... h20boro lib blog

Books due out Tuesday next week:

The Children of Hurin by J.R.R. Tolkien: A stand-alone that "reunites Lord of the Rings fans with elves and men, dragons and dwarves, eagles and orcs."

The Good Husband of Zebra Drive by Alexander McCall Smith, next in his No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series.

The Woods by Harlan Coben: "A New Jersey county prosecutor looks to solve a case that has haunted him for 20 years."

The Marriage Game by Fern Michaels: A newlywed returns from her honeymoon to divorce papers, seeks revenge.

Crazies to the Left of Me, Wimps to the Right: How One Side Lost Its Mind and the Other Lost Its Nerve by Bernard Goldberg: Political views of a former CBS News reporter.

via ShelfAwareness

Labels: bookselling, forthcoming, publishing, shelf awareness

These books are due out on Tuesday of next week:

Fresh Disasters by Stuart Woods: 13th in series featuring lawyer Stone Barrington, involving underworld of the New York mafia.

The Land of Mango Sunsets by Dorothea Benton Frank: "A middle-aged Manhattan socialite embarks on a journey of self-discovery" in novel set partly in the South Carolina low country.

Obsession by Karen Robards: Suspenseful tale of a woman who's a pawn in a CIA ploy.

The Quilter's Homecoming: An Elm Creek Quilts Novel by Jennifer Chiaverini: 10th in the series, set on a ranch in southern California.

Sleeping with Strangers by Eric Jerome Dickey: "Steamy, fast-paced novel."

We Shall Not Sleep by Anne Perry: 5th and last in her World War I series featuring the Reavley family.

Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson: By the author of Benjamin Franklin. Biography is based on recently released letters.

Get in the Game: 8 Elements of Perseverance that Make the Difference by Cal Ripken, Jr.: Orioles baseball legend's guide to "overcoming challenges and building a life you love."

The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring by Richard Preston: Profile of botanists and amateur naturalists who go into the treetops of Northern California's redwoods.

via ShelfAwareness

Labels: bookselling, forthcoming, publishing, shelf awareness

Guy Dammann at the Guardian's book blog takes on a topic that's oft discussed among readers and librarians: Is it OK to stop reading a book?:

"Books ... are somehow allowed to bully us, using nothing but our own reflected guilt to do so. They sit on our shelves, or in piles on our desks and bedside tables, gathering dust and issuing gentle reproaches with every glance, a literary equivalent of water torture."

He offers his strategy for deciding whether to read a non-fiction book, and how much of it to read; the reader comments that follow the essay offer lots more strategies, ideas, and opinions (some of which apply to fiction, too) and names of books they chose not to finish.

Labels: bookselling, guardian, reading

• FANTASY: Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman's DRAGONSHIPS series, featuring 'Viking-like warriors, three opposing groups of Gods, ships powered by dragons and the ultimate quest for salvation and survival.'
• SUSPENSE: The next two books in Karin Slaughter's Grant County series, plus a stand-alone
• THRILLER: Kimberly Scott's first novel, UNDERTOW, 'a legal thriller set in Boston, and the first in a series' (previously published in Australia under a pseudonym)
• FICTION: NYT writer Hilary de Vries's THE COOKING LESSONS, about 'four sisters negotiating their relationships after the death of their mother'
• FICTION: Brendan McNally's GERMANIA, debut novel 'about the last days of the Third Reich, when Albert Speer, Hitler's architect and friend, embarks on a foolhardy rebellion'
• MEMOIR: Former Mexican president Vicente Fox's memoir REVOLUTION OF HOPE, 'covering his relationships with many world leaders, including Castro and Bush,' in Oct. 2007.
• MEMOIR: Richard Rushfield's DON'T FOLLOW ME, I'M LOST: A MEMOIR OF HAMPSHIRE COLLEGE AT THE TWILIGHT OF THE 80S, about an LA teen at this Western Massachusetts campus as slacker culture and political correctness meet
• CURRENT EVENTS: National Journal investigative reporter Murray Waas's THE UNITED STATES v. I. LEWIS LIBBY, 'drawn from the transcript of the trial of Scooter Libby,' with original reporting and an introductory essay, in April 2007
• CURRENT EVENTS: Journalist Laura Secor's FUGITIVES FROM PARADISE, 'about the last ten years of reform and democracy movements in Iran'
• CURRENT EVENTS: Former CIA director George Tenet's AT THE CENTER OF THE STORM, to be published on April 30, 2007.
• SOCIOLOGY/POP CULTURE: The English translation of Pierre Bayard's HOW TO TALK ABOUT BOOKS YOU HAVEN'T READ, with examples from works by Graham Greene, Umberto Eco, Paul Valéry, et al.
• HISTORY: Joe Flood's THE FIRES, 'exploring the hidden history of the fires that ravaged New York City in the 1970s, long blamed on arson but actually the result of the intentional withdrawal of government services from poor neighborhoods'
• ART/HISTORY: Ulrich Boser's MISSING: THE UNTOLD STORY BEHIND THE WORLD'S LARGEST ART THEFT, attempting to 'unravel the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum robbery ... and exploring the world of art, theft and obsession'
• CHILDREN: Jenna Bush's ANA'S STORY: A JOURNEY OF HOPE, 'based on her experiences working with UNICEF in Central America, focusing on a seventeen-year-old single mother who was orphaned at a young age and is living with HIV', in Fall 2007. Proceeds to UNICEF.

Labels: bookselling, forthcoming, publishing, to be published

The bookshelves may be labelled 'Real Life,' 'Painful Lives,' or something similar, but the fact that there are bookstore sections devoted to these kinds of books attests to the selling power of misery literature, or 'mis lit.' Anthony Barnes, in the Independent, writes:

"As page-turners go, they are hardly the most uplifting of reads. The abuse, pain and betrayal are often relentless. But 'misery literature' has now become the book world's boom sector.

"New figures show that the misery memoir market doubled from £12m in 2005 to £24m last year, with up to 10 new titles vying to be top of the glums each month. The top-selling misery memoir in the UK -- Behind Closed Doors by Jenny Tomlin -- shifted 278,000 copies in 2006, more than six times the number sold by last year's Booker Prize winner, The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai.

"Of the 100 bestselling paperbacks last year, more than a tenth were tales of real-life misery, and they make up six of the top 10 in the Sunday Times paperback bestseller list. ...

"At their core, most are chilling tales of childhood abuse with some form of redemption and triumph against adversity at the end." These books apparently appeal most to women with young children.

Labels: bestsellers, bookselling, misery lit, UK

Are marketing departments, publishers' narrow focus on the bottom-line, and chain booksellers seeking to please the masses keeping good writing from being widely published? Prolific fiction writer Fay Weldon thinks so.

Weldon writes that "'Best selling' should not be an accolade so much as a warning. Today the danger for writers who continue to aspire to 'good' in the old sense [i.e., not necessarily selling the most books or winning a prize] is that they won’t get published at all, or it will be with miserable print runs. The synopses they must have approved before they begin a commissioned book will please marketing rather than the editorial department.

"Caution is the death of creativity. ... As the sequels and prequels take over -- if they liked that one, surely they'll like this one -- the creative imagination withers. "

Scott Pack (previously head buyer for UK bookselling giant Waterstone's, now commercial director of The Friday Project, a web-to-print publisher.) somewhat agrees, at least about which books are good and which aren't, but he contradicts some of Weldon's arguments: "A good book is a good book no matter what the genre or how many copies it sells. And a bad book remains bad, whatever the pedigree of the author or how many critics fall over each other to praise it. Quality is not always in inverse proportion to the number of copies sold. ... Publishing is a commercial industry and should not have to apologise for it. ... The money a publisher makes from the fast turnover of John Grisham or Patricia Cornwell allows them to invest in less popular titles that won’t sell anywhere near as well."

Labels: bestsellers, bookselling, publishing, weldon