It’s every author’s dream: You write a book that everybody loves. It gets fabulous reviews-one of them on the front page of The New York Times Book Review . You appear on the Today show and on C-Span and you tape Charlie Rose . There’s even interest from Hollywood-and you fly out to take some Read More
The Storyteller , which arrives in stores this week, is an engaging, funny novel about an aspiring author named Steven (with a V, so as not to be confused with that guy who wrote The Shining ) King, who inherits a friend’s manuscripts, retypes them and publishes them under yet another pseudonym-to huge professional success Read More
Since summer is slow in publishing-a few blockbusters courtesy of Hillary and Harry Potter notwithstanding-it should come as no surprise that Sunday’s New York Times Magazine piece about Random House made a sound in the forest even before it officially fell. But even by publishing’s high-decibel-chatter standards, the noise has been loud. Faxed versions of Read More
To the casual observer, the annual publishing extravaganza known as Book Expo America seems like just another in the trifecta of party-heavy, schmoozy publishing hoedowns, a stateside Frankfurt or London Book Fair. And while the three-day event held last weekend in Los Angeles boasts virtually the same cast of characters (star publishers, authors and agents), Read More
Like a couple of million other Americans, I’ve already read Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones -so the fact that it will not be appearing in paperback this summer makes no difference to my reading plans. But those who have been waiting for the paperback version of the novel, in which a murdered 14-year-old girl tells Read More
It seems counterintuitive, in a business driven by buzz, that one of the most cutting-edge weapons in a publisher’s arsenal depends on not letting people talk about-or even read-their books in advance. It’s called the embargo, and it’s looking like a pretty good strategy right now. It was used on two current best-sellers: Queen Noor’s Read More
A few years ago, I met with a prominent editor at a major house on a kind of “go-see” to introduce myself as a publishing reporter and tell her about the kinds of stories I would be writing. I told her how I planned to report the advances paid for books, how many copies were Read More
Why Is Ann Godoff
Diving on Penguin?
It’s a Lovely Match
Not since 1999, when Tina Brown dumped Condé Nast for a little adventure called Talk , has there been so much buzz about the comings and goings of a middle-aged media personage. But for the past two weeks, the only thing people in Read More
One night last November, novelist Jonathan Lethem was down on his knees pleading before his ex-wife, novelist Shelley Jackson, in front of a small group of strangers and friends at a party in Brooklyn Heights. “He was on his knees, begging Shelley,” recalled Elissa Schappell, yet another novelist and writer of the Vanity Fair book Read More
Just as he’s done for the last third of his life, the author Sidney Sheldon ended the year with a multimillion-dollar book deal, this time for a novel called Are You Afraid of the Dark? , which is expected to be published in 2003 by his longtime publisher, William Morrow. But the octogenarian author will Read More
