Following the recent controversy over whether or not a Lonely Planet guidebook author faked some of the book’s contents, Chris Taylor – who has himself written a number of Lonely Planet guides – weighs in on what he sees as an industry in decline.

Guidebook publishers will deny this, but the travel publishing industry is bound to exploit demand for what is widely seen as a glamour job — travel and get paid for it. But with so many competing guidebook series, many titles do not generate sales revenue that justifies the legwork that results in genuine personal recommendations. Most publishers who make claims to the contrary are being disingenuous.

In this context, Lonely Planet is probably one of the most responsible industry players. Nevertheless, pay rates for Lonely Planet writers have dropped with the proliferation of competing guidebook series in the past two decades. When Lonely Planet chief executive Stephen Palmer told the BBC (Lonely Planet is 75% owned by BBC World, the commercial arm of the BBC) this week that “we’re pretty confident we pay at the top of the range”, his confidence was not misplaced. What he neglected to say — and I have seen many examples — is that his company’s internal authors’ forum bristles with author posts about pay rates that have forced them to cut corners.

Read the whole piece here.

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.

Borders, the second-largest bookselling chain in the U.S., may be forced to sell itself off after hitting a financial crunch. Here are some takes on the chain’s troubles:

• Borders bookstore may be up for sale (Times Online)
• Giant Bookstore Chain Goes Broke, To Get Mopped Up By Even More Giant Bookstore Chain (Wired)
• Could Indigo target Borders? (The Globe and Mail)
• Did Borders kill the small, downtown bookstore? (MSNBC.com)
• The Rise and Fall of Borders (Gather.com)

One of the most famous and beloved libraries in the world – the New York Public Library, with the famous lion statues standing guard out front – is getting a new name: The Stephen A. Schwarzman Library.

Who is Stephen A. Schwarzman, you ask? According to The New York Times, he’s some rich guy who makes a living buying and selling things. Schwarzman is donating $100-million to the library, which is splendid and all, but does it really give him the right to recast the entire institution in his image?

Mr. Schwarzman said it was the library that proposed renaming the landmark building. “They said, ‘We’d like you to be the lead gift and give us $100 million and we’d like to rename the main branch after you,’ ” he said. “I said, ‘That sounds pretty good.’ ”

[…]

Still, the change will doubtless invite spirited commentary. Mr. Schwarzman has become something of a lightning rod for critics of Wall Street excess, especially the high-spending ways of private-equity chiefs.

The library itself has drawn criticism for some other transactions, like selling the Donnell branch in Midtown Manhattan in November to Orient-Express Hotels Ltd. for $59 million. The branch will be razed to make way for an 11-story hotel, with the library taking over the first floor and an underground level.

From Reuters:

Billionaire Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling would feel “exploited” if a fan’s unofficial encyclopedic companion to the boy wizard series was published, she said in court papers made public on Thursday.

Steve Vander Ark has written The Harry Potter Lexicon – a 400-page reference book based on his popular fan Web site (www.hp-lexicon.org). Rowling and Warner Bros. are suing RDR Books, which planned to publish the book last November.

“I am very frustrated that a former fan has tried to co-opt my work for financial gain,” Rowling, 42, who wrote the seven hugely successful Harry Potter novels, said in a declaration filed in U.S. District Court this week.

We’re not copyright lawyers, but we’re pretty sure that lexicons, literary guides, book-length exegeses, annotated editions, and literary companion volumes existed long before little Harry took his first trip aboard the Hogwarts Express.

(And note how Rowling dubs Ark a “former fan” – zing!)

Now that the crisis over parity and pricing has eased somewhat – at least for the moment – we can again turn our attention to a more pressing issue in books: how can we get them for free?

The easiest way to get free books is to work in publishing (or at, say, a publishing industry magazine), but there are millions and millions of readers – or, at least, thousands and thousands – out there who are not so lucky, and who are thus still paying money for books. And so, for them, here is the latest in free book news:

• HarperCollins will post free books on the web (The New York Times)
• Tor to give away e-books (Slashdot)
• Not free, but close: Random House U.S. will sell books online, chapter by chapter (The Wall Street Journal)
• But don’t forget: free books are rarely free (CNN Money.com)

“Few people who spend much time in the literary world emerge without at least one paranoid conspiracy theory,” writes Mark Lawson in The Guardian. Hard to disagree with that. His own theory as to what ails publishing is equally hard to dispute: “Increasingly, judgments involve not literary quality but commercial prospects.”

Though he’s referring specifically to the situation in the U.K., Lawson’s gloomy take on the current state of literary publishing is easily applied to the North American scene:

At the Christmas parties, many publishers were talking guiltily about new books by authors you might have heard of – winner of a Whitbread 20 years ago, writer of that book that became that film – that they have been forced to turn down because marketing was alarmed. This has happened largely because of a shift in the priorities of libraries, which used to be a guaranteed haven for several thousand copies of hardbacks that take a bit of brain work, but which are now rapidly ceding shelf-space to Citizens Advice Bureau leaflets or DVDs. And pressure on leisure time has made both producers and consumers of entertainment reluctant to sample a product that does not have some advance buzz.

None of this is particularly shocking, and at times it’s hard to see what Lawson’s point is beyond “we’re all doomed,” but still, it’s a cheery way to start the new year, isn’t it?

The National Post is reporting that a settlement between the Toronto Public Library and its labour union is essentially reversing the savings from the Sunday closure of 16 of the city’s libraries, announced earlier this year.

The deal was reached after an arbitrator ruled in October that the closures were contrary to the collective agreement and constituted an illegal layoff.

The settlement provides a total of $150,651 in retroactive pay to 286 library employees denied Sunday hours between Sept. 9 and Oct. 21, according to Ana-Maria Critchley, a spokeswoman for the library.

Sunday hours recommenced on Oct. 28.

The library board expected to save $400,000 had the 16 branches stayed shut on Sundays until the end of the year.

That breaks down to a savings of $23,529.41 per Sunday or $164,705.87 for the seven Sundays the libraries were locked before an arbitrator’s ruling reversed the board’s decision.

All told, that means the closures saved the city roughly $14,000 or about $125 per library per Sunday.

Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong, a well-known thorn in the side of Mayor David Miller, was quick to scold city council for failing to cut costs effectively.

“This is really disappointing,” said Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong, an opponent of the Mayor. “So many families and kids were hurt by these cuts for absolutely no need. There was no benefit.”

But the Post piece fails to mention that Minnan-Wong was one of the most vocal opponents of last summer’s proposed tax increase, which would have obviated the need for the library closures in the first place.

Still, Toronto’s problems appear to be pretty minor beside the funding crisis faced by the Windsor Public Library. The Windsor Star reports:

Taxpayers, library staff and management have reacted with dismay to news that city council has ordered the Windsor Public Library Board to make $800,000 more in budget cuts next year, without reducing hours or eliminating any of 10 local branches.

Brian Bell, chief executive officer of the library, said management is at a loss on how to achieve the goal, stating that the directive gives the cash-strapped institution next to no room to maneuver. He noted that a half million dollar cut had to be absorbed in 2005 even as the system grew from nine to 10 branches.

According to the Star, Windsor libraries are already woefully understaffed, and cuts are likely to be made to the library’s acquisitions budget.

[Bell] noted that the system averages about $1.3 million in purchases each year. Cutting back, he said may mean that rather than 100 copies of the latest Harry Potter novel, they may purchase only 28. He predicted that such resource cuts would double the number of orders on hold from 6,000 a month to 12,000. and further job-cuts would be impossible. The only viable cuts would be for acquisitions.

The answer is “yes,” according to Bits, The New York Times’s tech blog:

For years it was impossible to even suggest that Amazon buy eBay because eBay’s market value was three or four times that of Amazon. And there was good reason for that: EBay’s margins have been far higher because it simply moves bits around, while Amazon has to move boxes (and take the risk of owning inventory it can’t sell).

Now the tables are turning. Amazon is in favor on Wall Street. Its shares are up 150 percent over the last year, giving it a market value of $38 billion. EBay’s stock has been flat for a year, and it is now worth only a little more than Amazon at $45 billion.

Amazon has been improving its margins, in part because it is increasingly acting as a broker for goods sold by other merchants (and doing a better job for new merchandise than eBay stores or eBay’s Shopping.com). Amazon’s margins, to be fair, have been hurt because it is paying for a lot of two-day shipping under its Amazon Prime program. Amazon also has a wild card in its growing sideline business of selling storage and processing services to other Web businesses.

The real question, as far as we’re concerned, is, “Should some restless and massively rich tech company looking for a little lit-cachet buy Quillblog?” The answer to that is also “yes,” provided that we are guaranteed total editorial freedom, paid handsomely and by the word, and that each contributor is provided with a summer residence located near water.

Let the bidding begin.

Like many booksellers, Chris O’Brien, owner of The Miller’s Tale in Almonte, Ontario, has been wrestling with the issue of dollar-parity. As O’Brien explains on his store blog, this is the approach he’s come up with:

After many a sleepless night (well, actually, sleep is not one of my many problems) I have decided to offer my customers THREE, yes 3, choices.

Choice # 1
Ignore the following two choices and be kind to my bottom line.

Choice #2
Take 10 % off all purchases (except tickets) during the month of November. This is to celebrate our TENTH Anniversary.

Choice #3
You have the right to choose to pay the US price, when there is a US price listed on the book.

The choice is completely up to you.

As reported on Q&Q Omni, other booksellers are making similar decisions, even as more publishers wrestle with how to get their prices down. Q&Q plans to launch a more formal online discussion group on the subject of parity soon, but in the meantime, we invite you to share your own views in the comments field of this post. How bad could things get? What needs to be done? Who needs to do it?

Sci-fi author Robert J. Sawyer has sent an open letter to Toronto mayor David Miller to protest plans to cut service at the Toronto Public Library. In a passionate and compelling argument, Sawyer says, in part,

What makes Toronto so special is its multiculturalism — and it is in our libraries that newcomers to Toronto learn about the city and its traditions of inclusiveness and peacefulness. When you force library branches to curtail their hours, cut back on acquisitions, and freeze hiring, you are doing severe damage to the fabric of what once was, and can again be, the greatest city in the world. I urge you and your council to find another solution — because the current one is untenable.

Sawyer has also posted the full text of his letter as a comment on this Quillblog post.

Bad news for Toronto readers: faced with the city’s budget shortfall, the Toronto Public Library board has agreed to more than a million dollars in spending cuts this year. As the Toronto Star reports, that translates into no more Sunday service for 16 branches (including the Reference Library) and also means that 14,000 items have been dropped from the library’s acquisition plans. The board also put in place a hiring freeze, delayed a new branch opening at Jane and Dundas, cut its Storyteller in Residence program, and made various internal trims.

The police services board was also asked to cut money from its budget, and according to the Star article, chief Bill Blair is balking.

Meanwhile, in this Spacing post, library board member Adam Chaleff-Freudenthaler says he believes that if the money is found elsewhere (for example, if council decides to exercise its taxing powers rather than just putting off a decision), the TPL should be able to reverse the cuts it’s agreed to. Let’s hope he’s right, and that council won’t just take the “well, you’ve already decided you can live with the cuts” position.

In other news, the city of Ottawa is also facing a major budget shortfall. No word yet on ramifications for the library system there, though they would seem to be likely.

Sometimes, if you want to sell books, you’ve got to go where the people are: that is, bars, community centres, planes, trains, the Internet, and now, thanks to an emerging trend, people’s offices. According to a story in the San Francisco Chronicle, companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Starbucks have been hosting book events for their employees. In the case of Google, the company sweetens the pot by buying a ton of books to hand out free.

“There are so many distractions out there,” said Yelena Gitlin, publicity manager for Bloomsbury Books, who started bringing authors to Microsoft and Starbucks in 2003. “It’s hard to get people into bookstores these days, so book publishers and sellers have to come to readers — and they are often at work.”

Indeed, companies like Google are offering so many perks or “enriched lifestyle” options, as they are called — fitness classes, massage services, dry cleaning, financial advice, ski trips, round-the-clock meals and now lunch hours with famous authors — that the novice might not realize that health, well being and community were previously sought outside work.

At Yahoo, there’s even an employee by the name of Judy Moore whose title is “party princess.” Among Moore’s duties is to oversee high-profile book events.

The corporate author event originated at Microsoft Research in Seattle in the late ’90s, when science and technology authors were invited to address employees of the company’s think tank division. The program became so popular that in 2000 Linda Stone, Microsoft’s “Virtual Worlds” director, expanded it to include all kinds of authors and all of Microsoft, with the help of Kim Ricketts, Seattle’s University Bookstore event organizer. Two years later, SmartMoney magazine picked Microsoft’s author events as the employee “perk of the month,” and according to Ricketts, a new business model for bookselling was born.

“We sold and do sell a lot of books at companies,” Ricketts said. “It immediately became clear to me that this is a more efficient way to sell books.”

It sounds like a sweet gig for the authors – after all, nothing else says “captive audience” like a group of clean-shirted cubicle dwellers. The flesh-and-blood aspect is probably key, though – we’re thinking that the offices of Google and Microsoft are at least a couple of venues where Margaret Atwood’s LongPen would seem less like a novelty and more like business as usual.

The argument has been made, with respect to last week’s iPhone Tickle-Me-Elmo Harry Potter midnight madness, that breaking the embargo on the book’s contents just ruins it for readers. According to Tim Rutten in the Los Angeles Times, however, review embargoes are usually just about money.

Here it’s necessary to distinguish between the newspaper critics and the cyber crooks, who may have posted sections of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on the Web. That’s theft, and if we don’t protect the intellectual property of even fabulously wealthy creative people like Rowling, they’ll have less and less incentive to produce the things that entertain and delight us. Her publishers are right to go after these looters with laptops with every lawyer they hire.

Embargoes on reviews and discussions are another matter. All the outrage surrounding this particular book notwithstanding, contemporary publishers impose these blackouts not in the interest of readers but to protect the carefully planned publicity campaigns they create for books on which they have advanced large sums of money.

This is the economic imperative that leads publishers to withhold the contents of even nonfiction manuscripts that contain news that the public has a vital interest in knowing.

It’s also why newspapers, including this one, routinely break those embargoes without any pang of conscience. Our first and most compelling obligation is to our readers’ right to know and not to the commercial interests of publishers.

Rutten goes on to note that the before-the-witching-hour reviews that did appear were very respectful in terms of not giving away the book’s shocker ending, in which Harry discovers that he was a ghost the whole time, the ape-planet was really Earth, soylent green is made out of people, Ron was Keyser Söze, and Hermione was a guy.

The New York Times has an article about author Sara Gruen, who scored a $5-million advance from new Random House imprint Spiegel & Grau for her next two books. That’s because her most recent novel, Water for Elephants, published by the small firm Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, has been a runaway success over the past year. That book sold nearly 250,000 copies in hardcover and has already sold close to that in trade paper, the Times reports.

Gruen’s first book for Spiegel & Grau, Ape House, is about bonobo monkeys appearing in a reality TV show. That sounds like a grabber to Quillblog, but some are questioning the wisdom of that $5-million cheque:

Following up on an unforeseen success — particularly after receiving a news-making advance — is often tricky. Charles Frazier, whose debut novel, Cold Mountain, was a runaway best seller, left Grove/Atlantic for an $8 million advance from Random House for his second novel. Although that book, Thirteen Moons, spent 10 weeks on the New York Times hardcover fiction best-seller list and sold 242,000 copies in hardcover, according to BookScan, it is considered a publishing disappointment because it did not sell nearly enough to recover the advance.

What goes unmentioned in the Times article is that Gruen, a former technical writer who lives in Illinois, is actually a Canadian expat. She moved to the U.S. in 1999. Water for Elephants was published in Canada by HarperCollins Canada. (The Q&Q review of the book is here.)

A jury has decided that author Laura Albert’s use of the alter ego/pseudonym JT LeRoy constitutes fraud, The New York Times reports.

Albert published her novel Sarah in 2000 under the assumed name of JT LeRoy, who was purported to be the son of a truck-stop prostitute; Albert even paid a friend to appear as LeRoy. Antidote International Films bought the rights for the book in 2003, but after discovering that LeRoy did not exist, sued to get back its option money plus damages. Last week, the court ordered Albert to pay the company $116,500 (U.S.).

The trial did, however, bring up some interesting questions of art and commerce that a separate article in The Times pointed out were “perhaps better suited to The Paris Review than the federal courts.”

Antidote’s chief lawyer, Gregory Curtner, argued in court: “We bought the identity of the book’s author.” And the Times article says that Curtner “meant JT LeRoy’s identity, which, with its alluring elements of poverty and prostitution, was perhaps more valuable than the book itself.”

Defence lawyers have countered that for Albert, who has a history of psychopathology and sexual abuse, “JT LeRoy was not an ordinary nom de plume in the Mark Twain-Samuel Clemens mold but a fictional necessity, a sort of imaginary survival apparatus that allowed her both to write and to breathe.”

But there may be hope for a happy ending yet:

It is within reason to assume that the commercial value of “Sarah” will rise on the force of the publicity the book has received at trial. There is, however, another situation that might inflate its value even more.

Steven Shainberg, the proposed director of the film, testified that when he learned who had truly written “Sarah” an inspiration came to him to make a “meta-film,” a triple-layered movie that would blend the novel with the lives of its real and purported authors in a project he took to calling “Sarah Plus.”

If the meta-film works, it could be a win-win situation. Author and filmmakers will at get their film, and viewers get to see something Charlie Kaufmanesque instead of a movie of the week. In the meanwhile, Albert has a hefty fine to pay.

A Canadian Press story says that Canada’s cultural deficit – the gap between the number of magazine, films, and books we ship out of the country versus the number that come in – jumped in 2006. According to Statistics Canada, which tracks this kind of thing, we’ve been importing slightly less of our entertainment from other countries (ok, from the U.S.), but have been exporting a lot less – illegal downloads of the new Arcade Fire album notwithstanding.

And with Alice Munro reportedly retiring and Margaret Atwood already publishing at maximum output, the outlook is even more dire for our cultural exports.

As you’ve probably heard by now, the U.S.-based McSweeney’s is appealling to its readership to help them out of a financial jam, one brought on by the 2006 collapse of its distributor, AMS. They’re offering a discount of 30% off new titles and 50% off backlist in order to bump up orders, as well as auctioning off works by Art Spiegelman, Miranda July, and several others. Now, Salon has posted a piece about McSweeney’s’ difficulties and about the similar difficulties faced by all small presses post-AMS.

The bankrupt company in question, Advanced Marketing Services, was the parent company of Publishers Group West, which distributed books for more than 130 independent book publishers. “For us the timing was particularly bad,” says Eli Horowitz, the publisher of McSweeney’s Books, which has lost about $130,000 in actual earnings as a result of the bankruptcy. “We had a new Nick Hornby book and [Dave Eggers’] ‘What Is the What,’ which was our best seller of all time.”

But it looks as if things are improving, or at least for McSweeney’s anyway:

Horowitz says McSweeney’s has received “thousands of orders in the last few days,” [and says] “In a way this feels like a whole town coming together, and to me, this is all of a piece with what we’re about.”

Norwegian author Per Petterson has won this year’s IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, one of the world’s richest book prizes. Petterson won the €100,000 prize for his novel Out Stealing Horses; the book’s translator, Anne Born, will receive a quarter of the prize money. Per’s novel beat out seven other shortlisted titles, including Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown, Julian Barnes’s Arthur & George, and Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men.

No Canadian titles made the shortlist, though a dozen were among the 130-plus longlisted books. The sole Canadian to win an IMPAC is Alistair MacLeod, for No Great Mischief, in 2001.

Many BookExpo attendees were sorry to hear that Canadian Manda Group would not be hosting a Sunday night party this year. When asked about it, vice-president Carey Low noted that the annual event typically bears a price tag of $25,000 and that this year, “We asked a few other publishers if they were interested in helping with it, but we didn’t get much response, so we decided to take a year off.”

However, Low added that showgoers have said they’ll miss the party and that it will likely be “back by popular demand” next year. And lately the company has had some offers for help. “More than the money, we want more companies involved, so that they will bring more people, and it will be a better party,” Low said.

Turning 50 is often the catalyst for reflection, re-examination, and the occasional mid-life crisis. Quillblog hopes the Canada Council for the Arts is nowhere near its mid-life point, but in its 50th anniversary year, the Council is working on a new strategic plan that will guide it from 2008-2011. It has opened the discussion up to the arts community and interested Canadians with a paper posted on its website. It is a government document, so it isn’t exactly scintillating reading, but it does ask important questions such as:

1. What do you believe the Council does best?

2. How important do you think a national arts council is, and why? In what ways would you like to see the Council be a “leader”?

3. Is there anything the Council does that it no longer needs to be doing or that could be done by others? If so, what is it and who should do it?

4. Is there an important environmental trend that should be added to the list in this paper? What is it? Why?

5. What are the two most important things the Council could do to improve its support of the arts?

6. Where should the Council be spending more of its resources? Where should it be spending less? (see Appendix B for facts on the Council’s funding)

Now is your chance to have your say, plead, vent, gripe, whine, or even offer constructive suggestions. The Council is accepting feedback from now until June 15 and will report back in July via the website.

Toronto-raised author Susan Casey, who now lives in New York City, has signed a million-dollar deal for a new book about the science of surfing and the quest of top surfers to master ever-bigger waves. And she’s enlisted some professional help. As The New York Times reports, Casey

is paying Laird Hamilton, the celebrity surfer who will be a central character in her book, to put her at the center of the action.

“I’m asking him to put me in the middle of his dangerously and logistically complex undertaking,” said Ms. Casey, whose previous book, The Devil’s Teeth, was about great white sharks. “It was inevitable that we would have to have some kind of incentive for him to do that.”

It’s an unusual arrangement, but not one-of-a-kind. As the Times article notes, other authors have shared money with subjects before, though it does run the risk of complicating the relationship between writer and subject. For her part, Casey tells the Times “that she retained full editorial control of the book,” which is tentatively titled “100: Stalking the Giants of the Ocean.”

Quillblog was amused to see that this bit slipped past the Times editors:

Although The Devil’s Teeth sold just 36,000 copies in hardcover, according to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 percent of book sales, it was a New York Times nonfiction hardcover best seller.

Nothing like jabbing at the credibility of your own bestseller listings.

Next year, the world – or mainly just Canada and Japan, perhaps – will celebrate the 100th anniversary of the first publication of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s beloved Anne of Green Gables. But the L.M. Montgomery Institute in P.E.I. might not be ready to party.

The group, which was established in 1993 to honour and promote Lucy Maud and to be a hub for research, initially received a three-year grant from the Social Science and Humanities Council of Canada. Later funding came from the Macdonald Stewart Foundation and the telecommunications company Aliant.

In June 2004, Japan’s Imperial Highness Princess Takamodo became the Institute’s “international patron.” Furthermore, a long list of scholars, authors, and international figures – including Adrienne Clarkson and Jane Urquhart – grace its committees and board.

But the money seems to have stopped flowing in, according to CBC News Online.

Funding sources have dried up over the years, and the L.M. Montgomery Institute has struck a committee to try to source new ones.

“There is kind of this feeling that, you know, that there will always be funding there just because it’s so exciting and so great, how could there not be money?” Simon Lloyd, chair of the L.M. Montgomery Institute Committee told CBC News.

Lloyd added that he is confident they’ll be able to find enough funds to keep the lights on, so it’s not time to panic yet. Quillblog humbly suggests turning to the pages of Montgomery’s beloved tomes for fundraising ideas – Anne Shirley was pretty good at getting out of scrapes, after all.

Margaret Atwood says the Harper Tories are out to “squash the arts into the dust,” CBC reports. “They basically just hate us,” she says in an interview with CBC Radio. Criticizing the government’s cuts to arts funding, Atwood makes particular mention of the elimination of the $11.8-million public diplomacy fund, which the Foreign Affairs department previously used to help finance the export of Canadian cultural products and to help Canadian artists attend international events. She argues that an industry that contributes so much to the Canadian economy deserves more government support.

“When selling artistic things abroad, that money comes into Canada and is taxed in Canada, so it’s a net gain for Canada,” she said.

“Would they like to guess how much Yann Martel’s novel The Life of Pi generated abroad? Would they like to know … how much my foreign editions bring in? Would they like to know how much [Canadian producer] Robert LePage generates abroad?”

The timing of her comments might seem odd, a week after the Canada Council announced $33-million in new arts funding, but as a story in The Globe and Mail pointed out today, “the Conservative government scaled back a Liberal promise that the council’s regular funding would double from $150 million a year to $300 million. Instead, the Tories’ May, 2006, federal budget gave the council $50 million in new money as a one-time payment over two years.”

Atwood also drew attention to other funding needs. “Events such as the Four Seasons Performing Arts Centre in Toronto bring in millions of dollars from international guests, she said, yet the centre is one of six Toronto cultural projects still awaiting a funding announcement from Ottawa.”

Atwood was speaking in Montreal, where she is about to receive the $10,000 Grand Prix at the Blue Met Festival, an event, which she said, also lost $150,000 in funding this year.

The Sydney Morning Herald has a story about Penguin Australia publisher Ben Ball’s eyebrow-raising acquisitions. It’s not the books Ball has signed on that have raised those eyebrows, but the suitcase-loads of cash he is paying for them.

It was almost a year before Ball announced his first piece of literary fiction: a 700-page first novel by Steve Toltz, a Sydney screenwriter. Most first-time novelists are happy to get an advance of $5,000 to $10,000, so eyebrows were raised by Toltz’s advance, which was said to be more than $100,000.

Since then Ball has really been “splashing the cash,” to quote one rival. Kristin Williamson, wife of the playwright David Williamson, has apparently been given $150,000 to write about their lives together.

But what has the industry agog is the rumoured $300,000-plus advance given to the Melbourne author Chloe Hooper for a two-book deal: a novel and a non-fiction account of the recent troubles on Palm Island.

Hooper won a Walkley Award last year for a magazine article about the Palm Island inquest. Other publishers were keen to publish her book but did not expect it to sell more than 10,000 copies, a fifth of what would be needed to recoup the rumoured advance.

Obviously, whenever a publisher starts spending this kind of money for anything less than a tell-all memoir from a famous figure, the amounts are the message, a naked publicity ploy, an expensive attention-grabbing scheme.

Well, it won’t work this time, Ball! We’re on to you, so good luck getting any publicity out of this… oh, hang on.

We’re also betting that literary agents around the world are right now practising their best “G’day mate!”

IBBY Canada is holding its biennial Hot, Hot Cuba! fundraiser this Wednesday at a Toronto club. In the past, the evening of live music and salsa dancing has raised money to help children in Cuba, because IBBY Canada was twinned with IBBY in Cuba. This year, however, the organization is extending its reach a little further to include IBBY’s Children in Crisis Fund.

The fund is a new initiative intended to help children in areas affected by war, civil disruption, or natural disaster. Money raised will be used for bibliotherapy (the therapeutic use of books and storytelling) and to collect or replace collections of books. The first project to receive is about to begin in Lebanon with future projects planned for places such as Afghanistan, Darfur, Gaza, Iraq, and northern Uganda.

Click here for details.

As reported by the CBC, the amount of money for the Governor General’s Awards in literature, the performing arts, and visual arts is increasing. The Canada Council provides the prize money; in May of last year the council received $50-million in new funding from the federal government.

The prize for individual winners of Governor General’s literary and visual and media arts awards will be raised from $15,000 to $25,000.

The council will also boost its contribution to the Governor General’s Awards for performing arts so the value of the prize will be increased to $25,000.

The finalists for the 2007 Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts will be announced later this month.

The New Yorker’s Dana Goodyear has written an excellent (and meaty) piece about the Chicago-based Poetry magazine. In 2002, Poetry and its accompanying foundation was bequeathed the staggeringly ridiculous sum of $200-million by the Indianapolis poet and heiress Ruth Lilly, and ever since they’ve been trying to figure out ways to use the money to return poetry to a state of prominence in the public sphere.

One of the first changes to the Poetry Foundation was the hiring of a new president, John Barr, a former Wall Street executive with literary aspirations. According to Goodyear, Barr and his staff are trying to turn the magazine and its website into “the Billboard or the Entertainment Weekly of the poetry world, reflecting everything that’s happening without a dogmatic point of view.” This, of course, has put a number of poets’ noses out of joint, as has the foundation’s plan for the $200-million, which will apparently not be spent on grants to poets.

As Ethel Kaplan, a lawyer at a wealth-management firm and the chair of the board, put it, “Nobody wanted to sit back and read grant proposals—especially from poets.”

Instead, it seems, the plan is to use the money to make inroads in the popular media. One of the Poetry Foundation’s most interesting efforts of late has been to offer its services as an external poetry editor:

Over the past year, it has sent a dozen magazine editors mockups with poems superimposed on actual layouts from those magazines (a Basho haiku in a Good Housekeeping spread showing how to “pair old china with fresh blooms”; Lucille Clifton’s “Homage to My Hips” on a fitness page called “Love Your Curves”). To Details, the foundation suggested an essay by Jim Harrison: “If Jim Harrison, poet, novelist (Legends of the Fall) and walking vat of testosterone, needs a daily shot of poetry, it must not be for sissies. . . . A good hed for the piece might be ‘Don’t Be Afraid of Poetry.’ A better one might be ‘Read Poetry. Get Laid.’”

Now if the Poetry Foundation can only get Maxim to publish a spread featuring “There Once Was a Girl From Nantucket,” that’ll be $200-million well spent!

The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that the federal government should not be required to provide advance funding to Vancouver’s Little Sister’s Book and Art Emporium for its legal battle against Canada Customs, The Globe and Mail reports.

Little Sister’s fight with Canada Customs began 12 years ago after the agency blocked the import of four books. In 2000, the Supreme Court ruled that while Customs has the right to censor material, its practices at the time were unfair. The bookstore’s current allegation is that the agency has not obeyed that ruling an is still banning material in an arbitrary and discriminatory way.

But today’s 7-2 decision said that the challenge was too “narrow and insignificant to the broad public interest to justify such an unusual move,” writes Globe reporter Kirk Makin. “Public interest advance costs orders must be granted with caution, as a last resort, in circumstances where their necessity is clearly established,” according to reasons supplied by five of the majority judges.

(more…)

Prominent indie bookseller Richard Bachmann has spoken out about the More Canada initiative, in which several Canadian publishers are seeking funding to subsidize display placement for their titles in Indigo and indie bookstores.

In a statement issued today, Bachmann, the owner of A Different Drummer Books in Burlington, calls the scheme “outrageous,” arguing that “public money should not be used to underwrite marketing expenditures.” He also takes a pragmatic position – saying “we do not quite believe that advertising and focused display tables will work any wonders; those methods are already being employed” – and goes on to wax philosophical about the Indigo-dominated book market (“publishers have co-authored some of their own problems”).

Download a PDF of the full Different Drummer release right here.

In the wake of the Advanced Marketing Services (AMS) bankruptcy filing, one anonymous blogger is finding some dark humour in the experience. Radio Free PGW, which launched on January 5, includes some updates on events but mostly offers satirical comments on the business practices of the AMS executives and the resulting impact of the filing on the company’s publishers. Quillblog’s favourites include a comparison with Enron and a description of the new cheques PGW members can expect to receive:

For those of you who were growing tired of the boring brown PGW checks that always arrived when they were supposed to and never bounced, relief is around the corner.

Thanks to bankruptcy rules, new checks are on the way. Sources at the Wells Fargo-PGW Money Management Unit report that the new PGW checks will have a stylish periwinkle border with the letters “AMS” embossed in the background. In the center of the checks will be one of the following inspirational scenes:

– A portrait of the classic Wells Fargo stagecoach rolling over the back of a PGW publisher. In the outstretched hand of the publisher is one his own books.

– A stunning Rockwell style painting of a sheriff dragging a PGW publisher and his family from their home after it has been sold in foreclosure.

The blogger ends each day with a twist on Edward R. Murrow’s sign-off: “From the killing fields of America’s publishing industry–good day and good luck.”

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

Well, Mary Lawson’s The Other Side of the Bridge didn’t manage to make the jump from the Man Booker Prize longlist to the just-announced shortlist. But there is good news for a couple of Canadian publishers: three of the six shortlisted titles have been issued in separate Canadian editions, two of them – M.J. Hyland’s Carry Me Down and Kate Grenville’s The Secret River – by HarperCollins Canada. The third Canadian-published title is Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (Penguin Canada).

The other three Booker nominees are Hisham Matar’s In the Country of Men (Viking), Edward St Aubyn’s Mother’s Milk (Picador), and – singled out in the early press reaction as the frontrunner – Sarah Waters’ The Night Watch (Virago).

In its coverage of the shortlist announcement, The Guardian reminds us that over in Britain, it’s all about the betting action. “Meanwhile, the relatively low profile of many of the shortlisted authors was good news for bookmakers. ‘We couldn’t have compiled a better short-list from a bookmaking point of view,’ said William Hill spokesman Graham Sharpe. ‘Many of the well fancied runners like David Mitchell, Peter Carey, Barry Unsworth and Howard Jacobson have all fallen by the wayside and most punters have already lost their money.’”

Related links:
Click here for the official announcement
Click here for the Guardian story

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

Miraculously, Felix Dennis can somehow lay claim to being both a published poet and one of the richest men in Britain.

Rich he may be, but selfish he ain’t: in his forthcoming book, How to Get Rich, he shares his blueprints for achieving success in the business world with the rest of us.

Along these same lines, he’s provided The Guardian’s top 10 list for the day: the top 10 anti-poverty books. Now before you think that his list includes pragmatic treatments of world poverty and how to end it, know that these are the top ten books “that goaded [him] into abandoning poverty.”

Noteworthy titles on Dennis’ list include Dickens’ Great Expectations, The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh to His Brother, and An Anthology of World Poetry. Somehow, reading a collection of “wide-ranging, eye-opening” poetry inspired Dennis to “make lots and lots of money” so as to avoid what he calls “the usual, dreary poet-in-the-rat-infested-garret syndrome.”

Not quite the typical response to great verse, is it?

Related links:
Read the full story here

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

A story in The Toronto Star asks whether contemporary Canadian literature is or isn’t “anti-urban and anti-modern in spirit, and inimical to experimental writers” – like Douglas Coupland, who sparked the debate with an online rant he penned for an article on New York Times Select, an online service available only by subscription. Coupland charged that CanLit “is when the Canadian government pays you to write about life in small towns and/or the immigrant experience.”

The Star’s publishing reporter Judy Stoffman writes that Coupland “blamed entrenched, aging authors (none named) who suck up all the attention. The piece also takes aim at the system of government grants, supposedly limited to those who ‘follow CanLit’s guidelines.’ (Coupland has never received Canada Council money.)”

Publisher Patrick Crean of Thomas Allen & Son and Melanie Rutledge, head of the Canada Council writing and publishing section, argue in Stoffman’s piece that CanLit is edgy and that emerging writers are funded and published. But Toronto author Andrew Pyper, who has received grants from the council and also sat on a peer jury, agreed with Coupland up to a point. “We have done a very good job of creating a brand, a tone of fiction about distinctive Canadian topics,” he says. “But now, on the occasion of a new century, it might be useful to expand that brand, if not explode it altogether. Where I would part with Coupland is the blaming of the granting bodies.”

Quillblog reserves judgment until