Spy novelist and Guardian blogger Charles Cumming takes a closer look at the writing-life of James Bond author Ian Fleming, and decides that the myths have overshadowed the truth somewhat.

On the face of it, 007’s creator was an impossibly glamorous figure, a womaniser and bon viveur, cigarette holder in one hand, Ursula Andress’s telephone number in the other. His books sold by the million. John F. Kennedy revealed From Russia With Love to have been one of his favourite books. No novelist ever had it so easy, or so good.

The reality, of course, was somewhat different. Fleming was insecure about his reputation; in common with most commercially-successful novelists, he wanted to be taken seriously by the literati. At times, he found the demands of writing the Bond novels overwhelming. In 1964, for example, as he was about to embark on The Man with the Golden Gun, Fleming wrote a letter to Sir John Betjeman. “I must warn you that I am seriously running out of puff,” he complained. “My inventive streak is very nearly worked out.” Later that year, at the tender age of 56, Fleming died. He lived to see just two of the Bond films, Dr. No and From Russia with Love, and never fully enjoyed the fruits of his success.

According to The Baltimore Sun, hometown hero Tom Clancy is heading to Maryland’s highest court today to do battle with Wanda T. King – formerly Wanda Clancy – over rights to a series of books that bears his name.

At issue is a lucrative series of a dozen books called Tom Clancy’s Op-Center – a fictional U.S. anti-terrorist agency written in a Clancy-esque style and given muscular titles such as Op-Center: Acts of War and Op-Center: State of Siege. […] Clancy will fight to overturn a 2005 decision by a Calvert County Circuit Court judge giving [his ex-wife] control of [the] series.

While Clancy and former-friend-turned-business-adversary Steve Pieczenik are credited with creating the series, the bulk of the writing has fallen to a less exalted author named Jeff Rovin – whose name can generally be found on the covers in much smaller print than Clancy’s. […] The famous writer apparently became disenchanted with the series after King walked away with an equal share of the Jack Ryan Limited Partnership as part of the couple’s divorce settlement. In an e-mail introduced as evidence in the case, Clancy said of the Op-Center books: “I don’t even read them.”

The most gossipy parts of the story are toward the end, when Sun reporter Michael Dresser looks back at the messy-sounding divorce that preceded all of this.

Tom and Wanda Clancy’s marriage of more than 25 years apparently began falling apart in 1995, when she filed for divorce charging that her husband had committed adultery with a New York woman nicknamed “Ping-Ping” whom he met over the Internet.

[…]

In the Calvert County trial, Clancy claimed he wanted to take his name off the Op-Center novels for business reasons. Among other things, he claimed that the books were not making money and were hurting his “literary reputation.”

[…]

Pieczenik quoted Clancy as vowing to kill the Op-Center series before he would give “another dollar” to King and describing her in terms that devoted family man Jack Ryan would never have uttered about the mother of his children.

In literary circles, there is probably no author more loathed than the U.S. thriller writer James Patterson, who freely admits to writing his books – which he pumps out at a rate of eight or so a year – with the assistance of a large stable of co-writers. Not that Patterson gives a fig. His books have sold 130-million copies worldwide, and now, according to The Independent, a survey has found that U.K. libraries lend more of his books than those of any other author.

Titles by the author were lent more than 1.5 million times between July 2006 and June 2007, an annual survey found. Such is his popularity that he has ousted the children’s writer Jacqueline Wilson from the number one spot, according to the Public Lending Right figures.

His primacy in the world of book lending is bound to reignite the debate on the “consortium style” working practices of some popular writers, where teams of co-writers help with the process of putting together a novel.

[…]
When Random House took over as his publisher last year, Patterson was referred to as a “company”, according to Joel Rickett, deputy editor of The Bookseller. The publishing house also claimed that he has had more number one bestsellers around the world in the past five years than Dan Brown, J. K. Rowling, Tom Clancy and John Grisham combined. Mr. Rickett said while his collaborative way of working may be frowned upon by some, it was a more common way of working in the thriller genre.

“If you compare his way of working to other writing teams such as those in television, it’s not that unusual. He appears to have a keen awareness of brand and there’s a certain amount of cringing in this country but it is really about establishing a name that readers can trust”

It’s been five years now since Dan Brown’s insanely popular The Da Vinci Code was published, and a lot of publishing industry types are getting antsy waiting for the follow-up, which is purported to be about freemasonry and America’s founding fathers.

From The Wall Street Journal:

The whole industry is impatient. Book sales are generally sluggish, and one explosive, high-profile title can jump-start sales across the board as customers pour into the stores and walk out with a bagful of titles. […] So where is the new novel? It’s a mystery worthy of the deepest secrets of the Knights Templar. Mr. Brown, holed up in New Hampshire, isn’t saying. His agent, Heide Lange, isn’t, either.

“When a major author doesn’t deliver, you get down on your knees and pray,” says Laurence Kirshbaum, a book agent who heads up LJK Literary Management in New York. “You can’t threaten, you can’t cajole, you wait.” Back in November 2004, a spokeswoman for Doubleday said the target publishing date for Mr. Brown’s next book was 2005, although she noted that “there are no guarantees.”

Now, the publisher is hinting that a manuscript is close. “Dan Brown has a very specific release date for the publication of his new book, and when the book is published, his readers will see why,” says Stephen Rubin, president of Bertelsmann’s Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group, whose Doubleday imprint publishes Mr. Brown. Mr. Rubin declined further comment.

From there, the Wall Street Journal reporter ties himself in knots trying to guess what the “very specific release date” will be. Could it be July 4th, perhaps? Or Oct. 13th, when the cornerstone of the White House was laid in 1792? Or maybe it’ll be Sept. 18, the same day that president Washington led a Masonic parade down Pennsylvania Avenue to lay the cornerstone of the Capitol Building in 1793?

For our money, the more pressing question is: how is Doubleday going to sell the film rights to this one, considering that the film has already been made under the title National Treasure?

The New York Times is reporting that Jessica Seinfeld, the wife of comedian Jerry Seinfeld, has been having to field accusations of plagiarism relating to her new cookbook, Deceptively Delicious, a guide for parents of picky eaters.

[…] a number of readers posting on Amazon.com and Oprah.com and other Web sites have pointed out some similarities between Ms. Seinfeld’s book, which was published this month by Collins, an imprint of HarperCollins, and another cookbook published by Running Press, an imprint of the Perseus Books Group, in April.

That book, The Sneaky Chef, by Missy Chase Lapine, who is not a celebrity, also suggests that parents purée healthy foods like spinach and sweet potatoes and hide them in childhood favorites like macaroni and cheese or brownies.

Those sorts of similarities, the article suggests, are about as damning as it gets, which isn’t all that damning, if you ask us. Haven’t parents been using those techniques for centuries? And though Missy Chase Lapine is described as “not a celebrity,” she is the former publisher of Eating Well magazine, which means she’s not exactly a starving nobody.

The weird part of all this, however, is that no one involved is officially accusing Ms. Seinfeld.

“Honestly I can’t speculate, and I’m not going to accuse anyone of anything,” Ms. Lapine said. “I suppose it’s possible it’s a coincidence.”

Nevertheless, the speculation was enough to get Mr. Seinfeld himself on the phone with the Times reporter:

“Let’s be realistic — my wife isn’t in this for the money or the publicity.” He added, “I really don’t think we have another Watergate here.”

One of the more highly anticipated movie releases this fall is an adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s enormously popular bestseller The Kite Runner, but it looks as if most of us will have to wait until after Christmas to see it. According to The Washington Post, the planned early November release has been pushed back so that the film’s two child stars – Afghan natives Zekeria Ebrahim and Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada – can be evacuated from the country.

The move follows warnings that the two boys could face reprisal attacks over a scene in which Hassan, played by Ahmad Khan, is raped by an ethnic Pashtun thug.

[…]

Abdul Latif Ahmadi, president of Afghan Film, the state-run film company, said he and many others repeatedly warned The Kite Runner filmmakers, including producer E. Bennett Walsh and director Marc Forster, that that scene could provoke dangerous problems among religiously conservative Afghans, who might find it insulting.

[…]

“This is the mentality of the people in Afghanistan,” which has a 28 percent literacy rate, Ahmadi explained. “People don’t realize that it’s not true. When they watch a film, they accept it — it’s real, why did they do it?”

The film will be given a limited U.S. release on Dec. 14, in order to qualify for Oscar consideration, but it won’t open widely until sometime in January. The film won’t be released in Afghanistan at all, but, as The Washington Post points out, Afghanis will likely have many opportunities to see it on bootleg DVDs.

Though the new “Special Illustrated Edition” of Yann Martel’s Life of Pi isn’t due out from Knopf Canada until November 17, the Guardian has put together a short slide show of Croatian artist Tomislav Torjanac’s full-colour oil-paintings. You can see them here.

For the most part, the images are fairly literal-seeming representations of events from the book, which is fine, but they’re maybe a little too reminiscent of those illustrated children’s bibles a lot of us grew up with. Come to think of it, the illustrations actually make the book look kind of like a kid’s book. Maybe that’s the intention, though, who knows?

If you’re like us, you’re probably getting real sick of hearing about O.J. Simpson’s quasi-confessional If I Did It, but attention must be paid when the queen herself, Oprah, thrusts it back into the limelight. Yesterday, she invited the Goldman family onto her show to discuss the book and their decision to publish it, a choice for which they have been criticized. According to MSNBC, which has posted a good summation of the show’s highlights, Oprah said it was a “moral, ethical dilemma” for her to give more publicity to the book:

Winfrey acknowledged that her program often promotes books and authors, yet, she said, “I don’t want to be in the position to promote this book, because I, too, think it’s despicable.”

The MSNBC piece ends by stating that, as of yesterday, If I Did It was No. 8 in sales at Barnes and Noble and No. 52 on Amazon.com. According to a more recently updated piece on The Book Standard website, however, the book has subsequently shot up to No. 1 at Barnes and Noble and No. 2 on Amazon.com. Way to go Oprah…

Every year, the rare and used books website Bookfinder.com releases a bestseller list of out-of-print books, and this year’s list has now been unveiled. Some of the highlights are Cameron Crowe’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High: A True Story, Jessica Simpson’s now forebodingly titled I Do: Achieving Your Dream Wedding, David Manners’ The Great Tool Emporium, which describes itself as “a pictorial extravaganza of the tools of yesterday and today,” and photographer Larry Clark’s too-icky-to-ever-be-printed-again Teenage Lust.

You can see the full list – which has been broken down into several categories – here.

Michael Ondaatje will be the featured author on the BBC World Book Club’s fifth anniversary show on Sept. 28, speaking about his novel The English Patient. Host Harriet Gilbert will interview Ondaatje at Canada House in London, posing questions from listeners. In the past, the club has also featured Canadian novels Life of Pi by Yann Martel and The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood.

No word on whether on Ondaatje will be rereading his novel in preparation for the event. He once told an audience at a PEN Canada event that he doesn’t reread his own work and joked that if he did read The English Patient again he would probably be surprised there was no bathtub scene.

Thanks to John W. MacDonald’s blog for the tip.

According to a website called China View, Malaysian readers are scooping up pirated editions of the final Harry Potter installment in droves.

Cashing in on the popularity of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, pirates have mass-produced paperback editions which are retailed at 48 ringgit (14 U.S. dollars) each, the New Straits Times reported.

They are available at selected news vendors and bookstores, some of whom are selling the books at 60 ringgit (18 U.S. dollars) but with a 20 percent discount.

Checks at several news vendors and bookstores showed that the pirated book copied the original version wholesale, from its front and back covers and publisher’s logo to even the barcode.

Apparently, the pirated editions are selling like hotcakes, especially among the country’s student population. No word yet if the book’s Malaysian publisher will be cracking down on this, but we’re sure that Bloomsbury and Rowling herself are feeling very disappointed with the Malays right about now.

As if hardcore James Bond fans weren’t traumatized enough by the recent “re-imagining” of their hero in Casino Royale (which, of course, turned out just fine), now they’re going to have to fret and fuss about another re-imagining in the print realm. According to The New York Times, the Ian Fleming Estate has authorized English author Sebastian Faulks to carry on the 007 series. The new novel, which will go by the title Devil May Care, will by published by Penguin U.K. on May 28, 2008, the 100th anniversary of Fleming’s birth. When asked to compare his approach to Fleming’s, Faulks had this to say:

In his house in Jamaica, Ian Fleming used to write 1,000 words in the morning, then go snorkeling, have a cocktail, lunch on the terrace, more diving, another 1,000 words in late afternoon, then more martinis and glamorous women. In my house in London, I followed this routine exactly, apart from the cocktails, the lunch and the snorkeling.

The New York Times investigates that perpetual publishing mystery: what makes a book a bestseller? The answer, according to the article, is: who knows? Books that are bounced from slush pile to slush pile go on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies. Others that seem to be surefire hits get pulped within months of publication.

Brian DeFiore, a literary agent, asks: “Is it the cover? The title? The buzz wasn’t there? Timing? It wasn’t that good?”

The answer is that no one really knows. “It’s an accidental profession, most of the time,” said William Strachan, editor in chief at Carroll & Graf Publishers. “If you had the key, you’d be very wealthy. Nobody has the key.”

It’s the publishing equivalent of a Greek myth in which the gods – on a whim, on a bet, for a joke – take turns interfering in human fate: “This thriller about the Knights Templar shall succeed; this one shall fail. This wry comedy about a lonely, weight-obsessed, husband-seeking office worker shall succeed….”

Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez not only stirred things up this week with his address to the U.N., in which he referred to President George W. Bush as the devil, he also started an incorrect rumour that renowned linguist and political thinker Noam Chomsky was dead. At a news conference, Chávez expressed regret at “not having met that icon of the American left, the linguist Noam Chomsky, before his death.”

The New York Times checked in on Chomsky and found him alive and well, working and writing. The scholar was, however, struggling to get through 10,000 emails he had received regarding Chávez’s remark.

Chomsky said he was not offended by Chávez’s error. In fact, The Times reported that “while addressing world leaders at the United Nations, [Chávez] flagged Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance, which Mr. Chomsky published in 2003, as a must-read.” It propelled the book into Amazon’s top 10 bestsellers.

Is Chávez the new Oprah?

Related links:
Click here for the full story in The New York Times

In case anyone missed it, James Frey has spoken in-depth to a reporter – Laura Barton, writing for The Guardian – for the first time since the massive controversy over his Oprah-anointed but exaggerated “memoir,” A Million Little Pieces. The interview makes for a longish and frustrating and not very rewarding piece, so we’ll save you some time by highlighting the most salient points.

1. All that media attention sure has made for a rough few months.

2. People on the street understand, though. “Most people just say they loved the books, or it helped them, or someone they knew.”

3. Doubleday surely must have known from the start that Pieces was a “manipulated manuscript.”

4. Frey was a cultural scapegoat. “People feel frustrated by a lot of distortions by politicians, by members of the media, by movie stars, by tabloid journalists, and it was like a sorta confluence of events that I happened to be in the middle of.”

5. The Smoking Gun, the website that broke the news of the book’s falsehoods, was just doing its job – but really, it’s kind of a sleazy job, innit? “Their job is to get people to come to their website, to look at what they do. I just never thought that I was that big a target.”

6. He did have an anesthesia-free root canal – or at least, that’s what’s “true to my memory.”

7. North Americans can’t grasp the nuances of the dance between fiction and non- because they’re simply unsophisticated. “I think it has in certain ways to do with being a young culture, with being a culture that has less of an artistic and literary canon than some of the older European cultures.”

8. The publishers and agents who disowned Frey during the controversy are still making lots of money from his work.

Actually, he may have a point with that last one.

A couple of points that are intriguingly not explored in the article are: (a) How has Frey spent the money he’s made? Has he given any of it away? And (b) If the book was always meant to be a kind of postmodern freeplay of fact and fiction, why did he repeatedly insist that every word was true until it was proven otherwise?

Anyway, lest we think that the Frey fiasco has soured the market on confessional memoirs, writer Choire Sicha sets us straight with a feature in The New York Observer. And the story looks at the interesting question of where the policies of Alcoholics Anonymous — to which many such memoirists belong — fit in. “Members of A.A. have been struggling with the significance of that second ‘A’ for more than half a century. Within the group, members openly discuss their alcoholism; outside the group, they refrain from discussing their membership. That’s the theory.”

Related links:
Click here for the James Frey interview
Click here for the New York Observer feature

Dr. Seuss is sacred. Who doesn’t remember the unmistakable illustrations and wonderfully offbeat plots of childhood classics such as The Cat in the Hat, Green Eggs and Ham, One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish, and so many more?

In recent years, Hollywood has been seizing on the enduring popularity of the books and reinterpreting Seuss for film. First came How the Grinch Stole Christmas — in live action with Jim Carrey in the title role and lots of prosthetic make-up. Then, a live-action Cat in the Hat starring Mike Myers.

So what title from the Seuss canon will Hollywood disfigure next? Why, Horton Hears a Who, of course. As the Book Standard reports, Horton will star Jim Carrey and Steve Carell as the voices of the CGI-animated Horton and the mayor of Whoville, respectively.

Quillblog does not deny that Steve Carell has his moments of comedic brilliance, but still.

The problem is determining how to reconcile an adult appreciation for the fine talents of Steve Carell with nostalgia for the faded Seuss-illustrated pages of childhood. Any suggestions?

Related links:
More details on Horton at the Book Standard

The New York Times confirms a story that appeared on Radaronline.com earlier this week that “James Frey, the author who admitted making up portions of his best-selling memoir, A Million Little Pieces, and his publisher, Random House, have agreed in principle on a settlement with readers who filed lawsuits claiming they had been defrauded.”

The Times relies on an anonymous source for details of the settlement because it has yet to be approved by a judge, but states that “consumers who bought the book on or before Jan. 26 – when both the publisher and author released statements acknowledging that Mr. Frey had altered certain facts – will be eligible for a full refund.” If you didn’t keep your receipt, the publisher will accept some other proofs of purchase such as a particular page of the hardcover novel or the paperback’s front cover.

Quillblog prefers the more creative terms set out in a mock memo from Random House on Edward Champion’s Return of the Reluctant blog. The memo promises a refund of $4.24 for anyone returning the dust jacket with a hand-drawn moustache on the author’s photo, and a special offer: “If you send us a videotape, a VCD, or a DVD, in which you can demonstrate that you led or coerced a group of people to throw at least 200 copies into a public bonfire, we would like to offer you a promising career here at Random House.”

Related links:
Click here for the full story in The New York Times
Click here for Edward Champion’s Return of the Reluctant blog

Radar Online is reporting that Random House U.S. is looking to settle the various class-action lawsuits brought against it by readers of James Frey’s notoriously fictional memoir A Million Little Pieces who claim they were victims of fraud.

As part of the settlement, Random House (which has not confirmed any of the details of the story) will offer a full refund to all who bought the book before it was officially announced to contain many, mmm, embellishments. The catch: you need your original sales receipt to claim the money, so unless you’ve been using it as a bookmark, tough luck.

Another unconfirmed rumour has it that Random House is planning to send an English professor to the home of every enraged reader of Frey’s tome to explain the meaning of the expression “caveat lector.”

Related links:
Read the Radar Online story here

Nicholas Clee has a story in The Times about three books that claim to be #1 bestsellers, and the vaguely dishonest, semantical games their authors and publishers play to justify that claim. One book was #1 in Britain for a week, though not internationally, as its jacket claims. Another was the top seller at a single book chain. The third, and most suspect, was very briefly ranked number one on Amazon UK, thanks to its author, who “sent out e-mails offering ‘certain bonuses’ (mostly tennis-related) to people who bought his book from Amazon, hoping for a top 100 position.”

After taking the time to make clear that The Times‘ own list cannot be so easily manipulated, Clee gives some explanation as to why some authors and publishers have resorted to this kind of sleight of hand:

“Dan Brown’s domination of the 2005 bestseller lists charts caused a lot of grief to ambitious novelists who found the #1 position blocked to them for most of the year.”

Perhaps we’ll soon see books marketed as being top sellers based on the fact that their authors were once given a mug that said “#1 Dad.”

Related links:
Read the story in The Times

While getting one’s jollies from poring over accurate sales data only recently became a favourite activity among Canadian bookfolk, Australia six-year-old book industry sales data program, according to an Australian article, is like many a six-year-old in that it’s causing somewhat of a ruckus.

The story is a profile of Michael Webster, who “introduced the contentious book sales tracker Nielsen BookScan to Australian publishing” and, while he can’t leap over tall buildings in a single bound, he is “the kind of man grown authors have reason to fear … [and] partly because of him, the Australian book industry is undergoing a mini-revolution. In the process, he has helped turn a quaintly old-fashioned trade — described by novelist Robert Drewe as being ‘like journalism, with better table manners’ — into a more efficient and more ruthless industry.”

Webster says that BookScan forces publishers to see themselves as an industry. “It’s bringing that cold, hard commercial side into it,” he says. BookScan provides publishers and bookstores with “continuous, comprehensive sales data, as it surveys everything from postmodern poetry to street directories at the point of sale.” It also has a pretty good track record — it claims to track around 90% of book sales across the country, courtesy of 100 Australian bookstores, and gets the info out to their customers within a week.

But, according to the Australian article, “for a service that ostensibly tracks barcodes, BookScan divides opinions like no other publishing industry tool.” Yea-sayers give props to the transparency the service brings to the trade, while naysayers say the lists “foster obssession” with bestsellers.

Looks like we have a whole barrel o’ fun in store…

Related links:

Indie booksellers in Canada may think they’ve got it bad when it comes to the ever-encroaching chains, but English booksellers took another blow last week when “Ottakar’s, the second-largest book chain, finally fell to the largest, Waterstone’s, creating an even bigger and more powerful chain across the country,” according to a Guardian story. “Added to this, the huge supermarket chains compete directly with the independent booksellers, and undercut them so heavily on price that the bookshops, with their high-street rents, cannot survive. Forty have closed in the past six months. In 2005 Tesco increased its book sales by 50 per cent, and earlier this year it was the top retailer for a number of bestsellers. In fact, the supermarkets now sell more books (with only a tiny choice of titles) than the whole independent sector put together.”

But the independent publishers are coming together with the bookshops to give The Man a poke in the eye. Faber’s chief executive, Stephen Page, has “devised an inspired scheme that may now help bookshops and publishers compete more fairly and effectively with the chains” by creating an alliance between independent publishers and bookshops.

An independent publisher alliance began last year, “when a group of fiercely independent publishers, Atlantic, Canongate, Faber, Icon, Profile, Short Books and Quercus, came together to consolidate their sales in the UK in the hope of being able to compete more effectively with the conglomerates” (and is coming along nicely, with entree into arenas like Tesco, Asda, Amazon, and Woolworths), and now booksellers have been welcomed into the fold. “As their market share has declined and all efforts have focused on the bestseller lists, publishers — at their peril — have neglected the independent bookshops. So the Alliance has created more favourable terms, comparable to those given to the chains, for the independents. There are going to be special promotions — summer reading and Christmas campaigns — and Alliance authors will be asked to focus their bookshop marketing activities on the independents.”

The alliance also hopes to try a recommended-reading list similar to the American indie publishers’ Book Sense List, and have found that booksellers are loving the alliance so far.

Related links:
Check out the Guardian story here

Business Week looks at a couple of small American literary presses that are making a mark. Most prominently, New York’s Archipalego Books, which has scored a great deal of attention this year for an English translation of Lebanese author Elias Khoury’s novel Gate of the Sun. “The buzz started immediately and The New York Times and Publishers Weekly bestowed rave reviews on the tale, a contemporary homage to the Middle-Eastern epic 1001 Nights, reset in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon,” writes Business Week’s Stacy Perman. And later: “At a time when the book world continues to struggle, focusing mainly on bestsellers to remain profitable, Archipelago is one of a growing number of small publishers who are upending the industry stasis and redefining the business of publishing on their own terms.”

Related links:
Click here for the Business Week article

The world just can’t seem to leave its wealthiest conspiracy theorist alone. The latest incident in the Da Vinci Code money grab sees Mikhail Anikin, a Russian art historian, vying for a public apology and a slice of the Brown pie as compensation for Dan Brown’s alleged use of at least two of his theories in The Da Vinci Code. The theories in question hold that Leonardo Da Vinci was both a painter and a theologian and that his most famous painting, the Mona Lisa, is not a portrait so much as an encoded theological message on the state of the Christian Church that combines the images of both Jesus and the Virgin Mary. Anikin told the Agence France-Press that he shared these theories with colleagues in Texas, one of whom asked if he could impart the information to “a detective book author that he knew.” Anikin says he granted permission on the condition that the theory be attributed to him if used in one of the author’s books.

Anikin is threatening Brown with a lawsuit if compensation and an apology are not promised within the next couple of days. Keep up to date on the news with In Other Media, who finds that a happy side effect of all these lawsuits is that she can intelligently discuss DVC at cocktail parties, despite never having read the book.

Related links:
Click here for the story on the Book Standard website
Click here for the report on CBC.ca

As In Other Media composes this post, the indispensible auto-updating ESPN.com scoreboard indicates that Bucknell is leading Arkansas by five with less than five minutes to play in the second half. If you enjoy U.S. college basketball and, in particular, the NCAA tournament (perhaps better-known by broadcaster Brent Musburger’s term: “March Madness”) then that made perfect sense to you, if not, well, sorry. But The Book Standard has a piece (which we noticed on Bookslut) about how college baseketball books are dominating its sports and recreation bestsellers chart right now. The top title is a book by Will Blythe called To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever about the rivalry (probably the most intense in North American team sports, right now) between Duke and North Carolina. Perhaps the most intriguing book project inspired by that rivalry, however, is Aaron Dinin’s The Krzyzewskiville Tales, a work of fiction modeled on The Canterbury Tales and set in the tent community named for Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski where “the Cameron Crazies” (diehard Duke fans) camp out to get tickets for home games at Cameron Indoor Stadium. Dinin, a junior at Duke when the book was finished, was published, naturally, by Duke University Press.

UPDATE: Barring a buzzer beater, it looks like Bucknell is going to hold on; they lead by three with eight seconds left. God bless ESPN!

Related links:
Click here for The Book Standard article
Click here for the Duke University profile of Dinin

The publication of bestsellers lists derived from data released by BookNet Canada in Q&Q’s January/February issue has led litblogger Alex Good to comment on the state of bestsellers lists in Canada. Good cites a statement in the National Post that says that “the BookNet numbers — which are based on figures obtained from retailers making up 65% — 70% of the total book market — throw ‘into question the accuracy of some previously published, widely quoted bestseller lists.’ According to the new system, not one Canadian book was among the top 20 sellers in the pre-Christmas season. Mass-market books from foreign authors dominated.”

This leaves Good wondering where the figures in the Canada-friendly Globe and Mail and Maclean’s bestseller lists come from, calling them “useless exercises in cultural politics,” and ultimately challenging the aforementioned publications to scrap their lists altogether.

Related links:
Click here for Good’s piece
Click here for a September 2004 Q&Q article expanding on the ugly truths revealed by BNC bestsellers lists

The U.S. book news site, The Book Standard, has published a list of the top 200 bestselling books of 2005 in the U.S. Not surprisingly, the latest Harry Potter was #1. In second is James Frey’s Oprah-endorsed memoir, A Million Little Pieces. “Frey’s drug-rehab memoir sold 1,769,000 units as a paperback since its publication in September,” says The Book Standard. Rounding out the top five, in order, are: The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, 1776 by David McCullough, and The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. The top Canadian-authored book is Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink at #13, sandwiched between Your Best Life Now by toothy TV preacher Joel Osteen and Natural Cures “They” Don’t Want You to Know About by shifty TV huckster Kevin Trudeau.

Related links:
Click here for The Book Standard’s full list

An article on The Independent site is reporting that Scholastic, J.K. Rowling’s American publisher, is poised to lose big on the latest installment in the Harry Potter series, in spite of the book’s record-breaking first print run of 10.8 million copies. The reason for the unexpected downturn is due largely to a case of extreme optimism on behalf of Scholastic. When copies of the Half-Blood Prince began breaking sales records in the first 24 hours, the publisher decided to go back to press to print another 2.7 million copies to meet the demand. But now that the buying frenzy has tailed off, Scholastic may be looking at a whopping 2.5 million unsold copies that will eventually find their way back to the publisher.

Related links:
Read the article on The Independent site

It must be a difficult time for Bill Simmons, better known to his ESPN.com readership as The Sports Guy or, according to Slate magazine, as America’s greatest sportswriter. (This is a title Slate also bestowed on Sports Illustrated’s Gary Smith two years ago.) Simmons’ beloved Boston Red Sox are currently getting pounded by the Chicago White Sox in the playoffs, but his book about the Red Sox, Now I Can Die in Peace has made The New York Times bestsellers list. And in the middle of this trying week, he has been on a book tour. On his blog, named “More Cowbell” for the Christopher Walken line from a now-legendary Saturday Night Live sketch, Simmons questions the usefulness of the tour: “I am of the opinion that, other than the signings, none of this crap matters — if people are going to buy the book, they’re going to buy the book. But the book industry feels the exact opposite about the process, and who knows? Maybe they’re right.”

Meanwhile, with 500,000 unique visitors to his ESPN.com columns per month, Simmons has become, in the words of the Slate headline writers, a “phenomenon.” Writes Bryan Curtis: “The Sports Guy … is a subversion of the traditional sports column. Charles Fountain, who teaches a sportswriting course at Northeastern University, points out that this is not unlike the way in which The Daily Show With Jon Stewart subverts the traditional nightly news broadcast. Like Stewart, Simmons has a childlike obsession with pop culture. Simmons’ is the only sports column in which athletes sit comfortably alongside Survivor, The O.C., and Chuck Klosterman.”

Related links:
Click here for Bill Simmons’ blog, More Cowbell
Click here for the Slate article on Simmons

Russia, the nation that spawned many of the world’s greatest books both thick and thin, is now experiencing some literary hardships. On a recent bestsellers list posted on the country’s online bookseller, Ozon.ru, “six of the top 10 and all of the top three [books] were translations of foreign authors,” reports Murdo Macleod of Scotland on Sunday. In a survey commissioned by Russia’s National Library, “37% of respondents said they never read books, only 23% considered themselves active readers, and 52% never bought books,” while further findings showed that a majority of readers preferred pulp fiction to the Russian classics. Especially disheartening is Russia’s reported return to the centuries-old subscription bookselling system, whereby an author, soliciting potential buyers, publishes his or her own book only when a sufficient number of people have signed up.

Thanks to BookNinja.com for the link.

Related links:
Click here for the full story from Scotland on Sunday

In an astonishing case, a medical self-help book by a former used-car salesman with no medical training and a long list of fraud charges is holding a high position on North American bestsellers lists, including the third spot on Q&Q’s Self-Help Bestsellers list.

Kevin Trudeau, author of the self-published Natural Cures “They” Don’t Want You to Know About, has used the dismissal of his book by medical professionals and consumer protection agencies to his advantage, according to Arthur Caplan, chair of the Department of Medical Ethics at the University of Pennsylvania. Caplan claims that the book preys on the doubts many Americans have about the health care system. If this is the case, the medical community’s response to Natural Cures may only fuel the fires of the book’s success.

The New York Consumer Protection Board has issued a public warning concerning the infomercials Trudeau uses to sell his book, and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission has banned Trudeau from appearing in misleading infomercials, Candice Choi of The Associated Press reports. A convicted felon, Trudeau has been found guilty of depositing worthless cheques and of unlawfully using credit-card numbers of customers of a memory improvement course he was promoting. He has also been charged with fraud for his promotion of products such as Exercise in a Bottle, Fat Trapper Plus, the Mega Memory System, and coral calcium as a cure for cancer.

Related links:
Click here for the full story from canada.com

A hot topic of conversation in the online literary community is the commercial success of The Traveler, an ambiguously fictional first novel written by the strangely pseudonymed John Twelve Hawks. Climbing the New York Times bestsellers list, making its way onto the pages of the international press, and being optioned for a film without so much as a book tour or interview with its mysterious author, The Traveler has become the source of much bewilderment and hoopla.

The reclusive author with a potentially true story passing as fiction is nothing new, as is shown in a recent story posted on The Times Online. The article begins with a discussion of the mother of all ambiguously fictional novels, Henri Charrière’s Papillon — about the author’s supposed imprisonment, subsequent escape and adoption into an aboriginal community in French Guiana — segues into a discussion on veracity in an author’s biography, ends with a short write-up on reclusive authors that that includes J.D. Salinger, Harper Lee, Don DeLillo, and Thomas Pynchon, among others, and ultimately blasts The Traveler, saying “the writer too shy to be named has become a cliché, and a marketing tool. The Traveler is shooting up the bestseller lists, in part because the author has declined to be identified.”

Related links:
Click here for the Times Online article
Click here for a reviewer’s discussion of the book’s hype
Click here for The Traveler’s cryptic official website

What makes readers so ravenous for Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar? The children’s classic has enjoyed over 35 years of sustained success, as Dominic Casciani writes in a feature on the BBC’s news site. “It’s said that one copy a minute has been sold since it was released in 1969. George Bush is said to rank as one of its most avid fans; film and TV rights have just been bought for £1m, and it’s rumoured to be part of a package of books the U.K. government is to send to every toddler.” The article also includes comments from dozens of readers and fans of the book – a comment from Daniel Hale of Leeds reflects the general opinion: “Viva the Caterpillar!”

Related links:
Click here for the full story from BBC News

In The Globe and Mail, Gayle Macdonald interviews Michael Roizen, co-author of the recent blockbuster self-help title, You: The Owner’s Manual. Despite his health-conscious volume – which has been a hit since being featured on Oprah – Macdonald finds the author refreshingly realistic: “Roizen clearly gets the same Everyman cravings that afflict the rest of us. On a coffee table in his suite at Toronto’s Park Plaza Hotel are the remains of a Mr. Sub foot-long, which he washed down with a diet Coke.”

Related links:
Click here for the full story in The Globe and Mail

A recent survey by The Bookseller, the British book trade’s magazine, confirms what every book professional the world over already knows: not enough people are reading. In an opinion piece for The Herald, Rosemary Goring examines the reactions to the survey within the British publishing industry. Goring praises the industry for its efforts to raise the literacy levels of the estimated 5 million adults in the U.K. who have trouble reading, but she questions an emerging consensus among publishing executives that the best way to get more people reading is to publish more bestsellers like The Da Vinci Code, which appeal to a wider readership. In other words, the book business needs to be a little less snooty and learn to cater to the lowbrow set. Goring questions this logic by pointing out that there are already plenty of reader-friendly and picture-heavy books out there, and speculates on where this reasoning may lead the industry: “If books are to be written to order, by second-guessing the desires of a market so-far resistant to anything on offer, then authors might as well take their seats at the factory production line.” (Thanks to Bookninja for the link.)

Related links:
Read Rosemary Goring’s op-ed piece in The Herald

A very interesting discussion on the often dispiriting business of book promotion is running on Mad Max Perkins’s BookAngst 101 site. The discussion was instigated by a posting on Buzz, Balls & Hype, the blog of novelist M.J. Rose, who laments the way books are promoted to readers and booksellers. “No other product/commodity/thing spends a year in development and then gets three weeks on the shelf,” she writes. “Word of mouth takes at least 12-14 weeks to build. Yet, the publishing industry continues to give a book — at best — 3 to 4 weeks of promotion and co-op. What’s more, there is no pre-promotion of the book to the READERS.” Rose argues that the book business could learn a lot from the film industry, which advertises films to consumers and media for months prior to release. Perkins picks up Rose’s argument on his site, claiming that the type of promotion Rose is arguing for is actually applied to many publishers’ frontlist titles, but not to the books with more modest marketing budgets. This leads him to ask: “What is the model/mechanism whereby books published at a relatively modest scale can, nonetheless, be published (read: as a verb) instead of (as so often seems to be the case) simply tossed out there to fend for themselves (read: D.O.A.).”

Related links:
Read M.J. Rose’s posting on the Books, Balls & Hype site
Read Mad Max Perkins’s response on BookAngst 101

A.S. Byatt is one of many British authors crying foul over the number of used copies of their books being sold in stores and through online bookdealers. According to an article on the Times website, the authors are especially angry that many online bookstores post the cheaper prices for used copies of their books next to the prices for new copies. The authors do not receive any royalties on these used books. Byatt is calling on the government to institute new rules to ensure that authors receive some form of reimbursement from the multi-billion-dollar used-book business. The Literary Saloon, a blog on the Complete Review site, has some interesting commentary on Byatt’s proposal, including this retort from an angry bookseller: “During 30 years of new and second-hand bookselling I have fended off the hordes of customers trying to sell back to me last year’s over-hyped, second-rate bestsellers. Authors should refund their royalties on books so soon unloved and discarded.” Scroll down to “Second-hand royalties” to read all of the responses.

Related links:
Read the article on the Times site
Read some responses to Byatt’s proposal on the Literary Saloon

Though no one has ever claimed that the methods for compiling bestseller lists are the most reliable or scientific, a recent article on the Times website claims that the official Scottish bestseller list “has been exposed as a sham. One book was included that had not sold a single copy and other titles that have sold fewer than 100 copies appear regularly in the top 10.” The influential list is compiled by the Scottish Publishers Association and is the only one to exclusively track books by Scottish authors. But a comparison of the list’s 10 bestsellers with hard sales figures from Nielsen BookData revealed that many of the books should never have made a top-100 list.

Related links:
Read the Times article

It’s the holy grail for the book industry — empirical scientific data on just what makes a bestseller a bestseller. This Science Daily article tells of a study by “UCLA physicist and complex systems theorist Didier Sornette, who used statistical physics and mathematics to analyze 138 books that made Amazon.com’s best-seller list between 1997 and April 2004.” Says Sornette: “Complex systems can be understood, and the book market is a complex system.”

But trendspotting publishers may not want to go yacht-shopping just yet. As they’re boiled down by Science Daily, Sornette’s findings seem to amount to this: that book sales can be boosted by either an “exogenous shock” (that is, a major review or media appearance) or an “endogenous shock” (that is, word of mouth), with the latter leading to a longer and more enduring sales cycle.

We look forward to the next number-crunching study, which will no doubt bring us the shocking news that books by previously best-selling authors … tend to also be bestsellers.

(Thanks to Moby Lives for the link.)

Related links:
Click here for the Science Daily piece on a physicist’s study of the bestseller lists

With award season now having wound fully down, readers who missed Toronto Star columnist Philip Marchand’s post-Giller musings will find them worth a look. He writes: “Literary scholars have a word for those little parts of a book that really aren’t part of the book – footnotes, prefaces, indices, dedications. They call them ‘paratexts.’ In the same way, all this talk about books, prizes, public readings, is para-reading. Para-reading may coincide with the actual reading of a book, or may overlap a bit, or may entirely replace it.” From there, he’s off to a discussion of the biggest publishing phenomemon since Harry Potter – The Da Vinci Code. “If you took a survey of the guests at the Giller Prize dinner I would lay odds 80 per cent of them had read The Da Vinci Code. That’s more than the percentage of guests who had read any one of the six books nominated for the prize, you can be certain.” The reason for the book’s staggering success, Marchand suggests, is the spirit of the times, which are unusually friendly to conspiracy-minded imaginings of sinister governments and shadowy cabals of power.

In yesterday’s Star, publishing reporter Judy Stoffman looks at the latest attempt to extend the Da Vinci brand — a new, second hardcover edition, this one illustrated and selling for even more than the first. Random House of Canada’s Brad Martin tells Stoffman the company is “well under way to selling a combined half million copies in Canada of the two editions.”

Related links:
Philip Marchand’s Toronto Star column
Judy Stoffman’s story on The Da Vinci Code