“7: The Mickey Mantle Novel,” Peter Golenbock’s occasionally racy account of the life of Mickey Mantle, which was canceled last month by its publisher, HarperCollins, was revived yesterday by Lyons Press.
Read the story on NYTimes.com. For some reason, it’s filed under the Sports section - Baseball, to be specific - rather than Books.
From Reuters:
The dusty world of book publishing has taken a step into cyberspace as Random House and HarperCollins letting customers browse books online.
Random House, whose writers include Danielle Steel and Norman Mailer, said on Tuesday it will let consumers search and browse through more than 5,000 of its titles on the Internet through a new service called Insight.
Scotsman.com has an exclusive excerpt of Alexander McCall Smith’s new novel, The Good Husband of Zebra Drive:
It is useful, people generally agree, for a wife to wake up before her husband. Mma Ramotswe always rose from her bed an hour or so before Mr JLB Matekoni - a good thing for a wife to do because it affords time to accomplish at least some of the day’s tasks.
Click here to read the full excerpt (around 3,600 words).
Since Tyler Stewart, owner and president of 17-year-old Pandemonium Books & Games in Cambridge, Mass., posted a call for help earlier this month on his Livejournal blog, more than a thousand people have stepped forward to keep the store open by participating in a T-shirt drive. With the proceeds, Stewart plans to pay off his delinquent payroll taxes, although, he said, the store’s finances will continue to be “touch and go.” He has been able to negotiate with all his other creditors except the IRS.
For Stewart, it is particularly gratifying to have so many current and former customers from all over the country and England participate in the drive. About half the replies, he said, are people who have never shopped at Pandemonium, but care about independents. (T-shirts are still available at www.pandemoniumbooks.com.)
Link to the Publishers Weekly article
In front of a packed hall at the second annual ICv2 Graphic Novel Conference, ICv2 CEO Milton Griepp reported that graphic novel sales in the U.S. and Canada hit $330 million in 2006, a 12% increase over revised sales figures for 2005.
Griepp reported that sales of graphic novels passed comics periodicals as “the most popular format,” in 2006. He reported that 2006 sales of comics periodicals was about $310 million.
Griepp sees more growth for the category in 2007, noting plans by bestselling prose authors such as Stephen King and Laurell K. Hamilton to release comics work in the coming year. While manga continued to lead the category in sales, he noted that American genre comics were also doing well. He also said that acclaimed nonfiction titles like Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, the comics adaptation of the 9/11 report and Marisa Acocella Marchetto’s Cancer Vixen were attracting new readers, female readers in particular, to the category.
Link to the Publishers Weekly article
The director of the London School of Economics, Howard Davies, will chair the judges of the 39th Man Booker prize.
He will be joined on the panel for the 2007 award by the poet Wendy Cope, the journalist and novelist Giles Foden, the biographer Ruth Scurr and the actor Imogen Stubbs.
The competition is already showing the benefits of putting an economist at the helm. The longlist, which has ballooned to around 20 books over recent years, will be cut down this year to just 12 books. An announcement is expected in August.
The shortlist of six titles will be announced in early September. The winner of the 2007 prize will be announced on October 16.
Link to the Guardian article.
Itching for a chance to see your writing in print, but not quite finished with your three-part fantasy novel of epic proportions?
This could be the contest for you.
We’ve teamed up with Ziji publishing and Bebo.com to give you the chance to see one of your short stories in print. All you have to do is send us a story of less than 1,000 words before March 16 2007.
Information and links can be found here.
The New York Times has another story on The Higher Power of Lucky. According to the article, it all started when librarian Dana Nilsson posted a complaint on the LM-Net listserv. A passage I found amusing:
The book was in the high 600s on Amazon before Nilsson’s comments were publicized, but soon jumped into the top 40. Simon & Schuster had already ordered an extra 100,000 copies after the Newbery was announced.
