Harry Potter, Dan Brown dominate U.K. list of best-selling books

The stereotype has it that England is filled with recondite literati ensconced in mahogany-lined libraries reading leather-bound volumes of Romantic poetry and plump Victorian novels. This as compared to the beer-swilling philistines in America, gorging themselves on a diet of Dan Brown and Tom Clancy (if they read at all). Well, newly released data indicates that this conception is flawed. Readers in the U.K., it would seem, have every bit as much devotion to Dan Brown as their counterparts across the Atlantic.

As noted in the Guardian over the weekend, Brown took the number one spot on Neilsen Bookscan’s list of the U.K.’s best-selling books released since the company began collecting data in 1998. According to the service, which tracks 90 per cent of book purchases in the U.K., The Da Vinci Code moved 4,522,025 units between 1998 and 2010, which accounted for a staggering £22,857,837.53 in revenue. Angels and Demons, Brown’s prequel to The Da Vinci Code, took the fourth spot on the list, with 3,096,850 units sold, accounting for sales of £15,537,324.84.

Not surprisingly, the bulk of the top 10 is devoted to Harry Potter: all seven of J.K. Rowling’s books about the boy wizard are featured, with the first in the series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, taking the number two spot. The only place in the top 10 not devoted to Brown or Rowling goes to Stephenie Meyers’ Twilight, which clocks in at number nine. In fact, one has to make it to number 13 before a title by an author not among the three already mentioned appears: Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones.

Perhaps surprisingly, Stieg Larsson does not crop up on the list until number 17, although the three novels in the Swedish author’s Millennium Trilogy came in at numbers one, two, and three respectively on the list of U.K. bestsellers for 2010.

New online writing community geared toward teens

Parents and educators spend a lot of time, and spill a lot of ink, debating how to get teenagers interested in reading. Anyone who stops to think about the phenomenal success of Stephenie Meyers’ Twilight series will realize this is a somewhat odd debate to be having: teenagers are already reading (although perhaps not the kind of books that parents and educators might prefer).

Jacob Lewis, a former managing editor at The New Yorker, and Dana Goodyear, a staff writer at the magazine, seem to understand this. Lewis and Goodyear have teamed up to create Figment.com, an online community where young readers and writers can connect and submit their own fiction, poetry, even cell-phone novels.

From The New York Times:

The idea for Figment emerged from a very 21st-century invention, the cellphone novel, which arrived in the United States around 2008. That December, Ms. Goodyear wrote a 6,000-word article for The New Yorker about young Japanese women who had been busy composing fiction on their mobile phones. In the article she declared it “the first literary genre to emerge from the cellular age.”

Figment is an attempt to import that idea to the United States and expand on it. Mr. Lewis, who was out of a job after Portfolio, the Condé Nast magazine, was shuttered last year, teamed up with Ms. Goodyear, and the two worked with schools, libraries, and literary organizations across the country to recruit several hundred teenagers who were willing to participate in a prototype, which went online in a test version in June.

The Beta version of the site is up now. It features new writing from Blake Nelson, author of the acclaimed YA novel Girl, as well as contests, reviews, and user-generated content.

New Twilight Saga book gives another vamp her time to sparkle

It’s no Midnight Sun – Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga story written from Edward’s perspective, which was leaked in 2008 – but Meyer’s publisher, Little, Brown for Young Readers, announced today that a new novella is coming on June 5. The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner tells the story of a vampire in the “newborn army” (the term refers to her newfound vampirism – the book isn’t actually about baby bloodsuckers). The eponymous character was introduced in Eclipse, the third book in the Twilight Saga.

The initial print run for the 192-page book will be 1.5 million copies, and $1 from all U.S. book sales will go to the Red Cross to help relief efforts in Haiti and Chile. As a thank you to intensely devoted Twihards, the book will also be available for free online from June 7 to July 5.

The manuscript has been kept tightly under wraps so far, although Meyer gave copies to the director and a few cast members of the film adaptation of Eclipse, “so all the parties involved would end up having a really strong foundation for their characters before the cameras started rolling,” Meyer said on her website. After reading it, though, they literally had to burn their copies to keep the story from leaking. Bree Tanner was originally intended to be included in the upcoming The Twilight Saga: The Official Guide as a short story, but it expanded until it would no longer fit in the guide. Meyer said this about the new book:

I began this story a long time ago — before Twilight was even released. Back then I was just editing Eclipse, and in the thick of my vampire world. I was thinking a lot about the newborns, imagining their side of the story, and one thing led to another. I started writing from Bree’s perspective about those final days, and what it was like to be a newborn.

Daily book biz round-up, March 30

More book news for you all:

• iBooks pricing model leaked
• Kobo to go to agency model
• Let the media slobbering begin: new Stephenie Meyer title announced
• BookCamp 2010 is open for registration
• French publisher Gallimard to sue Google
• The Economist attempts to soothe its aging readers’ nerves
• Mike Shatzkin wonders why anyone wonders about Random House not teaming with Apple
• The Guardian wants your help in identifying these kids’ books

Daily book biz round-up, March 11

News, news, and more news:

• Graphic novel glitch just keeps getting worse as Amazon removes Diamond’s buy buttons
• Stephenie Meyer floats Hachette’s boat
• Italy falls in Google’s big game of Axis & Allies
• How many ISBN codes does one e-book need? Discuss.
• Simon Winchester gets in time machine, sets dial to “good ol’ days”
• First Nelson Mandela, then the Dalai Lama, now… John Ralston Saul
• Can e-books save long form journalism?

Bookmarks: Going Rogue mistakes, aliens and werewolves, Xbox Bibles, and more

A few bookish links from around the Web:

• Sarah Palin’s much-anticipated memoir hits shelves today. Palin tells Oprah in an unused clip from yesterday’s interview that “logistically speaking, practically speaking, it wasn’t a real difficult exercise to write the book” (via GalleyCat) 
• The Associated Press has compiled a list of the errors found in Going Rogue
• Stephenie Meyer, author of the wildly popular Twilight empire series, also sat on Oprah’s couch in a rare public appearance last Friday. In an unused clip (via Entertainment Weekly), Meyer admits to being “a little burned out by vampires” and says that she “may go spend some time with … aliens.” 
• For those of you sick of everything vampire, Bookgasm offers a werewolf alternative in David Wellington’s Frostbite 
• The New Oxford American Dictionary‘s Word of the Year is “unfriend,” which is defined as: “to remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook.”  Runners-up for the title included “hashtag,” “sexting,” “teabagger,” and “tramp stamp”
• The future is digital: the National Post reports that students at Toronto’s Blyth Academy will all receive a Sony Reader to replace those stuffy old textbooks of yore 
• How would you like your Bible?  Handwritten or on your Xbox? 

Twilight fans invade sleepy U.S. town

From The Guardian:

Residents of Forks, Washington State, are still stunned by what a piece of assiduous Googling from Twilight author Stephenie Meyer has unleashed on their town. Looking for the US’s rainiest location in which to set her vampire series, she lighted upon the small town, population 3,221.

Fans of the books and film, based around Bella Swan and her dreamy vampire love interest Edward Cullen, began pouring into Forks. Today hundreds visit the town daily; its visitor count for June was more than 8,000 – around the number who used to come in a year. Restaurants have Twilight-themed menus with dishes such as Bellasagne, shops sell Twilight items, and tours cover the books’ locations.

Sorta like when all those fans of A Complicated Kindness swarmed Steinbach, Manitoba.

Twilight sequel script found in trash

It was a blunder worthy of CSIS. In 1999, Canada’s spy agency had egg on its face after top-secret documents were stolen off the back seat of a parked car while the car’s owner attended a Toronto Maple Leafs hockey game. Then, in 2008, top-secret counter-terrorist documents were discovered in a trash can in downtown Ottawa. Now, in what has to be an equivalent threat to national security (this time in the U.S.), the top-secret script for New Moon, the film sequel to last year’s Twilight adaptation, along with a treatment for the third film in the series, were left in a trash can outside of a St. Louis hotel, where they were summarily discovered by salon owner Casey Ray.

Okay, maybe it’s not as serious as a CSIS security breach (Twilight fanatics are welcome to disagree), but one has to wonder who thought it would be a good idea to dispose of the hottest property in Hollywood by dumping it in a public trash bin.

Fortunately for the sanctity of the film series, Ray ignored her initial impulse to sell the scripts to a tabloid and instead returned them to Summit Entertainment, the production company for the movies. For her honesty, Ray has been invited to attend the premieres of both films.

This is not the first time a Stephenie Meyer property has been inadvertently leaked. Fans may remember the incident last year, in which a partial manuscript for a novel called Midnight Sun was released online, prompting the author to cancel plans to publish the book. The 12-chapter draft was later posted on Meyer’s website.

Amazon kindles a price war

It may not be the equivalent of the sans-coulottes rising en masse during the French Revolution or a student facing down a tank in Tiananmen Square, but there appears to be a grassroots uprising of sorts developing around the pricing of e-books sold through Amazon for use on their Kindle readers. According to Galleycat, a group of almost 250 Amazon users have initiated a boycott of Kindle titles priced at more than $9.99. These currently include bestselling titles such as The Secret, David McCullough’s biography of Harry Truman, and the new novel by Harlan Coben.

There are currently 808 titles on Amazon with the “9 99 boycott” tag, including some (like Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer) that are sold at $9.99 on the nose.

Not surprisingly, most of the online commentary supports the rebellion: it’s another example of the people making their voices heard against the greedhead publishers and corporate behemoths. And to be fair, many of the arguments the boycotters are making have merit: Kindle e-books are not as permanent or as versatile as actual books (they can’t be marked up, lent out, or printed out), and there is a tradition of electronic content on the Web being priced more modestly than its physical counterpart (one reason why iTunes became so popular).

Still, it’s fallacious to presume that e-books don’t cost publshers anything to produce (even without the cost of paper, printing, and warehousing, there are acquisitions and editorial costs to be factored into the equation), and they are still getting gutted on their margins for regular books by sites like Amazon, which demand steep discounts on the titles they sell. Mark-ups for e-books may seem like price gouging on the part of publishers (and this may indeed be the case), but the bottom line is that this segment of the market is still negligible, and publishers need to make money if they want to survive. Perhaps the solution is to sell more e-books at a lower unit cost; whether or not the Amazon boycott has this effect remains to be seen.

King vs. Meyer

Wolfe and Irving, Vargas Llosa and Garcia Marquez, Amis and Barnes – those of us who love a good literary feud can now add to the list reigning horror author Stephen King, who lashed out at the upstart Stephenie Meyer in an interview with a reporter from USA Today – and threw in a few more barbs at James Patterson for good measure. Anyone who’s concerned that readers no longer engage with criticism should have a look at the comments section appending the story, which at the time of this writing was nearing 1,200 responses.

From The Guardian:

King compared the Mormon author to JK Rowling, saying that both authors were “speaking directly to young people”. “The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good,” he told an interviewer from USA Weekend.

King also drew a comparison between Meyer and Perry Mason mystery writer Erle Stanley Gardner. “He was a terrible writer, too, but he was very successful,” he said, going on to criticise prolific thriller author James Patterson – “a terrible writer but he’s very successful” – and fellow horror author Dean Koontz, who although he “can write like hell”, is sometimes “just awful”.