From The Wall Street Journal: Amazon.com Inc. closed its $6.5 billion acquisition of the MGM movie and television studio on Thursday, even as the Federal Trade Commission continues to examine the deal. The move comes after Amazon certified to the FTC that it had provided all the information requested by antitrust investigators reviewing the transaction. … Read more
From Slate: There’s nothing like the announcement of a fat book advance to set other writers grumbling in protest, whether the jackpot winners are Michelle and Barack Obama, who landed a staggering $65 million deal for two books in 2017 or such unsavory figures as right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, whose relatively modest $250,000 contract with … Read more
From UnHerd: What did the sensitivity readers say? And did I care? Of all the aspects of the recent attempt to cancel my work, the one that seems to fascinate most people is the moment when my publishers sent my Orwell Prize-winning memoir, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, to be assessed by experts … Read more
From Anne R. Allen’s Blog with Ruth Harris: Who could have predicted the bright ray of light that shined on publishing during this pandemic! But it did shine, and will continue to shine, as people rekindle their love of reading and writing! Publishing is more profitable than ever before in its history…for the second year … Read more
From Marie Claire: When author and illustrator Ariella Elovic drafted her book proposal for Cheeky: A Head-to-Toe Memoir, she never considered that the graphic memoir about body acceptance might one day become a television series. Growing up, her biggest insecurities were her visibly hairy arms, sideburns, unibrow, and upper lip hair; as a young adult, she … Read more
From Kristine Kathryn Rus ch: For six months now, I’ve been contemplating the sentence, “IP is the new frontlist.” I wrote about the implications of that twice in the past two months, first as part of the fear-based decisionmaking blogs, and then in the previous post called “Untapped.” First a few terms for those of … Read more
From Kristine Kathryn Rusch: JP Colaco, head of ad sales for WarnerMedia . . . . said, “IP is the new primetime.” Television execs are acting on this. They’re becoming platform agnostic (which raises its own problems) and they have learned, because of the pandemic, that people want to watch good television. They don’t care if that … Read more
From The New Republic: In 1993, a young Jeff Bezos was contemplating a career change. He wanted to leave his executive job at the high-speed–trading investment firm D.E. Shaw & Co., and while he was mulling his next move, he happened to pick up a copy of The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1989 novel … Read more
From c/net: Author Soman Chainani has spent 10 years working on his children’s book series The School for Good and Evil. He finished the sixth, and last, book in the series, One True King, in March 2020, and says he was ready to take the rest of the year to relax and head out on … Read more
From The New Republic: Salman Rushdie, the Booker Prize–winning novelist, insists that he is not, like so many media members before him, going to Substack—at least not full-time. He won’t be publishing his next book on the newsletter platform. Instead, he’s taken an advance from the company to fool around with “whatever comes into” his … Read more
From The Atlantic: If you want a preview of next year’s Emmy Awards, just take a walk past your local bookstore. According to data drawn from Publishers Marketplace, the industry’s clearinghouse for news and self-reported book deals, literary adaptations to television have been on a steady climb. The site has listed nearly 4,000 film and … Read more
From GrammarlyBlog: A summary is a shorter description of a longer work, covering all of the highlights but not many of the details. It’s used for an overview so that people can get an idea of what the longer work entails without reading or watching it first. You see summaries everywhere, from book covers to … Read more
From Marker: Jeff Bezos is the world’s richest person, and Amazon, the company he founded, one of the world’s most admired and valuable. Two recent books, Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos, with an introduction by Walter Isaacson, and Working Backwards, by longtime Amazon executives Colin Bryar and Bill Carr, offer lessons from the … Read more
From Jane Friedman: You probably remember this one from history class: Thomas Paine, in 1776, dashed off a pamphlet called Common Sense, encouraging the American colonists to revolt against British rule, with the pamphlet supposedly proving so popular that, in its first three months of publication alone, it sold more than 100,000 copies. Also, it helped … Read more
From The Wall Street Journal: ast century: Angeline Boulley was a young mother of three. Last decade: She was a bureaucrat wondering if she might also be a writer. Last year: She was a novice finishing a title that had sold in a seven-figure two-book deal. And last week, she was a debut author with … Read more
From Publishers Weekly: Writing is a strange career. You spend countless hours pouring your soul on the page for no promise of pay, no benefits, and no guarantee anyone will even publish you. Then you go online and find out people think you have it too damn good. That was the recent situation when—as part … Read more
From Indies Unlimited: Netflix. Lootcrate. Amazon Prime. Everyone has at least heard of most of these, and you probably subscribe to one or two of them. From TV to men’s razors, the subscription model is catching on with consumers. According to Deloitte, 69% of households now subscribe to one or more video streaming subscription services. A survey … Read more
PG and Mrs. PG each received their second Covid vaccination today (Pfizer for Covid aficionados). The talking Covid drums have been saying that side effects from the second vaccination can be more difficult than the first. For PG, the only side effects he has experienced from the second is feeling a bit tired, hence, he … Read more
From The New York Times: Few authors have had a better shake at the movies than John le Carré, whose sophisticated novels of Cold War atmosphere, moral ambiguities and wryly observed backroom machinations have long attracted talented filmmakers and leading actors. While Alec Guinness’s definitive performance as George Smiley in the BBC mini-series versions of … Read more
From Writer Unboxed: I have always been a visual writer. When formulating a scene, I have to envision each moment in exacting detail. As such, a good deal of my editing process involves scaling back, sharpening key images and finding short cuts to capture the feel of a moment with fewer words. Even so, I … Read more
From Changing America: Many Americans are watching more television in quarantine and lockdown during the coronavirus pandemic, but the plethora of content is often niche. Still, in a year of polarizing politics, “The Queen’s Gambit” has united viewers around the world. Seven episodes were enough to garner the show a 100 percent rating on Rotten … Read more
From the BBC: Navtej Sarna had a highly distinguished career in the Indian Foreign Service. There were stints as ambassador to both London and Washington DC. But before that he spent a short time with the Indian industrial conglomerate Tata. He recalls the final paper of the entrance exams, which he sat in 1980. Applicants … Read more
From The New Publishing Standard: The head of the UK’s Publishers Association puts a brave face on the latest numbers from Nielsen, which show digital heading for an all-time high as this year winds down. Despite a significant drop in print sales, as we’d expect with the country’s “nations” (England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland) in … Read more
From Writer Beware: I’ve written several posts about a fairly new phenomenon in the world of writing scams: scammers that falsely use the names of reputable publishing professionals, including literary agents and publishers, to lure writers into paying large amounts of money for worthless, substandard, and/or never-delivered services. This time, I’m breaking down a very … Read more
From Publishing Perspectives: The “Battle for Attention”—part of the title of Bookwire‘s conference report from Frankfurter Buchmesse—became a lot more vivid for many professionals participating in the digital evocation of the trade show last week. That’s because the enormous fair, which draws more than 250,000 people annually in its physical setting at Messe Frankfurt, was, … Read more
From Public Books: Having thrown privacy and consumer protection overboard long ago, Google, in 2018, officially removed its best-loved maxim, “Don’t be evil,” from its code of conduct. Arguably, the company could no longer ignore the contradiction between self-declared ethics and the relentless pursuit of profit. (In only the final quarter of 2019, Google booked $46 … Read more
From The Nation: hen Covid-19 struck, hundreds of millions of students were suddenly stranded at home without access to teachers or libraries. UNESCO reported that in April, 90 percent of the world’s enrolled students had been adversely affected by the pandemic. In response, the Internet Archive’s Open Library announced the National Emergency Library, a temporary … Read more
From Writers in the Storm: Writing espionage is a balancing act between being authentic and being so accurate that we embarrass political leaders, get people killed, and/or end up with some angry FBI Special Agents on our doorstep. As a general rule, while the non-violent embarrassment of political leaders who are asking for it can … Read more
From Politico: When South African President Cyril Ramaphosa sent a copyright reform back to the parliament last week, he raised constitutional concerns as a reason to delay the bill. But in the preceding months, the United States and the European Union — encouraged by the powerful cultural industry — had pressured him to postpone the … Read more
From Publishing Perspectives: In its online program Wednesday (June 24) on the state and prospects for audio publishers and other players in the world industry, the mood was upbeat, the presentations ran smoothly, and the audience was offered a lot to think about. . . . . As is frequently the case in these events, … Read more
From The Deseret News: In a twist of uncanny timing, Emily St. John Mandel is releasing her newest novel in the midst of a worldwide pandemic. But it’s her last novel that has people interested, and for good reason: the subject of her last novel was a world-wide pandemic. Her novel “Station Eleven” was a … Read more
From The Wall Street Journal: As if things weren’t bad enough, now there’s a shortage of jigsaw puzzles just when we need them most. The coronavirus pandemic has forced millions of Americans to hunker down in their homes and find ways to entertain themselves. A lot of them are thinking the same thought: jigsaw puzzle. … Read more
From The New York Times: Amazon is hiring aggressively to meet customer demand. Traffic has soared on Facebook and YouTube. And cloud computing has become essential to home workers. Amazon said it was hiring 100,000 warehouse workers to meet surging demand. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, said traffic for video calling and messaging had exploded. Microsoft said … Read more
Entrepreneur that she is, Mrs. PG expected that a lot of her readers or prospective readers might be spending more time than usual at home, so she will be starting some discount price promotions on some of her ebooks to make it less expensive to stay inside and read. PG would not be surprised if … Read more
From Publishing Perspectives: Saying that the book is no longer a business model in itself, Roger Casas-Alatriste insists on a transmedial approach for publishers. . . . . In a keynote address at Tuesday’s (February 18) annual CONTEC México conference in Mexico city, issues of transmedia have been described as “the capacity to think how … Read more
From The New Republic: As the last decade concluded, book publishers breathed a sigh of relief. The 2010s were characterized by a series of Amazon-related shock waves—the growing power of the retail behemoth, the rise of e-books, a related Department of Justice antitrust lawsuit, and the decimation of bookstores both large and small. But publishers … Read more
From The Washington Post: While some people are scrambling to collect log-ins for Netflix, HBO Go, Hulu and, now, Disney Plus, Sarah Jacobsson Purewal is working on a different kind of hustle. She signs up for any public library that will have her to find and reserve available e-books. The Los Angeles-based freelance writer used … Read more
Second article from The Atlantic today. PG usually doesn’t post excerpts of two items from the same source during the same time period, but he thought visitors to TPV would be interested in the topic of reading. From The Atlantic: When Stevie Peters was a kid, she used to read books for pizza. She remembers … Read more
From Publishing Perspectives: The Authors Guild in New York has today (August 23) issued a statement on the class action lawsuit filed against Cengage by a group of writers for the service. As Publishing Perspectives readers will recall from our mention of this case on August 19 that this is the second time writers have challenged the Cengage Unlimited subscription offer … Read more
From Electric Lit: In 1921, the silent film star Fatty Arbuckle was accused of raping and murdering the actress Virginia Rappé at an illicit gin party he’d thrown in his hotel room. Though Arbuckle was acquitted in court, the damage to his reputation ended his career and cost his employer, Universal Studios, a lot of … Read more
From Kristine Kathryn Rusch: [F]or years, I’ve been wondering why big traditional publishing companies aren’t licensing their backlist. There’s a million ways to make money off copyright licenses, and the most obvious is to keep books in print. Yet so many big traditional publishing companies don’t keep their books in print. Or, worse, in my … Read more
From Crime Reads: When we got home, our house wasn’t as we left it. We stood for a moment, not yet understanding why all our belongings were on the floor, how each drawer had been pulled out, tipped empty. There was a space where my laptop should have been and there were loose wires hanging … Read more
From Working Knowledge, Harvard Business School: Brian Kenny: In the world of computer science, Jon Wainwright is kind of a big deal. A computer language pioneer, he was the principle architect of both Script 5 and Manuscript. What makes John a legend has nothing to do with programming. Let me explain. On April 3, 1995, Jon … Read more
From The Week: If you’re a voracious reader — or even a casual one — you’ll probably recognize the names of three of the big TV miniseries debuting on cable and subscription streaming services within the next two weeks. On May 17, Hulu will be making available all six episodes of its new adaptation of … Read more
From Wired: “Helvetica is like water,” says a recent video about the most popular typeface in the world. The 62-year-old font family, with its sans-serif shapes and clean corners, is ubiquitous. It is used on the signage in New York’s subway system. It is the brand identity of American Airlines, as well as American Apparel. It is … Read more
Legal Stuff Follows Warning: This is a long post, but if you read it, most of you will understand more about Fair Use and Derivative Works than you do right now. From The Illusion of More: Section 106(2) of the U.S. copyright law grants authors the exclusive right to prepare derivative works. So, the filmmaker … Read more
From The Verge: The platform was built on the backs of independent creators, but now YouTube is abandoning them for more traditional content. . . . . Aanny Philippou is mad. He’s practically standing on top of his chair as his twin brother and fellow YouTube creator Michael stares on in amusement. Logan Paul, perhaps … Read more
From The Conversation: Microsoft has announced that it will close the books category of its digital store. While other software and apps will still be available via the virtual shop front, and on purchasers’ consoles and devices, the closure of the eBook store takes with it customers’ eBook libraries. Any digital books bought through the … Read more
From Bloomberg: Winning a copyright battle can mean losing a public relations war. Broadway producer Scott Rudin endured a wave of criticism after sending letters to at least eight community theater groups that had planned to perform the play “To Kill a Mockingbird” with an older script than the one used in the Broadway production. … Read more
From The Wall Street Journal: Apple ’s extravagant unveiling on Monday of AppleTV+, its new video content streaming service, unveiled very little. Celebrities talked about their must-see shows without showing any clips. Apple executives trumpeted their plan to offer a bundle of content from different content partners without offering any details on pricing. So what … Read more