big books, big bucks

From: Collectors Weekly

"Donna Tartt’s novel The Goldfinch has 771 pages. The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton, winner of the 2013 Man Booker Prize, is 834 pages long. And then there is City on Fire, the 900-page debut novel that took the publishing industry by storm last week.

     It was even more evidence that the long novel is experiencing a resurgence, as a dozen publishers competed for the rights to release the book, set in New York City in the 1970s. City on Fire was written by Garth Risk Hallberg, a 34-year-old who has contributed to The New York Times Book Review and The Millions. Publishers who had a copy of the manuscript — and said they could concentrate on little else until they had finished reading it — rapturously compared it to work by Michael Chabon and Thomas Pynchon.
     The book drew an advance that is highly unusual for a debut novel. In a two-day bidding war, 10 publishers bid more than $1 million. Knopf emerged the victor, paying close to $2 million, said two people familiar with the negotiations.
     Before the acquisition, Diana Miller, an editor at Knopf, wrote Chris Parris-Lamb, Mr. Hallberg’s agent, an email praising the book, saying it was 'off the charts in its ambition, its powers of observation, its ability to be at once intellectual and emotionally generous.'”
— Julie Bosman, The New York Times
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Alice Munro wins the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature

From: Hindustan Times

"Alice Munro wins the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming the first Canadian woman to take the award since its launch in 1901.

     Munro, 82, only the 13th woman given the award, was lauded by the Swedish Academy during the Nobel announcement in Stockholm as the 'master of the contemporary short story.'
     'We're not saying just that she can say a lot in just 20 pages — more than an average novel writer can — but also that she can cover ground. She can have a single short story that covers decades, and it works,' said Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy.
     Reached in British Columbia by CBC News on Thursday morning, Munro said she always viewed her chances of winning the Nobel as 'one of those pipe dreams' that 'might happen, but it probably wouldn't.' Alice Munro Munro's daughter woke her up to tell her the news. 'It's the middle of the night here and I had forgotten about it all, of course,' she told the CBC's Heather Hiscox early Thursday.
     Munro called the honour 'a splendid thing to happen.'
     Munro said her husband, Gerald Fremlin, a geographer/cartographer who died in April, would have been very happy, and that her previous husband, James Munro, with whom she has three children, and all her family were thrilled."
— CBC

"Alice Munro near her home in Clinton, Ontario."
from: The New York Times

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"Alice Munro, the renowned Canadian short-story writer whose visceral work explores the tangled relationships between men and women, small-town existence and the fallibility of memory, won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday. Ms. Munro, 82, is the 13th woman to win the prize.
     Announcing the award in Stockholm, the Swedish Academy said that Ms. Munro was a 'master of the contemporary short story.'
     Ms. Munro, who lives in Clinton, a town in Ontario, told a writer from The Globe and Mail this year that she planned to retire after Dear Life, her 14th story collection.
     In a statement from Penguin Random House, her publisher, Ms. Munro said that she was 'amazed, and very grateful' for the prize."
— Julie Bosman, The New York Times
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"... lit on fire with excitement"

"… But The Silent Wife [by A. S. A. Harrison] has a striking story behind its publication that makes it an unlikely best seller: In a season that has been dominated by brand-name authors—Khaled Hosseini, Stephen King and J. K. Rowling—Ms. Harrison was a Toronto writer and an unknown, who had never published a novel before. Her book was released as a paperback original, not a hardcover, which is the preferred, more expensive format chosen when a publisher wants a book to make a big splash.

     And in a real-life tragic twist, Ms. Harrison died of cancer in April, only weeks before her book was published. She was 65….
     Samantha Haywood, Ms. Harrison’s literary agent in Canada, said that Ms. Harrison spent much of her career working as an editor and writing nonfiction under the name Susan Harrison.
     Until The Silent Wife, Ms. Harrison’s attempts at fiction had sputtered out. She wrote two novels that Ms. Haywood described as 'cozy mysteries,' but they never sold to a publisher.
     Then Ms. Harrison had the idea for The Silent Wife, with its concept of his-and-hers narratives. 'She was lit on fire with excitement,' Ms. Haywood said. “It was quite fully realized as an idea.'"
— Julie Bosman, The New York Times
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PO'd Publishers Poo-poo Pulitzer Prize Pronouncement

Joseph Pulitzer, 1847 - 1911
(From: Wikipedia)

"One day after the Pulitzer Prize board said it would not award a Pulitzer in fiction for the first time in 35 years, the publishing industry was still seething, with some going as far as offering surrogate winners.
     Publishers Weekly posted a list of books from 2011 that could have been chosen, including Chad Harbach’s Art of Fielding and The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka.
     On Tuesday, Sarah McNally, the owner of McNally Jackson Books in SoHo, said she would present her own awards to The Great Night by Chris Adrian, We the Animals by Justin Torres and Pym by Mat Johnson.
     Publishers Weekly posted a list of books from 2011 that could have been chosen, including Chad Harbach’s Art of Fielding and The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka.
     On Twitter, Doubleday suggested the Twitterverse choose its own Pulitzer winner (using the hashtag #TwitterPulitzer), immediately prompting nominations like The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta and The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides.
     Striking a rare note of optimism, publishers of the three fiction finalists said they hoped the books would nevertheless get a boost in a rare year without a winner in the spotlight. 'In years past it’s the Pulitzer winner that captures all the attention and all the sales,' said Paul Bogaards, a spokesman for Alfred A. Knopf. 'But since this year there was not a winner and there’s much conversation about the finalists, this may be an opportunity and a catalyst for sales.'”
— Julie Bosman, The New York Times
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Curvature of the Spine

Photo: design345

"With the e-book revolution upending the publishing business, Madeline McIntosh, the president of sales, operations and digital for Random House, stood at the lectern on the opening day [of the Columbia Publishing Course] in June, projecting a slide depicting the industry as a roller coaster, its occupants frozen in motion at the top of a steep loop.
[...]'You never know what’s going to happen,' Carolyn Pittis, the senior vice president of global author services at HarperCollins, told a packed room of students several days into the course. 'So it’s very exciting for those of us who spent many years when a lot of things didn’t happen.'
[...] In the past year, e-books have skyrocketed in popularity, especially in genre fiction like romance and thrillers. For some new releases, the first week has brought more sales of electronic copies than of print copies."— Julie Bosman, The New York Times
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