps. Eventually the drinks disappeared altogether, and we were left with nothing more than a celebratory email.)

In the battle of Pratchett vs. Cole, the publishers are none other than Doubleday and Headline, divisions of Random House and Hachette respectively. These are the biggest fishes in the publishing pond.

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Pratchett’s Snuff snaffles top spot with ease

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| By Philip Stone

Terry Pratchett’s Snuff (Doubleday) has become one of the fastest-selling novels since records began, shifting 54,687 copies at UK book retail outlets in its three days on sale last week.

Helped by extensive pre-orders and a £5 deal at Tesco, Pratchett’s 39th Discworld novel has the biggest opening week sale from a hardback adult-audience novel since Transworld stablemate Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol (Bantam Press) in 2009. Along with Brown, only one other novel has sold more copies in its first week on shelves since records began: Thomas Harris’ Hannibal (Heinemann) sold 58,300 copies in four days after its release in June 1999.

Transworld managing director Larry Finlay said: “[Pratchett] is now firmly established as one of the nation’s most important and widely read authors, with so much to say about the world in which we live. I couldn’t be more delighted that with Snuff, Terry now joins a very select band of record-breakers.”

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A life in writing: Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett … AS Byatt is a fan, calling him 'a great storyteller, and splendidly inventive with the English language'. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe for the Guardian

‘I think there’s time for at least a few more books yet’.

By Alison Flood

Terry Pratchett is having a statue made. It’s a statue of a goddess, and he thinks she ought probably to be smoking a cigarette, and to be showing one breast. “There should be an urn, too. If there’s an urn it’s not porn – that’s a Discworld cliché,” he says, a bubble of laughter in his voice.

The goddess is one of Pratchett’s own invention: Narrativia, the deity of narrative who smiles on writers (and perhaps especially sunnily on her creator). Discworld, created by Pratchett 28 years ago, is the fantasy world held up by four elephants balanced on the back of a giant turtle. It’s a concept which started out as an affectionate lampoon of the sword-and-sorcery fantasy genre, but it has, over the years, become an increasingly sophisticated swipe at contemporary society, pointing out the ridiculousness of everything from Hollywood to the postal service, newspapers, banks and football.

And Narrativia has been beside him all the way. “If you’ve been a good boy and worked at what you’re doing, then the goddess Narrativia will smile on you,” he says, recounting his delight at a particular piece of her work, when he was writing Thief of Time more than a decade ago. He decided to call one of his characters Ronnie Soak. Soak is the fifth horseman of the apocalypse – the one who left before they got famous. His name was picked at random, so Pratchett was astonished when he noticed what it sounded like backwards. Suddenly, he knew of what this particular horseman would be a harbinger. “I thought chaos – yes! Chaos, the oldest,” he says. “Stuff just turns up like that.”

In typically ebullient fashion, Thief of Time also contains a sprinkling of yetis, a clock which will stop time and the Monks of History, whose job it is to manage time, moving it from where it isn’t needed (underwater) to where it is (cities). AS Byattsaid on the book’s publication that it should have been nominated for the Booker prize. But it was a fantasy novel; it was funny; it was a bestseller. Unsurprisingly enough, it wasn’t.And despite Pratchett’s immense popularity (75 million copies sold of his 67 books), it took a while for the literary establishment to notice – apart from Byatt.

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Terry Pratchett starts process to take his own life

Sir Terry Pratchett was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 2008. Photograph: Dominic Lipinski/PA

The fantasy writer Terry Pratchett says he has received consent forms requesting assisted suicide but has not yet signed them.

By Ben Dowell

Sir Terry Pratchett, the fantasy writer who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2008, said yesterday he had started the formal process that could lead to his own assisted suicide at the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland.

Pratchett, whose BBC2 film about the subject of assisted suicide is to be shown on BBC2 tomorrow, revealed he had been sent the consent forms requesting a suicide by the clinic and planned to sign them imminently.

“The only thing stopping me [signing them] is that I have made this film and I have a bloody book to finish,” he said.

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