Pick, Edugyan, deWitt make Booker longlist

Three Canadian authors have made the 2011 Man Booker Prize for Fiction longlist, announced today. Alison Pick’s Far to Go (House of Anansi Press, Q&Q’s September 2010 cover profile), Esi Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues (forthcoming from Thomas Allen & Son in September and profiled in the July-August 2011 issue of Q&Q), and Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers (House of Anansi) are vying for the title of “the best novel of the year written by a citizen of the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland.”

It’s also worth noting three of the longlisted titles come from House of Anansi, which is also the domestic publisher of Stephen Kelman’s longlisted book, Pigeon English.

The full list includes:

• Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending (Jonathan Cape/Random House)
• Sebastian Barry, On Canaan’s Side (Faber)
• Carol Birch, Jamrach’s Menagerie (Canongate Books/HarperCollins)
• Patrick deWitt, The Sisters Brothers (Granta/House of Anansi)
• Esi Edugyan, Half Blood Blues (Serpent’s Tail/Thomas Allen)
• Yvvette Edwards, A Cupboard Full of Coats (Oneworld)
• Alan Hollinghurst, The Stranger’s Child (Picador/Pan Macmillan)
• Stephen Kelman, Pigeon English (Bloomsbury/House of Anansi)
• Patrick McGuinness, The Last Hundred Days (Seren Books)
• A.D. Miller, Snowdrops (Atlantic)
• Alison Pick, Far to Go (Headline Review/House of Anansi)
• Jane Rogers, The Testament of Jessie Lamb (Sandstone Press)
• D.J. Taylor, Derby Day (Chatto & Windus/Random House)

The six-title shortlist will be revealed Sept. 6 and the winner announced Oct. 18. Each author included on the shortlist will receive £2,500 and a special edition of their book. The winner will be awarded an additional £50,000. The jury, chaired by Dame Stella Rimington, is made up of writer Matthew d’Ancona, author Susan Hill, author and politician Chris Mullin, and Gaby Wood, books editor at The Daily Telegraph.

Macmillan U.K. admits to bribery

According to a report from Reuters, officials from the U.K. arm of Macmillan have admitted that they paid bribes to secure a potentially lucrative deal to print textbooks in southern Sudan.

Macmillan said it made “corrupt payments” in a bidding process for an education project supported by a World Bank-managed fund in the African region, the [World Bank] said in a statement.

“The World Bank Group has debarred Macmillan Limited … declaring the company ineligible to be awarded Bank-financed contracts for a period of six years in the wake of the company’s admission of bribery payments relating to a Trust Fund-supported education project in Southern Sudan,” read the statement.

As the article goes on to state, however, the six-year ineligibility period may be reduced to as little as three years in recognition of the fact that Macmillan has been quick to respond to the controversy.

Macmillan had agreed to roll out a “compliance monitoring program” and cooperate with the bank’s efforts to fight fraud and corruption, the World Bank statement read.

“Macmillan admitted engaging in bribes [...],” a World Bank official, who asked not to be named, told Reuters. “This happened during the bidding process and Macmillan did not get the contract.”

The official, based in Washington, said the payments were offered between 2008 and 2009.

Daily book biz round-up, March 12

Come ‘n get yer scoops:

• Hilary Mantel wins National Book Critics Circle Award
• Margaret Atwood to sing her little heart out in Score: A Hockey Musical. And if you don’t believe that, here’s some pics.
• Crummey and Mitchell win Commonwealth book prizes
• You can’t have an iPad yet, but you can pay for one right now!
• More breathless iPad revelations: book selections to be categorized … and sub-categorized!
• Hachette Livre takes off glove, slaps Paris Book Fair in face
• “Unknown mid-list author from Canada” begs for dough on Dragon’s Den
• Macmillan CEO (and heartthrob) John Sargent ponders the “thorny” problem of e-books and libraries
• John Sargent again, this time taking questions from his adoring fans

HarperCollins steps into the ring of the Amazon vs. Macmillan battle

While Amazon has yet to fully reinstate Macmillan titles on its website, another potential threat looms on the horizon for the online retailer. Rupert Murdoch, chairman and CEO of News Corp. – the huge media conglomerate that owns HarperCollins – said about e-readers during a conference call yesterday that “devices and platforms are proliferating, but this clever technology is merely an empty vessel without any great content.” Further taking the side of the publishers in the Amazon vs. Macmillan battle, Murdoch had this to say (via All Things Digital):

We don’t like the Amazon model of selling everything at $9.99. They don’t pay us that. They pay us the full wholesale price of $14 or whatever we charge. We think it really devalues books and it hurts all the retailers of the hardcover books. We are not against [inaudible] books. On the contrary, we like them very much indeed. It is low cost to us and so on. But we want some room to maneuver in it.

Murdoch also said that Apple has already agreed to “a variety of higher prices” for e-books, and that Amazon is ready to renegotiate pricing with News Corp. Will the clout of a publisher like HarperCollins force Amazon to allow higher prices? Will customers be willing to cough up more than $9.99 for an e-book, despite online protests? Or will the higher prices deter readers from investing in the high-priced Kindle at all?

One thing’s for sure: the publishing industry is being brought together by a common enemy, as demonstrated today at the America Booksellers Association’s Winter Institute. Galleycat reports that when Macmillan’s stand against Amazon was mentioned at the event, the company received an enthusiastic standing ovation.

Amazon and Macmillan get in the ring

Over the weekend a corporate brawl over e-book pricing lit up the Internet. After the U.S. publishing firm Macmillan announced that it would be raising prices of its e-books above Amazon’s $9.99 standard, Amazon responded by silently removing the “buy” buttons on all Macmillan titles. On Sunday, Amazon announced in a confusing note posted to its online Kindle forum – in which it claimed without irony that Macmillan has a ‘monopoly‘ on its own books – that it have will ‘have to capitulate.’

In a humorous round-up of the Amazon/Macmillan e-pricing hijinks, blogger and novelist John Scalzi details how Amazon failed over the weekend:

Amazon apparently forgot that when it moved against Macmillan, it also moved against Macmillan’s authors. Macmillan may be a faceless, soulless baby-consuming corporate entity with no feelings or emotions, but authors have both of those, and are also twitchy neurotic messes who obsess about their sales, a fact which Amazon should be well aware of because we check our Amazon numbers four hundred times a day, and a one-star Amazon review causes us to crush up six Zoloft and snort them into our nasal cavities, because waiting for the pills to digest would just take too long.

These are the people Amazon pissed off. Which was not a smart thing, because as we all know, the salient feature of writers is that they write. And they did, about this, all weekend long. And not just Macmillan’s authors, but other authors as well, who reasonably feared that their corporate parent might be the next victim of Amazon’s foot-stompery.

Hot Docs meets CanLit

Hot Docs, the annual documentary film fest in Tornto, has released its spring lineup of 150 films. A couple of films with CanLit tie-ins have caught Quillblog’s attention: Inside Hana’s Suitcase tells the story behind Karen Levine’s book Hana’s Suitcase, about a Czech victim of the Holocaust, which went on to become a bestseller for Second Story Press and spawned a series of Holocaust-related titles. Paris 1919 is based on the book by Margaret MacMillan about the months following the First World War. And Poetry in Motion showcases 24 avant-gardish poets, including Michael Ondaatje, performing their work.

Hot Docs passes are already on sale, and the fest runs from April 30 to May 10.

Australian publishers don’t like the cut of Nobel-winner’s jib

Australia’s only Nobel Prize-winning author must be rolling in his grave this week — not a single major publisher or literary agent would release his stuff today, it seems. Earlier this summer, The Australian sent out the third chapter of Patrick White’s The Eye of the Storm, the “novel that clinched his Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973, with the judges describing it as one of his most accomplished works.”

They anagrammatically changed White’s name to Wraith Picket, the title to The Eye of the Cyclone, and the names of the characters. And, in spite of White’s shining credentials — “he is the nation’s most lauded novelist, our only Nobel prize-winning writer, twice a winner of the Miles Franklin award and three times the Australian Literature Society’s Gold Medalist” and, according to Wikipedia, “is widely regarded as one of the greatest English-language novelists of the 20th century” — 10 out of the 12 places they submitted it to, including big boys Pan Macmillan and HarperCollins, independents ABC Books, Text, and Scribe, and three top agents, thought it was crap, and the other two didn’t bother to reply.

The highest praise offered was Nicholas Hudson of Nicholas Hudson Publishing’s calling it “clever,” but he also found the book puzzling. “I found it hard to get involved with the characters, so it was not character-driven, nor in the ideas, so it was not idea-driven. It seemed like a plot-driven novel whose plot got lost through an aspiration to be a literary novel … I was not compelled to read on,” he says. When the hoax was revealed, it turns out that Hudson’s rejection letter was him being polite. “I thought it was pretentious fart-arsery. I don’t like White,” Hudson said.

Australian Literary Management’s veteran literary agent Lyn Tranter was less than pleased with the ruse, calling it “piss-weak.” “I am looking at one thing and one thing only — can I sell it? And the answer is no, I can’t sell The Eye of the Storm,” she said. “As a literary agent my job is to secure the interest of the public,” she says.

Other people looking out for their public include agent Mary Cunnane (“Alas, the sample chapter, while reply [sic] with energy and feeling, does not give evidence that the work is yet of a publishable quality. I suggest you get a copy of David Lodge’s The Art of Fiction and absorb its lessons about exposition, dialogue, point of view, voice and characterisation”), Cameron Creswell Agency (who said his list was too long and that new authors are only taken if “we believe very strongly in their writing”), and Pan MacMillan (“If you are after critical analysis, it may be a good idea to join a writers’ centre. There are centres in each state and these communities provide access to proofreaders, mentor programs and inside information about the publishing industry”).

Related links:
Read about this in The Australian here…
And here…
And here…

Book Expo… Iraq

Macmillan UK chief executive Richard Charkin has been keeping a mostly Macmillan-related blog since late last year. On it, he discusses copyright issues and Google, outlines Macmilan’s expansion into Asia, and, um, posts pictures from his holidays.

Last week, however, Charkin posted a dispatch from Charles Jenkins, international sales manager at Palgrave Macmillan, who attended the International Book Fair held in Erbil, in Northern Iraq, the first to be held in that country in 30 years.

“The Iraqi government had budgeted about £700,000 for the purchase of books relating to Higher Education in the English Language,” Jenkins writes. “Cash sales were brisk, and in the purchasing frenzy one could witness the unusual sight of boxes of books being hauled away in supermarket trolleys by librarians, academics, students and private individuals, under the watchful eye of the ubiquitous, gun-toting Peshmerga soldiers…. theft was not a problem at this Fair!”

Clearly, the book market in Iraq is not quite in its last throes.

Related links:
Read Richard Charkin’s blog post