|
Writers' magazine |
|
|
|
|
|
News stories from the book world 2001You can check latest stories.
21 December McGraw-Hill downsizing As part of a restructure, the large American publisher McGraw Hill has announced that it will be shedding 925 jobs, which is five per cent of their workforce. Over half of the jobs being lost will come from their educational division. MightyWords to close The MightyWords site is to close, with the loss of 23 jobs. BN.com, having acquired over half of MightyWords, appears to be reevaluating its usefulness in terms of BN.com’s own customers. But better news from bookshops The latest sales figures from the UK book trade seem to indicate that Christmas has arrived at last and a bumper season is expected. Consumers seem to have decided that the anticipated recession has not yet arrived yet and they might as well cheer themselves up by going on a Christmas spending spree. Back to Top
10 December Authors M J Rose and Doug Clegg, trailblazers of e-marketing, have set up BuzzYour.com, a line of interactive e-workbooks which will provide advice for writers and other creative people on how to succeed through e-marketing. Titles include Buzz Your Book, Buzz Your Zine and Buzz Your Website and are intended to help readers to maximise use of the Internet to promote their work. They can be found on PigeonholePress.com, which is based on the concept that thinking big doesn't always work and that it is better to focus on niche marketing instead. Back to Top
3 December Amazon provides Thanksgiving cheer To counter the gloom which has overtaken the American economy, there’s good news from online bookseller Amazon. On the day after Thanksgiving the online retailer sold 12,000 more items per hour than it did on the same day last year. This news cheered Wall Street so much that Amazon’s share price rose by a third. Clancy non-transfer fee Following on from the recent departure of Phyllis Grann, until recently President and Publisher of Penguin-Putnam, there’s been a lot of speculation in New York publishing circles about possible transfers for her stable of bestselling authors. This has intensified now it’s has been announced that she will join Random House, US. According to the New York Post, one author at least will not be moving with Ms Grann. Tom Clancy had a big two-book contract with Penguin Putnam, and was clearly one author the publishing house did not want to lose. Just in the last two weeks the key person clause (which lets the author out of the contract if their editor moves) has been taken out. The suggestion is that Penguin Putnam paid over a substantial sum of money to get this provision removed – so they could hang on to the author. Back to Top
26 November Recent reports from New York suggest that the only people in the book business likely to do well this autumn are the remainder dealers. A New York Times report indicated that sales even of best-selling authors, usually regarded as ‘bankers’, have plunged by 25 to 40 per cent. Carolyn Reidy, president of adult publishing at Simon and Schuster, said: 'I have never seen anything like it … I have seen softness in the market for books, but always the bigger books still sold – that is why the falloff in name fiction is so horrifying.' Since the big American trade publishing houses are so dependant on sales of big authors’ books, this downturn in sales right in the middle of the most important selling season will have a disproportionate effect on their profits. Don Weisberg, chief operating officer of Random House, North America, said he forecast eighteen months of tough times ahead. ‘Hundreds of thousands of people lost their jobs in the last couple of months, all potential book buyers’ he said. In difficult economic times, publishers tend to cut their lists and shed staff. In the UK Penguin has recently announced 49 redundancies and HarperCollins will lose 19 jobs. It’s not clear to what extent book-buyers are reacting to the continuing war in Afghanistan, or whether they are primarily affected by the weak economy and the fear of lay-offs. The theory that books withstand recession rather well, being a relatively cheap form of entertainment, does not seem to be holding up too well at present. Back to Top
19 November Harry Potter and the magic of books A recent report in the Wall Street Journal suggests that kids may be turning back to books. Across the US, bookstores are reporting an increase in young book-buyers of between 20% and 75% over the past three years. According to a survey by Leisure Trends, over 25% of people under 25 now say that reading is their favourite pastime, compared to 10% a year ago. If this is the ‘Harry Potter’ effect, then it is should be greeted enthusiastically by everyone connected with writing, publishing or selling books. But perhaps television has finally lost its appeal. If children are picking up books again, there may be real hope for the future of reading. Alison Reid, the owner of the Diesel Bookstore in Oakland, California, endorses the general trend: ‘This generation has far more patience, is much more open to art and culture than any I’ve seen.'
Judge blocks parody of "Gone With the Wind" 29 April ATLANTA, April 20 (Reuters) - The estate of Margaret Mitchell, the author of the Civil War epic ``Gone With the Wind,'' won a victory on Friday when a federal judge blocked publication of a parody called ``The Wind Done Gone.'' U.S. District Judge Charles Pannell ruled in a 51-page decision that ``The Wind Done Gone,'' written by Alice Randall, infringed on the copyright of Mitchell's 1936 novel. He granted a preliminary injunction against the book's publication, which had been set for June. Mitchell's estate had sued Houghton Mifflin Co. publishers of ``The Wind Done Gone,'' in federal district court in Atlanta, charging copyright infringement. Houghton Mifflin said in a statement that it and Randall were disappointed in the ruling and that it planned to appeal. ``The Wind Done Gone'' aims to counter Mitchell's work by depicting 19th century Southern plantation life from an African-American viewpoint. It is written from the point of view of a mixed-race plantation owner's daughter -- who might be a half sister of ``Gone With the Wind'' heroine Scarlett O'Hara -- on a Georgia plantation after the Civil War. Lawyers for Mitchell's estate said Randall committed ``wholesale theft of major characters'' from ``Gone With the Wind,'' which was made into a wildly popular 1939 film starring Vivian Leigh and Clark Gable. Pannell, who heard from both sides in court on Wednesday, found that ``substantial similarities'' existed between the two works and that those similarities involved copyrighted material. ``The new work's use of copyrighted materials from 'Gone With the Wind' goes well beyond that which is necessary to create a parody and, thus, makes excessive use of the original work,'' Pannell said in his order. Randall and her publisher had argued that her parody simply revisited the world of a famous book and did not violate copyright law. ``Today's ruling, if allowed to stand, will have a chilling effect on all those who seek to use free expression and parody to explode myths and provoke new thinking,'' the Boston-based publisher said in its statement after the ruling. ``I wrote this parody to ridicule a book that has wounded generations of Americans,'' Randall, who is black, said in the statement. ``I look forward to the day when readers will be able to judge my book for themselves.'' The original novel's depiction of black slaves, portrayed as a cheerful and supportive backdrop to the white protagonists' lives, is offensive to many African-Americans. Authors who have defended the parody include novelist Harper Lee, author of ``To Kill a Mockingbird,'' and Nobel laureate Toni Morrison.but11 June Publisher goes ahead with The Wind Done Gone Now that it has been cleared by the courts to publish Alice Randall's The Wind Done Gone, the American publisher Houghton Mifflin has upped the first print run of the book. This is in anticipation that the publicity created by the Mitchell Estate’s attempt to prevent the novel being published will substantially increase sales. It is ironic that the Estate’s efforts to protect the copyright of Gone with the Wind should ultimately have had the effect of boosting Alice Randall’s book, which seeks to re-tell the myth-making novel from the slaves’ point of view.
2 April 2001 Writers Copyright Argued in the
Supreme Court The US Supreme Court has been hearing arguments relating to the landmark case brought by members of the National Writers Union against the New York Times Company, Newsday Inc, Time Inc, Lexis/Nexis and University Microfilms Inc. The charge is that the publishers violated freelance contributors’ copyrights by republishing their work electronically without permission or paying further compensation. The case hinges on whether publishers have the right, in the absence of a contract, to reproduce and redistribute freelance work in electronic databases. For the publishers this is a huge threat to their business, as they claim they would have to remove large amounts of material from their databases, leaving gaps in the historic record. Jonathan Tasini, the President of the National Writers Union, said ‘ Copyright is supposed to protect authors, to allow them to make a fair living… The First Amendment ensures that no one entity can control information. Publishers are blaming the victim. We're not Luddites; all writers want their work out there. They just want to be paid fairly. It won't be easy, but with bargaining we can figure this out.’ It seems that some sort of compromise is needed, so that publishers can republish and writers can get their share of the revenue generated by their copyright material. The Supreme Court ruling is awaited with interest.
UK budget will help authors The recent UK budget included a proposal which could substantially improve authors’ tax position. It is proposed that authors and other creative artists should be allowed to average their income over two consecutive years for tax purposes, rather than having advances and other payments received by authors taxed as a lump sum. For the authors to qualify, their profits in the lower-earning of the two years must be less than 75% of those in the higher-earning year. A recent and rather alarming Society of Authors survey of authors’ income, showed that about half of the Society’s members earned less than the full-time equivalent of the national minimum wage. It is clearly vital that authors are helped to maximise their income by minimising the tax burden they bear.
26 March 2001 Who owns e-book rights? Random House sues Rosetta Books. Random House, the Bertelsmann-owned largest publisher in the world, is suing the Internet start-up Rosetta Books (www/rosettabooks.com/) for copyright infringement. Rosetta Books was set up recently to sell e-book versions of modern classics through its website. The basic premise of Random’s suit is that its existing contracts with the authors give it the exclusive right to publish in book form, which the publisher maintains includes e-book formats. Titles by major authors, including William Styron, Kurt Vonnegut and Robert Parker, are involved. Rosetta made deals direct with the authors through their agents. The case revolves around the question of whether or not Random’s original purchase of rights covers e-books. Since the contracts for the books involved are all pre-1995, they contain no specific mention of e-books or e-book rights. The authors’ agents therefore claim that these rights are reserved by the author and that the authors are not infringing their contracts with Random House by selling them to Rosetta Books. The Authors’ Guild, not surprisingly, is siding with the authors. Paul Aiken, executive director of the Guild, told The New York Times: ‘Everyone knew what a book was when these contracts were signed – volumes printed on paper – and this is nothing more than a bold and baseless rights grab.’ Agents – again, no surprise here - feel the same way. Don Maas, head of the Association of Authors’ Representatives, said in a statement: ‘This unjustified assertion of power on the part of the world’s largest publishing conglomerate is distressing.' The case has implications for all authors, as they may be in a position to sell new rights such as e-book rights on books they have already published, often in contracts specifying considerably higher royalties. As far as new contracts are concerned, it seems clear that publishers will fight to stop e-book rights being separated from print rights, not least because they are already launching their own e-book publishing programmes. The outcome of this case could have a significant impact on authors' rights in relation to new and existing technologies going forward. C.H. |
|
©WritersServices.com 2001-2008 |
