Gravity’s Rainbow Appears

		On this day in 1973 Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow appeared, causing among the critics the sort of wonder and mayhem which begins the novel, as a V-2 rocket slams into 1944 London: “A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now….” The final verdicts ranged from “unreadable” to “masterpiece.”                                     …read more

Byron’s Maids

		On this day in 1812 Lord Byron spoke for the first time in the House of Lords, choosing for his topic the recent Luddite rioting. Byron was twenty-four, recently returned from the obligatory Grand Tour of Europe, and ready for a career; had his speech been the success he hoped for, there is every chance that the career might have been in politics, rather than in poetry and persecution.                                                                                             …read more

Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes

 On this day in 1956 Sylvia Plath described in her journal her first meeting with Ted Hughes: “…Then the worst thing happened, that big, dark, hunky boy, the only one there huge enough for me, who had been hunching around over women, and whose name I had asked the minute I had come into the room, but no one told me, came over and was looking hard in my eyes and it was Ted Hughes….”                                                                        …read more

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How to Distribute Your Self-Published Book

By Conor Risch

Distributing a self-published book can be just as challenging—albeit in a different way—and time consuming as creating the book itself. (For more on self-publishing, see our “Self-Publishing Done Right” story from the March 2011 issue of PDN.) Depending on the type of book you’ve produced, there are both online and brick-and-mortar options for selling your work.

The handful of bookstores dedicated to photography, places like Dashwood Books in New York, and Photo-Eye in Santa Fe, will consider selling self-published work if it meets certain criteria for quality and if they believe their audience will respond to it, as will certain museum bookstores and other traditional booksellers. Generally bookstores want 40 percent or more of the purchase price for a book, but some stores also offer consignment agreements with different terms.                                         …read more

Walker launches marketing campaigns for YA and picturebooks

Caroline Horn

Walker Books is launching marketing campaigns to support its picture book publishing and teen fiction ranges. Undercover, promoting a range of YA titles, will launch in March and a separate picture book campaign, Picture Book Picnic, will begin in April.
 
Joanne Owen, consumer marketing manager, said, “We wanted to find a way to pull together and cross-promote a range of titles within these two key areas. It makes a lot of sense to invest longer-term, and we envisage both campaigns will continue beyond this launch year.” Each campaign is backed by a five-figure budget.                                                                …read more

Trade looks forward with “excitement” in Egypt

Lisa Campbell

Booksellers and publishers in Egypt are re-opening their doors with “excitement about a new era in publishing” after the country’s revolution. Some publishers and booksellers became targets after supporters of the former Egyptian President, Hosni Mubarak, attacked symbols of democracy and freedom of speech in 18 days of protest.                            …read more

Hodder to release final Earth’s Children novel

Charlotte Williams

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Hodder & Stoughton is gearing up for the launch of the final book in the Earth’s Children series, which began 35 years ago with an idea for a short story.

The Land of Painted Caves will be the sixth novel in Jean M Auel’s series which follows Ayla, a girl orphaned in an earthquake and brought up by a clan of Neanderthals before becoming a wife, ­mother and now in the last book a wise woman of the Ninth Cave, a group of Cro-Magnons in south-west France. The fifth novel, Shelters of Stone, was published nine years ago, selling 2.3 million ­copies worldwide in its first six months. 

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Internet Archive Partners With 150 Libraries to Launch an E-Book Lending Program

By Audrey Watters

The Internet Archive, in conjunction with 150 libraries, has rolled out a new 80,000 e-book lending collection today on OpenLibrary.org. This means that library patrons with an OpenLibrary account can check out any of these e-books.

The hope is that this effort will help libraries make the move to digital book lending. “As readers go digital, so are our libraries,” says Brewster Kahle, founder and Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive.

This new digital lending system will allow library patrons to borrow up to 5 e-books at a time for up to 2 weeks.                                   ….read more

Jerusalem International Book Fair 2011: Awards, Lectures and Deals

by Daisy Maryles

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 All coverage of the official opening on February 20 of the 25th Jerusalem International Book Fair focused on British author Ian McEwan’s acceptance of the Jerusalem Book Prize, Israel’s highest literary honor. The celebrated author had been besieged with demands that he boycott the prize and his trip to Jerusalem. “It will make him a collaborator with Israel’s worst human rights offenders,” was how the London newspaper The Guardian put it. McEwan told the standing room only crowd that “since accepting the invitation to Jerusalem, my time has not been peaceful.”
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Haymarket Author Denied Visa

By Claire Kirch

Chicago publisher Haymarket Books expects to put on hold a book tour for Omar Barghouti scheduled for April because the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem has denied him a visa to enter the country. Barghouti, the founding member of the Palestinian Civil Society Boycott, Divestment, Sanction Campaign, is the author of Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights. The book is being released in April with a 4,000-copy first print run.

 

If Barghouti is not able to obtain a visa, the lack of a tour will hamper sales, but Haymarket said more is at stake than selling copies of a book.

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