This article titled “Tim Waterstone poised to regain book chain as profits plunge under HMV” was written by Richard Wachman, for guardian.co.uk on Saturday 4th September 2010 23.06 UTC

Tim Waterstone, the founder of the books chain that bears his name, is considering a £100m-plus bid to take the chain private if the parent company, HMV, fails to turn the business around by the new year.

Well-placed City sources say Waterstone is closely monitoring developments at the bookshops, where sales and profits have plunged under HMV’s ownership.

HMV’s chief executive, Simon Fox, is to update the City this week on trading at the group’s operations as rebel shareholders push for a sale following the bungled opening of a new centralised distribution hub in Burton upon Trent.

Waterstone is ready to fire off a bid if Fox decides to sell, and has lined up funding from backers that include a London-based hedge fund.

HMV shareholders are pushing for a sale, although they are prepared to wait until after the all-important Christmas trading period before presenting their case to management.

Waterstone, who last week published his first novel in 10 years – In for a Penny, In for a Pound – founded Waterstone’s in 1982, opening the first store in London’s Old Brompton Road.

He sold the firm to WH Smith in the early 1990s, which in turn offloaded the company to HMV in 1998 for £300m. But in recent years, the business has floundered. Waterstone attempted to buy the firm back in 2006 for £280m, but withdrew his offer following a row over the terms of a deal.

Sources say Waterstone is still keen to regain control and that “it is unthinkable he wouldn’t be in the running” if HMV decided to sell. Analysts say the value of Waterstone’s is not reflected in the HMV stock price, which closed at 59p on Friday, valuing the entertainment group at about £255m.

“According to some calculations, Waterstone’s doesn’t feature at all in the parent company’s market value,” said one broker.

As reported in the Observer’s sister paper, the Guardian, last week, shareholders will demand a sale of Waterstone’s if a turnaround plan unveiled in March fails to reap returns.

Investors were rattled at Christmas when HMV disclosed that like-for-like sales at Waterstone’s had slumped by nearly 9% during a period viewed as peak trading time.

After the collapse of Borders in the UK, Waterstone’s is now Britain’s last major specialist books chain, with a national presence of 300 shops. But the firm has been hit by fierce competition from internet retailers such as Amazon and Play, and supermarkets.

New devices like the Kindle e-reader have raised concern about the long-term viability of high-street bookshops. But Tim Waterstone is understood to believe that rumours of the death of the bookshop have been greatly exaggerated.

Former colleagues of Waterstone say he has been troubled by poor morale at the chain, but is supportive of its new managing director, Dominic Myers, who took over when Gerry Johnson departed earlier this year.

An HMV spokesman said: “We have a clear strategy for the turnaround of Waterstone’s, focused on reinforcing our credentials as a range bookseller and helping stores reflect the local interest of their customers. Although we are only a few months in with this strategy, we are making very good progress and our initiatives have been very well received by the wider book industry.” Insiders said there was no intention to sell at present.

Despite problems at Waterstone’s, HMV revealed last month that group profits had risen by more than 12% after a strong showing from its core music and entertainment business. Fox said then that HMV was “on track” to transform the company into a broad-based entertainment brand after a move into live music and ticketing. The idea is to be less dependent on CD and DVD sales.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Pubished via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

This article titled “Guardian first book award longlist ranges around the world” was written by Richard Lea, for guardian.co.uk on Friday 27th August 2010 14.32 UTC

The past vies with the future and poetry with prose on the longlist of the 2010 Guardian first book award, which was announced today. The 10 debut titles in the running for the £10,000 award range from dystopian fiction to popular psychology, and span the globe from Somalia to Finland, Kashmir to Winston Churchill’s family home in Kent.

War stalks the pages of the best-known novel on the list, Nadifa Mohamed’s Black Mamba Boy, which was longlisted for the Orange prize and has already won the 2010 Betty Trask award. Mohamed takes the story of her father, who left Somalia as a boy and settled in the UK after crossing Africa, and transforms it into fiction inflected by the African tradition of praise poetry. Starting as a 10-year-old boy in 1930s Somalia and journeying through Djibouti, Eritrea, Sudan and Egypt to freedom in Britain, Mohamed’s main character witnesses key moments in the African experience of the second world war and embodies the itinerant experience of the Somali community.

According to the chair of the judges, the Guardian’s literary editor Claire Armitstead, Mohamed is just one of a group of young British authors on the longlist who are expanding the territory of the novel.

“This year’s longlist brings together a younger generation of writers who have moved beyond the social realism of Martin Amis and Ian McEwan, and are pushing at the boundaries of realist fiction,” she said.

Armitstead also cited Rebecca Hunt, whose novel Mr Chartwell imagines the depression that haunts both Winston Churchill and a young woman in Battersea as a huge black dog, and Ned Beauman, who explores Nazism, eugenics and entomology in Boxer, Beetle, as responding to the changes in publishing and wider society with fiction that enlarges the possibilities of the novel.

Speaking to the Guardian, Beauman, who expressed his “delight” at finding himself on the longlist, agreed that there was an impulse towards experimentation, but not necessarily in imposing what he called “the literary equivalent of recessional austerity measures”.

“Paring away plot, character, humour, lyricism, humanity is more often boring than it is bold,” he said. “The Americans know this, and indeed all I did in Boxer, Beetle was smuggle a few postmodern devices across the Atlantic, but at the moment a lot of British readers seem to be falling for this idea that the most interesting fiction has to involve rather dated Modernist self-flagellation.”

After the success of projects as various as Inglourious Basterds and The Kindly Ones, he confessed himself unworried by the difficulty of attracting readers to a story which combines the Third Reich and cockroaches. “What has emerged as a bigger obstacle is that everyone finds all the characters so horrible,” he said, “which had honestly never occurred to me when I was writing it.”

Steven Amsterdam, whose episodic novel Things We Didn’t See Coming considers how we might retain our humanity in a future ruled by environmental and technological catastrophe, and Maile Chapman, whose Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto evokes life in a 1920s Finnish asylum, are the two remaining novelists on the list.

Alexandra Harris looks back at the early 20th century through a different lens in Romantic Moderns, a study of how English writers, painters, gardeners, architects, critics and composers imbued the artistic revolutions coming across the channel with a nostalgic sense of place. Daniel Swift considers the lack of imagination that powers modern warfare in Bomber County, an investigation into the death of his grandfather which was sparked by Robert Graves’s observation that the second world war produced no great poets. Basharat Peer, meanwhile, reports from the frontline of the conflict between India and Pakistan in a return to his troubled homeland of Kashmir in Curfewed Night.

Kathryn Schulz’s Being Wrong, an exploration of how our convictions shape our lives despite being riddled with error, and Katharine Towers’s The Floating Man, a collection of poetry haunted by music and water, complete the list.

Armitstead will be joined on the judging panel by the artistic director of the ICA, Ekow Eshun, the author Adam Foulds, the biographer Richard Holmes, the actor Diana Quick, the Guardian’s deputy editor, Kath Viner, and Stuart Broom from Waterstone’s, who will represent the views of five reading groups hosted in Waterstone’s bookshops around the country.

Last year’s winner was the Zimbabwean writer Petina Gappah, for her collection of short stories, An Elegy for Easterly. She joined a roster of winners from the 12-year history of the award that includes Zadie Smith, Alex Ross and Jonathan Safran Foer.

The shortlist for this year’s prize will be announced in late October, with the winner revealed at the beginning of December.

The longlist

Fiction

Mr Chartwell by Rebecca Hunt (Fig Tree)

Boxer, Beetle by Ned Beauman (Sceptre)

Things We Didn’t See Coming by Steven Amsterdam (Harvill)

Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto by Maile Chapman (Cape)

Black Mamba Boy by Nadifa Mohamed (HarperCollins)

Non-fiction

Bomber County: The Lost Airmen of World War Two by Daniel Swift (Hamish Hamilton)

Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error by Kathryn Schulz (Portobello)

Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper by Alexandra Harris (Thames & Hudson)

Curfewed Night: A Frontline Memoir of Life, Love and War in Kashmir by Basharat Peer (Harper Press)

Poetry

The Floating Man by Katharine Towers (Picador)

• All titles on the Guardian First Book Award longlist are available at a discount from the Guardian Bookshop. Go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or ring 0330 333 6846

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Pubished via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

This article titled “Stieg Larsson becomes first author to sell 1m ebooks on Amazon” was written by Alison Flood, for guardian.co.uk on Wednesday 28th July 2010 13.27 UTC

The late Swedish journalist Stieg Larsson has beaten Stephenie Meyer and James Patterson to become the first author to sell more than one million ebooks on Amazon.

The online retailer said yesterday that Larsson, author of the Millennium trilogy, had become the first member of its new “Kindle Million Club”, for authors whose work has sold over a million copies in Amazon’s Kindle store in the US. The crime novelist is likely to be joined by thriller writer Patterson – Amazon said last week that it had sold over 860,000 of his ebooks – while Twilight scribe Meyer, Sookie Stackhouse creator Charlaine Harris and queen of romantic suspense Nora Roberts have each sold more than 500,000 Kindle books in the US.

“Larsson’s books have captivated millions of readers around the world and ignited a voracious interest in the lives of its main characters Lisbeth Salander and Michael Blomqvist,” said Russ Grandinetti, vice president of Kindle content. “It’s been exciting to have been a part of introducing so many people to these great books.”

The novelist’s three books – The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest – currently top Amazon’s Kindle bestseller list, and are also in the top 10 bestselling Kindle books of all time, according to the retailer.

The books have also topped Amazon’s UK Kindle chart for “a good few months”, said Iain Millar, marketing manager at Larsson’s UK publisher Quercus, and are currently at the top of Waterstone’s ebook bestseller list.

But Millar said that UK ebook sales for Larsson were “nowhere near the million mark, which is indicative of the extent to which the US ebook market is ahead of ours”.

“Broadly, the print books are equally popular in the States and in the UK, but uptake of the electronic version is much higher there, primarily because a much higher proportion of book customers in the States own ebook devices,” he said.

Quercus has sold 3.3m copies of Larsson’s books in the UK, and estimates that worldwide sales of the three novels are somewhere between 35-40m copies, “but they are literally selling too fast to count”, said Millar.

The news about Larsson’s ebook sales follows Amazon’s announcement last week that over the past three months it sold 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardback books. Kindle sales accelerated in the past month alone, when the online retailer said it sold 180 Kindle books for every 100 hardbacks. The figures cover Amazon’s US book business, include hardback sales when there is no Kindle edition and exclude free Kindle books.

The retailer made no mention of the proportion of paperback salesto Kindle sales, but founder Jeff Bezos stressed that ebooks were not cannibalising print, saying that hardback purchases at Amazon were still growing and that Kindles had overtaken them regardless.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Pubished via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

This article titled “Celebrated authors bypass publishing houses to sell ebooks via Amazon” was written by Alison Flood, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 22nd July 2010 13.51 UTC

An eye-wateringly stellar list of authors, from Philip Roth to Orhan Pamuk, Martin Amis and John Updike, is bypassing publishers to sell digital editions of books directly to readers, via Amazon.

The brainchild of uber-agent Andrew “The Jackal” Wylie, Odyssey Editions launches today. It offers 20 modern literary classics as ebooks for the first time, exclusively via Amazon.com’s Kindle store. The books, all priced at Amazon’s usual ebook rate of .99, range from Amis’s London Fields, Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint and VS Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival to titles from the estates of dead authors such as John Updike, William S Burroughs, Saul Bellow and Hunter S Thompson.

The authors all share Wylie as their agent, and the move makes good on his threat last month that, dissatisfied with the terms publishers have been offering for ebooks, he would remove them from the equation.

“We will take our 700 clients, see what rights are not allocated to publishers, and establish a company on their behalf to license those ebook rights directly to someone like Google, Amazon.com, or Apple. It would be another business, set up on parallel tracks to the frontlist book business,” he told Harvard Magazine in June.

The exclusive deal with Amazon, which will last for two years, effectively removes other booksellers from the equation as well: modern classics including Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and Hunter S Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas will only be sold through the internet retailer.

“As the market for ebooks grows, it will be important for readers to have access in ebook format to the best contemporary literature the world has to offer,” said Wylie, who worked with the UK company Enhanced Editions on the digital project. “This publishing programme is designed to address that need, and to help ebook readers build a digital library of classic contemporary literature.”

The move is likely to concern publishers. In December, Random House wrote to agents informing them of its belief that it holds exclusive rights to digital editions of the “vast majority” of its backlist titles, even those acquired before electronic rights were specifically included in contracts. That letter enraged authors, and the Authors Guild issued a statement saying that “publishers acquire only the rights that they bargain for; authors retain rights they have not expressly granted to publishers. E-book rights, under older book contracts, were retained by the authors.”

The guild also pointed to a 2001 court ruling, which dismissed Random House’s claim that its copyright had been breached when ebook publisher Rosetta Books acquired digital rights in eight novels by the American writers Kurt Vonnegut and William Styron.

But Random House – which publishes physical editions of some of the Odyssey titles – looks set to challenge the new venture. Spokesman Stuart Applebaum said in a statement that the publisher was “disappointed by Mr Wylie’s actions”.

He continued: “Last night, we sent a letter to Amazon disputing their rights to legally sell these titles, which are subject to active Random House publishing agreements. Upon assessing our business options, we will be taking appropriate action.”

Eleven of the Odyssey titles will be available globally, according to Amazon.com. The tension between publishers and authors over ebook rights has also been growing in the UK: earlier this month historian and novelist Tom Holland, chair of the Society of Authors, said that the deals authors were being asked to sign up to for ebooks were “not remotely fair”.

The current standard royalty for ebooks in the UK is 25%, but authors believe it should be 50%, as digital editions have lower warehousing and distribution costs.

American literary agent Robert Gottlieb, chairman of the Trident Media Group, said agents were also pushing for better royalty rates in the US. “As of this time, publishers are doing their hardest to hold to the 25%. My view is this is a moving target and, as time goes by and the market place becomes more competitive, publishers will have to negotiate ebook royalties on a case-by-case basis,” he said.

Although Gottlieb wished Andrew well in his new venture, he felt that an agent becoming, in effect, a publisher contained “the potential for a conflict of interest with authors and/or estates”, and is not contemplating a similar move himself.

Wylie’s initiative is not the first time authors have looked to bypass publishers. In December, bestselling business author Stephen Covey announced that he had sold exclusive digital rights in two of his bestselling titles to Amazon, cutting out his traditional publisher Simon & Schuster. The deal was made via Rosetta Books, which also struck a similar deal in the US for a collection of titles by Ian McEwan. And with Amazon.com offering authors a royalty of 70% for ebooks sold via its Kindle store, the trend only looks set to continue.

Full list of titles published by Odyssey Editions and available on the Kindle:

London Fields by Martin Amis

The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow

Ficciones (Spanish edition) by Jorge Luis Borges

Junky by William Burroughs

The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich

The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

The Enigma of Arrival by VS Naipaul

The White Castle by Orhan Pamuk

Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth

Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson

Rabbit Run by John Updike

Rabbit Redux by John Updike

Rabbit is Rich by John Updike

Rabbit at Rest by John Updike

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Pubished via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

This article titled “Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird soars up the charts” was written by Alison Flood, for guardian.co.uk on Friday 9th July 2010 08.33 UTC

Fifty years after it first became a bestseller, Harper Lee’s groundbreaking story of racism in the American south, To Kill a Mockingbird, is racing back to the top of the UK’s book charts.

Celebrations in libraries, bookshops and cinemas around the country marking the half-century since the novel was first published on 11 July 1960 have sent the modern classic riding high in the bestseller lists once more. This Pulitzer prize-winning debut – the only novel Lee has published so far – sits alongside more modern fare from the likes of Terry Pratchett, Jodi Picoult and Patricia Cornwell in 14th position overall in The Bookseller magazine’s official UK top 50.

In the independent bookseller Foyles, To Kill a Mockingbird is currently the number one bestseller following prominent promotions of the 50th anniversary edition. Foyles’s web editor Jonathan Ruppin was “delighted that a classic book of such significance, both in terms of its literary impact and the awareness of important issues that it raises, is still being discovered by new generations of readers”.

“The elegance and humanity of Harper Lee’s writing and the absorbing story she tells mean that it’s a book which is unlikely ever to go out of print.” While its 1930s setting is increasingly remote, he continued, communities still fighting for equality and justice can still draw inspiration from the novel, “but, above all, it’s simply a fantastic read”.

Telling the story of lawyer Atticus Finch’s defence of a black man charged with the rape of a white girl through the eyes of his children Scout and Jem Finch, the novel takes its title from Finch’s advice to his children: “Shoot all the Bluejays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a Mockingbird.”

It has gone on to sell more than 40m copies around the world, and counts Oprah Winfrey, Truman Capote and George W Bush – who awarded Lee the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her “outstanding contribution to America’s literary tradition” – among its many fans.

Fifty years on, Waterstone’s has been running a special offer on the book, which has pushed it into its top 10 bestsellers for the first time.

“It is our number seven title, ahead of Barbara Kingsolver, Harlan Coben and Edward Rutherford,” said Waterstone’s Jon Howells. “It’s an amazing achievement for a 50-year-old novel – great to see.”

“Booksellers have relished the chance to handsell what is for many their favourite book, and customer response has been exceptional,” he added. “I guess it is one of those titles that many people have read, but a long time ago, or have meant to read for a long, long time, and this anniversary is inspiring a lot of people to pick the book up.”

The UK’s libraries have also been hosting events to discuss and read the book, while cinemas have been holding screenings of the Oscar-winning film adaptation starring Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch, and as well as the 50th anniversary edition of the book, the book’s British publisher Arrow has released the UK’s first-ever audio version, an unabridged, 11-hour edition read by Sissy Spacek. “She was handpicked by Harper Lee to read it,” said spokesperson Ruth Waldram.

Events in the UK pale in comparison to the country-wide festivities in the US, however. From an all-day readathon in North Carolina, a courtroom re-enactment in California and “mocktails and music by the Boo Radleys” in New York, celebrations are centring on Monroeville, Alabama, Lee’s hometown and the inspiration for the fictional setting of Maycomb in the novel. A four-day celebration is currently under way, complete with a marathon reading from the book, a walking tour of the town, a feast of the traditional Southern foods described in the novel, and a birthday party on the lawn of the courthouse that features in the book, where the “signature” cocktail, Tequila Mockingbird, will be on offer.

Thousands of fans visit the town every year to pay homage to the novel, and Monroeville is expecting a further influx this weekend. There is still hope that the reclusive 84-year-old Lee, who retired from public life in 1964 following the unexpected success of her only novel, will make an appearance at events, although reports last month suggested that despite receiving an invitation to the celebrations, she will be remaining in her apartment. Her publisher describes her chief interests – apart from writing – as “19th-century literature and 18th-century music, watching politicians and cats, travelling and being alone”.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Pubished via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

All the stories from the last fortnight.

To keep up to date why not subscribe to our daily e-mail or our RSS feed.

Hughes & Hughes Dun Laoghaire

However, industry observers pointed to the company’s rapid growth in recent years as playing a significant role in its downfall. The chain expanded its presence in shopping malls such as the Pavilions Shopping Centre in Swords and Dundrum Town Centre at the height of the boom, locking itself into high rents.

The latest accounts for Hughes & Hughes show that the bookseller posted sales of more than €37m to the 53 weeks ended March 2008, up more than €6m year-on-year.

The 2008 year also saw the company return to profit and the directors expressed confidence of “future progress” when they signed off their report in August 2008, just before the financial collapse.

The company closed the year with bank loans of more than €5.8m and shareholders’ loans of €750,000. The debt is likely to have gone up since then, given the business’ expansion.

Company filings also show that Ulster Bank has a number of charges registered against Hughes & Hughes.

Just before Christmas we wanted to buy 60 copies to the wonderful “Tribes” by US marketing Guru Seth Godin to send to customers as a thank you present. I phoned around and the price in Hughes & Hughes was €16 per copy. We ended up getting the books on Amazon.co.uk for just €7.50 per copy. The price was the same on Amazon whether we were was getting one copy or 70. Do you see now why Hughes & Hughes is gone out of business?

Another busy fortnight for Irish Publishing News. We crossed the 100 article point mid-week.

Please keep us up to date with news and events so that we can post them on Mondays and Thursday.

Editor

The cancellation and postponement of several children’s and literary titles due to be published by Mercier Press has been blamed on a reduction in Arts Council funding, the company said today.

The Cork-based firm confirmed comments made yesterday on Twitter by the children’s publishing blogger, David Maybury, whose as yet untitled book was to be published later in 2010.

Confirmation from the company came through an update on Twitter: ‘Regrettably, several literary and children’s projects have been cancelled or postponed at Mercier due to a 40% cut from The Arts Council.’

Mercier Press’ funding was reduced from €32,000 in 2009 to €20,000 in 2010. The Arts Council has had its overall budget reduced by over €8 million compared with the previous year.

In a phone interview, Managing Director of Mercier Press Clodagh Feehan said it was an ‘unfortunate’ situation.

She said the company would be ‘willing to negotiate with authors who felt they had opportunities to publish earlier (than the new dates) elsewhere’ and that they would honour all ‘existing contracts’.

Ms Feehan added that Mercier Press did not wish to damage anyone’s ability to succeed.

She said the company’s ‘focus was on survival’ in difficult economic conditions.

The Head of Literature for the Arts Council, Sarah Bannan, said that ‘some tough decisions had been made’ but that the Council was happy that it ‘didn’t have to discontinue its funding relationship with Mercier Press’.

Mercier Press was one of several of publishers who experienced a drop in Arts Council funding compared with last year. For a full list of the cuts and its impact see our spreadsheet here.

The O’Brien Press has announced a new representation deal with UK independent Frances Lincoln. Beginning in June 2010 Frances Lincoln will represent all of O’Brien Press’ titles both children’s and adult titles in the UK Book trade.

Compass-DSA currently handle UK representation of O’Brien Press’ adult titles and their children’s titles are handled in-house by the O’Brien Press team. The deal will mean the end of O’Brien Press’ 12 year partnership with Compass-DSA.

Commenting on the announcement Ivan O’Brien, MD of O’Brien Press, said:

We are delighted to announce Frances Lincoln as our new representatives in the UK book market. As like-minded long-established independents publishers, we are confident that we will make good partners and look forward to working with Frances Lincoln to bring our extensive list of adults and children’s titles to the UK market.