What's the difference between publishers and writers
29 Jun 2012 02:19:27
Public sales figures are notoriously hard to come by in the book-apps world, but HarperCollins has shared some details of how its Brian Cox's Wonders of the Universe app performed following its release in March 2012.
The publisher paid developer The Other Media more than £50k to make the app, while also investing in a PR and marketing campaign. According to digital publisher Alex Gatrell, HarperCollins needed to sell 20k copies to recoup its investment.
"Within three days we'd recouped the cos... Read Full Story
Soon Margaret Atwood's books will be legal in the internet
26 Jun 2012 01:28:59
As of today, there's a new member of the social-reading website Wattpad, alongside the likes of misstwinkletoes, bacutie4eva and xoStardust: the Booker prize-winning author Margaret Atwood.
Atwood has signed up to Wattpad to share her writing with its online community of nine million other users. Describing herself as "a writer since 1956" on her online profile, Atwood has posted two new poems on the website, is planning to share a piece of fiction this autumn and will also be the final judge o... Read Full Story
Carol Ann Duffy are trying to save one of the UK's greatest municipal libraries
26 Jun 2012 01:27:23
The poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, and a host of other literary names have joined calls to halt the destruction of hundreds of thousands of books at one of the UK's greatest municipal libraries. They have written to the head of libraries for Manchester, demanding that the book pulping stop immediately.
Manchester Central Library is in the midst of a £170m, three-year restoration of its elegant domed and porticoed building, built in the Great Depression as a symbol of hope. A vast circular insc... Read Full Story
Be smart - read books, another one The Yard by Alex Grecian
26 Jun 2012 01:24:38
The scene is London, 1889, a year after Jack the Ripper's last victim died, and the city is struggling to come to terms with his crimes.
When the body of a Scotland Yard detective is found in a trunk, his lips and eyes sewn shut, and a series of bearded men are found brutally murdered, their faces neatly shaved, it looks like at least one more serial killer is on the loose. The new man on the Yard's murder squad, Walter Day, just up from Devon, is put on the grisly case, with the help of forens... Read Full Story
Some facts about famous book Fifty Shades of Grey
25 Jun 2012 03:51:32
James, a London-based former TV executive, is now the first author ever to see three of her books sell more than 100,000 printed copies in just one week. She has also broken the weekly sales record for a paperback novel after the first book in the trilogy sold 205,130 copies in seven days, beating the previous record of 141,000.
And she looks set to continue smashing sales records: after just two months, paperback sales for the first novel now total 765,000, a number Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Co... Read Full Story
Book for your oppinion The Magic of Reality by Richard Dawkins
25 Jun 2012 03:49:27
Winter isn't really caused by Persephone's trip to the underworld, rainbows don't signal God's promise to Noah, and dawn will break each day even if the Aztec sun-god Huitzilopochtli doesn't get his daily dose of still-beating human hearts. We now know about atoms, orbits and refracted light, and Dawkins gives a clear breakdown of the scientific method, its virtues, and what it has uncovered.
When The Magic of Reality was published in hardback, it was lavishly illustrated: a coffee-table book f... Read Full Story
New winners of The Edinburgh book festival lineup
23 Jun 2012 01:53:32
Zadie Smith will be giving the first glimpse of her long-awaited new novel NW, poet Alice Oswald will put on a rare performance of Memorial, her reimagining of the Iliad, and authors from Irvine Welsh to Joyce Carol Oates will debate the key issues facing modern literature at this summer's Edinburgh international book festival.
From talks by former prime minister Gordon Brown and former hostage John McCarthy to the reminiscences of Seamus Heaney and Andrew O'Hagan about their journeys together ... Read Full Story
The English Lakes A History by Ian Thompson
23 Jun 2012 01:52:28
Eight million tourists visit the Lake District National Park each year. Yet this miniature version of the Alps has not always been seen as an ideal refuge from "the pressures of city life". Thompson's study shows that the Lake District is "an imaginative construction". Even the name is relatively recent. Its growth in popularity paralleled the rapid rise of the first great industrial city – Manchester, just 75 miles away. In 1727, Defoe was dismissive of the area: its hills were "all barren and ... Read Full Story
Harry Potter is in the new form
23 Jun 2012 01:48:23
Comic book legend Alan Moore is courting the wrath of Harry Potter fans after giving the long-awaited antichrist in his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen books a remarkable resemblance to the boy wizard.
The popular comic book series has traced the adventures of Mina Murray, Allan Quatermain and others, referencing everything from Brecht's Threepenny Opera to Rosemary's Baby and the Rolling Stones as the League journeys through history. In the heavily embargoed Century 2009, out this week, they... Read Full Story
About new book Vesuvius by Gillian Darley
22 Jun 2012 09:59:17
Last erupting in 1944, Vesuvius appears to be sleeping, just a few vaporous wisps hinting at its fearsome reputation. The monitoring equipment strewn over its slopes is, however, a reminder not to be lulled into complacency by the picturesque murals in local cafés: as Darley ominously points out, the people who live in the volcano's shadow are facing "a natural catastrophe on a quite unimaginable scale". That note of alarm aside, Darley sticks to a measured history of the site, exploring its sta... Read Full Story
Problems in book selling field
22 Jun 2012 09:56:51
The crisis for independent bookshops shows no signs of abating as the inexorable rise of ebooks continues to cause problems for the beleaguered sector.
New figures from the Booksellers Association show that the number of independent booksellers fell to 1,094 by the end of 2011, down from 1,159 in 2010 and 1,289 in 2009. The 65 casualties last year range from Dartmouth's famous Harbour Bookshop, founded 60 years ago by Christopher Robin Milne, to The Travel Bookshop in Notting Hill, made famous ... Read Full Story
If you love poems John Fowles - they have published!
22 Jun 2012 09:54:00
Unpublished poems by the late John Fowles are set to reveal a new side to the reclusive author of The Magus, The Collector and The French Lieutenant's Woman.
Fowles, who died in 2005, aged 79, published just one volume of poetry in his lifetime, Poems, which was released only in the US, way back in 1973. But the author actually wrote poetry before he began his career as a novelist, and said that he found it "an enormous relief from the constant play-acting of fiction". "I never pick up a book o... Read Full Story
