Political cartoonist and blogger Tom Tomorrow (né Dan Perkins) has decided to branch out into kidlit with a picture book entitled The Very Silly Mayor, due out in September. On his site, This Modern World, Tomorrow makes it clear the kind of book he was aiming for … and not aiming for:

I wanted it to be a book that would be amusing enough for adults, so that parents could stand to read it for the fiftieth evening in a row without feeling like their heads were going to explode. But at the same time, I wanted it to be a book that was genuinely for children, not one of these alleged kid’s books whose author revels in his own cleverness, winking knowingly at the adult and leaving the child almost irrelevant to the experience.

Given that the book is being published by a small press in the U.S., Tomorrow lays out the stakes of indie publishing:

It’s hardcover, with a dust jacket, interior wallpaper – should be a lovely package. But as I also pointed out previously, what this means is that I have much more of a personal stake in this – rather than getting most of the money I will make from it up front in an advance, as I’ve been able to in the past, most of what I’m going to earn will be after the actual sales. And my publisher – did I mention they’re small? They don’t have a skyscraper. They don’t really have an office. They’re two people working out of an apartment in Brooklyn. Which may actually be the wave of the future, as far as publishing goes – low overhead, keep it simple. But sales of this book will impact their lives, and mine, directly.

Of course, most Canadian indie publishers and authors would see this “wave of the future” as being more like the “wave of the past three or four decades.”

Earlier today, the international publishing giant Hachette Book Group announced that it will be moving Canadian sales and distribution of its U.K. lines to its U.S. offices. The decision will have major ramifications for several players in the Canadian publishing scene, including HarperCollins Canada, Penguin Canada, and H.B. Fenn and Company.  No one, however, will be more affected than McArthur & Company, which currently represents the bulk of Hachette’s U.K. lines in Canada, including Orion, Hodder & Stoughton, Hodder Headline, John Murray, and Hachette Children’s Books. According to a press release sent out by Hachette, McArthur will continue representing those lines until Dec. 31, 2009, after which point Hachette will take over permanently. This will be a major blow to McArthur, as the lines make up approximately two thirds of its business.

Look for a more detailed report later today on Q&Q Omni.

Before his death, Franz Kafka famously told his literary executor, Max Brod, to burn all his manuscripts. Brod didn’t listen, and as a result, Western literature has The Trial and The Castle. Last year, there was a minor brouhaha in the literary world over whether Dmitri Nabokov would accede to his father’s wishes and destroy his final, unfinished manuscript. Dmitri waffled, but eventually said that he’d allow the work to be published.

Apparently Mark Twain was similarly reticent about having his correspondence and other written materials publicly displayed after his death. In a letter to his brother, quoted in the Guardian, Twain wrote, “I don’t want any absurd ‘literary remains’ and ‘unpublished letters of Mark Twain’ published after I am planted.” The American humourist has now been “planted” for close to a century, and a new collection of unpublished essays, titled Who Is Mark Twain?, is set to make an appearance next month.

According to Alison Flood in the Guardian, the book, to be published by HarperStudio in the U.K., will feature 24 previously unpublished stories and essays, including one titled “Jane Austen,” in which Twain posits that Austen’s intent was to “make the reader detest her people up to the middle of the book and like them in the rest of the chapters.”

Quillblog was unable to discover whether the book has a Canadian publisher as yet.

It may be counterintuitive, but in an interview with Scott Esposito, Soft Skull Press publisher Richard Nash says that his company’s sales were actually up last year, despite the persistence and scope of the global recession. The small American press made “a hair short of a million net” in 2008, which Nash calls “a great year.”

Calling the book “the most robust and fine-tuned of the anolog technologies,” Nash claims that people are only now seeing the effect of changes in the way the medium is consumed. According to Nash, the shift in consumer spending patterns is not so much a bellwether of doom as an opportunity for innovation:

And the impact is currently less on the industry itself; it’s more that the cumulative effect of the changes from other industries, chiefly the amount of content consumed online, is drawing people away from the printed book format. The shift can be cause for gloom if you’re of the handwringing temperament, but it is far more an opportunity to rid the publishing business of a lot of cant and laziness and arrogance.

A small St.Paul, Minnesota-based publisher is hoping to reap big rewards in the wake of Barack Obama’s swearing-in ceremony yesterday. Graywolf Press is the publisher of poet Elizabeth Alexander, who wrote and recited the inauguration poem, “Praise Song for the Day,” and the company has reportedly been receiving urgent calls from Barnes & Noble to ship copies of the work as quickly as possible.

According to the Canadian Press:

The St. Paul-based publisher is printing 100,000 copies of Alexander’s inaugural poem, by far the biggest print run in its 35-year history but not for an inaugural work. Maya Angelou’s “On the Pulse of the Morning,” recited in 1993 at President Bill Clinton’s inaugural, was a million seller.

Alexander’s poem, titled “Praise Song for the Day: A Poem for Barack Obama’s Presidential Inauguration,” consists of 14, unrhymed three-line stanzas, and a one-line coda: “praise song for walking forward in that light.” It will be released as an US$8 paperback, 32 pages, on Feb. 6.

What do Fay Weldon, Kathy Lette, and Louise Doughty have in common with the Marquis de Sade, Anaïs Nin, and Georges Bataille? Stumped? They’ve all dipped their ink in the well of pornography.

The Times Online is reporting that Sphere, an imprint of Little, Brown, is set to publish In Bed With, a collection of 20 erotic stories written by acclaimed women novelists under pseudonyms. Dubbed the “cliterati” by Lette, one of the book’s authors and a co-commissioner of stories, the contributors have each chosen a “nom de porn,” such as Minx Malone, Storm Henley, and Minty Mountjoie.

According to the Times article, the contributors are being very cagey about which story belongs to which author:

Lette refused to confirm or deny which story she wrote. “I would luv to help but would have to hand in my ovaries,” she emailed.

Doughty, a novelist and former Booker prize judge, confessed that her story is set abroad (which narrows it down to three) and that her style is a form of literary homage. “Mine is also not that explicit,” she said. “I did, though, find it both a challenge to write and very freeing.” [Rachel] Johnson, whose most recent novel is Notting Hell, revealed that “not even my husband knows which one I did. Although when I told him I’d contributed, he said, ‘Why on earth did they ask you to help as you don’t know anything about sex’.”

Johnson said she would “love to help you identify my story. But my hands are tied while a very big man is doing something unmentionable to me”.

Not everyone approached to contribute to the anthology agreed to participate. Among the abstainers were Jilly Cooper and Joanna Trollope.

An interesting publishing sidenote: one of Little, Brown’s other imprints is Virago, which publishes feminist books. The authors of the erotic anthology have argued that feminism and pornography are not incompatible.

Spider-Man has already saved incoming president Barack Obama; he’s now poised to save the entire publishing industry. In the midst of the gigantic economic clusterfuck global financial meltdown at the end of 2008, one segment of the publishing industry not only remained solvent, but actually grew: comic books.

The graphic novel industry saw a growth in sales of 5% in 2008, according to an article in USA Today.

Marvel Comics’ Secret Invasion #1 was the best-selling comic book of 2008. The eight-issue miniseries about the takeover of superheroes by shape-shifting Skrulls took the first six spots. Only Uncanny X-Men #500 (No. 7) and DC Comics’ Final Crisis #1 (No. 9) also cracked the top 10. Diamond did not release actual sales figures, but best-selling comic books (priced at $2.99 or $3.99) normally sell more than 100,000 copies.

Another title that sold well in 2008 was DC’s reprint of the Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons graphic novel Watchmen, which has seen a spike in interest in advance of the March 6 release of the film adaptation.

One of the most surprising casualties of last month’s  carnage-strewn “Black Wednesday” was legendary 79-year-old editor Drenka Willen, who was coolly laid off from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt after nearly 30 years with the firm (as reported by The New York Observer). It appears, however, that the company’s embattled CEO Tony Lucki has sheepishly asked the editor of such Nobel laureates as José Saramago and Wislawa Szymborska to return to work, after receiving an angry letter from Günter Grass, another author from Willen’s pedigreed stable.

Commenting on the about-face, the Los Angeles Times book blog Jacket Copy takes solace in this apparent victory of editorial integrity over the exigencies of the bottom line:

The author-editor relationship is the molten core of book publishing. Authors often show their loyalty by switching publishing houses when their editors move. In an age where the bottom line is so often the almighty dollar, it’s good to hear that some writers have a trump card to play.

In the New York Times, Motoko Rich looks at the dying glitz and glam of the publishing world, which, according to Rich, once “came with a milieu that mixed cultural swagger with pure Manhattan high life.”

Stark contrasts are drawn between company parties past and those planned for the future: Macmillan, which announced mass restructuring and layoffs in mid-December last year, will trade their Hotel del Coronado spring list meeting venue for meetings via webcam. Simon & Schuster cancelled its holiday party, while one division of Random House had pizza and beer in a cafeteria room. Other “glittery and cozy traditions” of the industry that are being clamped down upon are flights, hotel bills, cocktail hours, and, of course, the lunch tabs.

Nobody expects one of the staples of the business — the long lunch — to die off completely because of these straitened circumstances. But publishers, editors and literary agents, who have often been among the best diners in the city, are now reconsidering their favorite restaurants.

Besides the flash, though, other aspects of the publishing business are being examined, like distribution of advance print galleys, the return of unsold books by retailers, and cash advances for authors.

At HarperCollins a new unit is experimenting with a model that substitutes profit sharing with authors for cash advances and eliminates returns of unsold copies from booksellers.

Jonathan Galassi, publisher of the literary powerhouse Farrar, Straus & Giroux, said the custom of accepting returns from booksellers was created during the Great Depression to persuade bookstores to take more copies. “In a moment where getting people to put stock in a store of anything, not just books, is harder because of the money it costs to front them,” Mr. Galassi said. “I think it might be counterproductive to have a return-free business at this point.”

Black Wednesday saw three of the largest U.S. publishers announce massive layoffs and restructuring, and it seems there will be no end to these types of changes as the economy continues to spiral downward.

Macmillan, which publishes authors like Thomas Friedman and Janet Evanovich, is cutting 64 jobs — just under four percent of its work force.

From the Associated Press:

“Going forward we are tightening our belts in response to the current recession, but we are also reorganizing and rethinking our business to position ourselves for the long term,” Macmillan CEO John Sargent wrote in a company memo, a copy of which was obtained Monday by The Associated Press.

In a move he said the publisher had been looking into for months, Macmillan will combine its seven children’s companies into a single division, the Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group, effective Jan. 1. Macmillan also plans reductions through a “centralized business and production group for its adult and children’s publishing companies,” according to the memo.

The Associated Press also reports that Macmillan’s presence at BookExpo America will be reduced, while the use of digital technology will increase in an effort to cut costs.