The Guardian's Blog, page 216

The Fifty Shades of Grey biography that wasn't

A tiny Yorkshire publishing house made waves when it announced plans to print a 'biography' of Christian Grey. Then came the scary threats from some bigshot lawyers. Tamsin Rutter explains what happened next

The publishing world erupted in a frenzy when a small West Yorkshire publishing company promised to deliver the "unauthorised biography" of Fifty Shades of Grey's controversial heartthrob Christian Grey.

Within an hour of the Bookseller revealing details of the forthcoming book, the Hebden Bridge-based independent publishers Bluemoose Books were inundated with requests, including from 20 different European and north American publishers asking to buy the rights to the "biography". They even had Hollywood on the phone - Universal Studios wanted to buy the film rights.

The book was to offer a psychological insight into Grey before he became famous, his "childhood, educational background, rapid rise in business, years of international travel and his string of relationships and select sexual proclivities," as written by a fictional former classmate of Grey's, Dominic Cutmore, and was due to be published last October.

The only problem was Bluemoose Books did not actually own the rights to such a book – nor did it have the funds to print such a book – nor, in fact, did it have the book itself. None of its in-house authors had ever read EL James's erotic novel, let alone written fan fiction purporting to tell the tale of how a troubled young chap grew up to be the tall, dark and handsome man of every woman's dreams. (Every woman willing to submit to his darkest and kinkiest sexual desires, at least.)

So what happens when a tiny publishing house takes on a project on this scale and effectively takes on one of the most powerful publishers in the world? Kevin Duffy, owner of Bluemoose Books, was under a bit of pressure to make good on his opportunistic stunt and produce a novel which, he had boasted, would "pull no punches and leaves no stone unturned".

He instructed his wife to buy a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey and desperately leaf through it on the train down to London while texting a plot summary to one of the company's authors, who fired off the first three chapters of The Secret Life of Christian Grey in an afternoon. Meanwhile, Duffy started trying to cobble together enough cash to print the hundreds of thousands of copies needed to quench the world's desire for Grey-related fiction.

And, he said: "For a week I nearly became a millionaire." But alas, Bluemoose Books soon fell off the "erotica" bandwagon they had only just jumped on to, after a terse phone call from James's New York and London-based publishers, Random House, whose corporate lawyers were bandying about the term "copyright infringement". They quickly dropped the idea.

Duffy is not too disheartened, however, saying: "The reason I re-mortgaged the house was to publish great stories." (A Bluemoose book, Pig Iron by Benjamin Myers, was recently reviewed by the Guardian.) The stunt had also put him in touch with publishing houses in Australia and the United States, allowing him to promote some of the homegrown fiction Bluehouse is so proud of.

Duffy said that although his company was too small to risk legal action, they might "write a book about the book about the book. Just about putting the idea out there, that idea going off on its own steam, and then realising that because of the cash cow that is Fifty Shades of Grey that means we wouldn't be allowed to publish it. They couldn't sue us for that. I just get really annoyed that the biggest publisher in the world can tie you up in knots."

Though unsuccessful, the almost-attempt at cashing in on James's success is testament to the erotic furore which gripped the nation at the publication of Fifty Shades of Grey, itself a product of fan fiction of the Twilight series. Publishers must believe there's still a market out there yearning for sex novels women don't have to hide on the train. But it seems only the biggest publishers can cash in on it.

EL JamesPublishingFifty Shades of GreyTamsin Rutter
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The 50 Shades of Grey biography that wasn't

A tiny Yorkshire publishing house made waves when it announced plans to print a "biography" of Christian Grey. Then came the scary threats from some bigshot lawyers. Kevin Duffy from Bluemoose Books explains to Tamsin Rutter what happened next

The publishing world erupted in a frenzy when a small West Yorkshire publishing company promised to deliver the "unauthorised biography" of 50 Shades of Grey's controversial (if fictional) heartthrob Christian Grey.

Within an hour of The Bookseller revealing details of the forthcoming book, the Hebden Bridge-based independent publishers Bluemoose Books were inundated with requests, including from 20 different European and North American publishers asking to buy the rights to the "biography". They even had Hollywood on the phone - Universal Studios wanted to buy the film rights.

The book was to offer a psychological insight into Christian Grey before he became famous, his "childhood, educational background, rapid rise in business, years of international travel and his string of relationships and select sexual proclivities," as written by a fictional former classmate of Grey's, Dominic Cutmore, and due to be published last October.

The only problem was Bluemoose Books did not actually own the rights to such a book – nor did it have the funds to print such a book – nor, in fact, the book itself. None of its in-house authors had ever read E L James' erotic novel, let alone written fan fiction purporting to tell the tale of how a troubled young chap grew up to be the tall dark and handsome man of every woman's dreams. Every woman willing to submit to his darkest and kinkiest sexual desires, at least.

So what happens when a tiny publishing house takes on a project on this scale and effectively takes on one of the most powerful publishers in the world? Kevin Duffy, owner of Bluemoose Books, was under a bit of pressure to make good on his opportunistic stunt and produce a novel which, he had boasted, would "pull no punches and leaves no stone unturned."

He instructed his wife to buy a copy of 50 Shades of Grey and desperately leaf through a it on the train down to London while texting a plot summary to one of the company's authors, who fired off the first three chapters of The Secret Life of Christian Grey in an afternoon. Meanwhile, Duffy started trying to cobble together enough cash to print the hundreds of thousands of copies needed to quench the world's desire for Grey-related fiction.

And, he said: "For a week I nearly became famous." But alas, Bluemoose Books soon fell off the 'erotica' bandwagon they had only just jumped on to, after a terse phone call from EL James' New York and London-based publishers, Random House, whose corporate lawyers were bandying about the term 'copyright infringement'. They quickly dropped the idea.

Duffy is not too disheartened, however, saying: "The reason I re-mortgaged the house was to publish great stories." (A Bluemoose book, Pig Iron by Benjamin Myers, was recently reviewed by the Guardian.) The stunt had also put him in touch with publishing houses in Australia and the United States, allowing him to promote some of the home-grown fiction Bluehouse is so proud of.

Duffy said that although his company was too small to risk legal action, they might "write a book about the book about the book. Just about putting the idea out there, that idea going off on its own steam, and then realising that because of the cash cow that is 50 Shades of Grey that means we wouldn't be allowed to publish it. They couldn't sue us for that. I just get really annoyed that the biggest publisher in the world can tie you up in knots."

Though unsuccessful, the almost-attempt at cashing in on James' success is testament to the erotic furore which gripped the nation at the publication of 50 Shades of Grey, itself a product of fan fiction of the Twilight series. Publishers must believe there's still a market out there yearning for sex novels women don't have to hide on the train. But it seems only the biggest publishers can cash in on it.

EL JamesPublishingFifty Shades of GreyTamsin Rutter
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The real appeal of fantastic food in children's books

Meadowcream, butterbeer, Pop Biscuits: the great thing about such dream feasts is that it's not hard to imagine eating them

During the reluctant but necessary leanness of January, only emergency digestives and coffee chocs remaining amid a crinkly, post-apocalyptic emptiness, the Redwall books are entirely off my menu. This is because I can't re-read them without becoming desperate to try impossible but delicious-sounding food: meadowcream, hotroot soup and deeper'n'ever pie. (Actually a Redwaller's diet would probably purge festive excess very nicely, if we were only mouse or mustelid enough to digest it.) For me, Brian Jacques' feasts, lovingly described and partaken of by Redwallers with universal glee, pick up where Brambly Hedge leaves off, using words, rather than images, to evoke a similar sense of doll-scale richness. Jill Barklem's Store Stump, full of candied violets, preserved crabapples and drying mushrooms, imparts to small readers the joyful and cosy illusion of being smaller still – the size of someone for whom a whole hazelnut would represent bilious excess. I wish I'd taken that approach this Christmas.

I don't know the recipe for meadowcream (nor can I squeeze into the Store Stump, alas – especially now), but The Box of Delights regularly requires me to create a curdled mess of eggs and treacle while trying to conjure up the kindly Inspector's posset, prescribed to young Kay as a sovereign remedy for nervous strain brought on by overmuch education. (It may be my ignorance as to the size of a "Jorum" that's to blame, but I keep winding up with sweetened scrambled eggs). I also have a weakness for fierce little Maria's demanding "underdone chops and plenty of them" to build herself up after being scrobbled by the villainous Abner Brown.

CS Lewis's Narnian food, too, remains among his otherworld's most seductive characteristics. From the datelike toffee-tree that grows from Digory's planted bag of sweets, to the eel stew served, with gloomy predictions of its toxicity, by Puddleglum, the familiar is transmuted into the exotic in much the same way that a wardrobe becomes a doorway to a forest – where fauns serve Edwardian afternoon tea, complete with boiled eggs and sardines. The food of Enid Blyton's Faraway Tree, up which round-faced pixies provide buns and lemonade for solidly peckish child explorers, also belongs on this shelf between the mundane and the magical. Pop biscuits which fill your mouth with honey, plums which grow all year round – everything is just real, and just unreal enough, to whet a child's appetite both for reading and rations.

More recent additions to my kid-lit fantasy food menu include butterbeer (but not pumpkin juice) from Hogwarts, and Forty-Two Century butter-pie from Diana Wynne Jones's Time City. Wynne Jones, with her usual deadpan common sense, cautions against even fantastical excess – butterpies are addictively delicious, defying the laws of physics by containing a hot part within a cold ("It's goloptuous when you get to the warm part, isn't it?") but if you steal a friend's credit and over-indulge they'll make you horribly sick all the same.

There's something about the food of these fantastical worlds, striking the perfect balance between wild exoticism and a down-to-earth basis in everyday eating, which makes me yearn not just to eat them, but to make them. Actually, not just to make them, but to be the sort of person whose pantry (I think you have to have a pantry) is automatically stocked with gilded gingerbread, raisin wine in stoneware jugs, venison pasties and hothouse peaches. They tease because they remain impossible, but so plausible the reader believes that she or he can somehow acquire the secret of their making. Perhaps by next Christmas I'll have learned the recipe for meadowcream in a dream, or Heston will have invented a Twenty-One Century butterpie. And if not – well, fantasy food, at least, leaves your waistline unrounded.

Children and teenagersImogen Russell Williams
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The best crap book covers

A new blog is picking out the best of the worst author-designed book covers, and it's gloriously awful stuff

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I love crap book covers. And my favourite romance blog Smart Bitches Trashy Books has just pointed me in the direction of a glorious new source of awfulness: Lousy Book Covers (tagline: "Just because you CAN design your own book cover doesn't mean you SHOULD").

The site is aptly named. My eyes are still hurting from Elfthade, while Spending Christmas with a Yeti is a dire warning about the dangers of clip art. There's Reach for the Moon, "with your horribly deformed appendage", as the site's author Nathan Shumate puts it, Hell's Christmas – which actually reminds me of those Point Horror books I used to read – and for sheer, brilliant randomness, The Churning Cauldron, complete with a fire, an elephant, a donkey and the White House. I'm so intrigued by this last one that I'm going to find out what it's actually about – ah, I see. "There are those, who believe so strongly in an ideal or concept that it consumes their very soul. 'The Deacon', a retired Green Beret, is one such person. He has decided that this nation of ours is in rapid decline and he plans to save it from a totally destructive Administration as well as it's [sic] other problems by whatever means possible, He has teamed up with several old friends with like backgrounds and they set out to… in their words 'Save Lady Liberty'." Good lord.

Anyway, the site has recently become a bit of a viral hit, "all because of one thin-skinned author who found her work here and made a stink about it", says Shumate. The author? Shannon McRoberts, who objected to the inclusion of her book Athine Verses: The Blood Sisters among other "lousy" covers.

Sympathy, alas, is in short supply. "If you can't take the heat, stay out of Photoshop," as one respondent put it. "I think I'm going to get that on a T-shirt," agreed Shumate.

Anyway, enjoy … and if that's not enough for you, a Polish correspondent has been inspired by Shumate to track down the worst of Polish book covers, and it is a revelation.

FictionAlison Flood
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Open thread: Which are the best books to read on the London Underground?

Just the ticket: Recommend the best reads for a tube journey

The London Underground is 150 years old. It opened in 1863, and last year transported over one billion passengers through its 270 stations. All very interesting, but if you are one of its daily users, it can be a crowded, smelly and uncomfortable journey. On the plus side, however, the absence of a phone signal makes this prime reading time. So, let's celebrate this birthday by naming the books best suited for reading underground.

I'm always on the look-out for one that is light and easily pocketed - if it's a physical book - with chapters, so I can read chunks between stops, but above all, distracting. Penelope Lively's Moon Tiger was just the ticket last week, and so far this week the The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce seems to be on the right track. What about you? Help your fellow traveller by recommending the best tube reads in the thread below.

Hannah Freeman
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Northern writers join protests against library cuts in Newcastle

Lee Hall and Ann Cleeves will be speaking at a demonstration against council arts cuts tonight, before joining other authors in highlighting individual libraries under threat. Alan Sykes reports

Several of the north's of England's leading writers are pitching in to help the campaign to save Newcastle's libraries from closures threatened by the city council. Ten of the city's 18 branch libraries are like to shut down if proposals reluctantly suggested by the council are agreed next month.

New Writing North, the Newcastle-based writing and reading development agency for the north, has approached five writers and asked them to "adopt" one of the threatened libraries. David Almond, Michael Chaplin, Ann Cleeves, Lee Hall and Mari Hannah have all agreed to take part, and each will be publishing an article on their experiences in 'their' library on the website www.letstalklibraries.com next week. Each is very clear that libraries played

a pivotal role in their development as young readers and in their careers as writers.

Newcastle City Council's Leader, Councillor Nick Forbes, says:

We face massive financial challenges which have just got bigger following further announcements of Government cuts. I have written to the Prime Minister to warn him that the northern cities with higher levels of deprivation are being most severely hit by the Government's austerity programme - but I fear that they are not listening.

Ann Cleeves, a Tynemouth-based crime writer whose works have been translated into 20 languages, spent time in Cruddas Park Library, in a deprived part of Newcastle's west end. She writes:

We shouldn't be planning to close Cruddas Park but to develop it. In communities like this, libraries provide people's only access to the arts. So let's use these safe, welcoming spaces to introduce people to poetry, music and drama as well as to books

Michael Chaplin, who recently adapted Chris Mullins' diaries for the stage, will be writing about Jesmond Library – described by Pevsner as "typical of the best of its date". He reminisces about his early memories of the threatened building:

Jesmond Library opened in 1963, when I was 12, at which point I transferred my book-borrowing from Heaton. I loved this new library from the moment I saw it, perched on a corner between another haunt, Jesmond Baths, and the Methodist Church. I was beguiled by its shape, like an upended drum, or if you prefer culinary allusions, an outsized Brie cheese. You stepped past the lime sapling by the front door, planted your feet on the green Westmorland slate floor, approached the desk, around which the book shelves radiated like the spokes of a bicycle, and a nice lady, usually with spectacles, would smile and asked if she could help. In the years ahead, she and her colleagues always did. Thanks to them I discovered the wonders of too many books to list: from Gavin Maxwell's Ring of Bright Water to Robert Graves' I, Claudius. The librarians, I discovered, had the key not just to a lovely building, but also to the much bigger space of a child's imagination.

The Save Newcastle Libraries Coalition has organised a rally to protest against the proposed library cuts. It takes place this evening at 7pm at the Assembly Rooms on Fenkle Street, near Newcastle Central Station. Lee Hall and Ann Cleeves will both be speaking.

Save Newcastle Libraries' Twitter account is @SNLcoalition

Alan Sykes has been walking 1000km (621 miles) from Seville to Santiago e Compostela, but is now back on his regular arts beat for the Guardian Northerner. He Tweets here.

NewcastleSunderlandLocal governmentLibrariesLocal government network blogAlan Sykes
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What poems do you know by heart?

The government is backing a scheme to get young people to learn poetry. What poems would you recommend, and which can you quote?

News of a government drive to encourage learning poetry by heart provoked Keatsian trills of verse on the books desk.

And, yes, the master of mists and mellow fruitfulness did indeed turn out to be one of the most fondly remembered poets, with On the Sea, Ode to Autumn and La Belle Dame Sans Merci each making an appearance. None, though, was so passionately declaimed as Robert Burns' Tam o'Shanter - which perhaps goes to show how much more patriotic the Scots are than the English about their poetry.

A quick call-out on twitter inspired a rather more irreverent response, but then – with the honourable exception of the haiku – you don't get much poetry in 140 characters.

The 130 poems selected for the Poetry by Heart are both long and short and span 700 years. How many of them do you know, and what others have you learned by heart, either by desire or coercion?

Altogether now...

PoetryRobert BurnsJohn Keats
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Tips, links and suggestions: Tell us about the books you are reading today

Your weekly space to tell us what you're reading and what you'd like to see covered on the books site - plus our review list

Happy 2013 everyone.

feanor75's first book of 2013 is On The Road in its original form: 'I think if Kerouac had been allowed to publish this without the edit it may not have sold so well. However, it's good to read it with all the real names and with more details. It's sadder than the edited version which is more to Kerouac's desired effect on the reader. '

Getover99 kicked the year off with The Trial by Franz Kafka: 'It feels like I am on some kind of Ketamine trip!' – a feeling AggieH shared, about a much more recent novel:

Xmas reading included The Teleportation Accident. It's a pleasingly strange, genre-scoffing book. There's history, noir, drugs, surrealism, politics, sex, literature, crime, Vonnegutian science fiction and a dark, distorted Svejkish air about the protagonist.
For all its fine aspects, I read it at one remove. I tired of Beauman's ostentatious talent for metaphors and similes. They are both the book's best and worst feature. Most are quite brilliant. There are just so many per page that they seem attention-seeking. I started to wish that somebody would cut them out and give them to me as a separate list. That way I could enjoy each one in its own right and then go back to reading the book without being distracted.

ileinster's book however, wasn't so much "strange" as confusing: "I just finished something called The Light of Amsterdam by David Park. It dragged along until the end and I still don't know what the ending signified. I'd be grateful if anyone can enlighten me."
Ideas below, please.

Mexican2 is leaps and bounds ahead of the rest of us by having already read James Salter's All That Is and causing jealousy all round. It's not published until April, but on the bright side it does sound as though we've a treat in store: "Salter's language, and his sense of character is masterful: the only distraction I found from the narrative was a sense of awe at the ease with which his technique appears to operate. Near perfect."

Inspired by PaulBowes01's posting links to two interesting pieces on the subject of book blurbs, here are a few links blogs, tweets and such from beyond the walls of Guardian books, that I've enjoyed or found interesting. Please feel free to post your own.

• I've been a fan of Letters of Note for a few years now and, prompted by their end of year roundup of popular letters from 2012 , I reread this letter from John Steinbeck to his son, Thom.

• I continue to enjoy my daily dose of Katherine Mansfield administered via Twitter:

Christmas, in any case, is no fun away from ones own people. I seldom want to make merry with strangers...

— KATHERINE MANSFIELD (@KMSOCIETY) January 3, 2013

• Launched today, The British Libraries Digital Scholarship blog. If you don't feel like bookmarking yet another blog, I'll keep an eye on it and let you know if something particular comes up.

• This will get the conversation going: Essa Academy: Bookless school where everyone has iPad

Here's our review list; a selection of some of the books we'll be talking about this week, subject to last minute changes.

Non-fiction

• Family Secrets: Living with Shame from the Victorians to the Present day by Deborah Cohen.
• The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? by Jared Diamond.
• Classified by Christopher Moran
• Shooting Victoria: Madness, Mayhem and the Rebirth of British Monarchy by Paul Thomas Murphy.
• Navel Gazing: One Woman's Question for a Size Normal by Anne H Putnam.
• The Undiscovered Country: Journey's Among the Dead by Carl Watkins.

Fiction

• Blasphemy by Sherman Alexie
• How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti.
• Wool by Hugh Howey.
• The World Was All Before Them by Matthew Reynolds.
• Raw Head and Bloody Bones by Jack Wolf.

Hannah FreemanGuardian readers
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Spreading the joy of book tokens

A random act of bookshop kindness reminds me of how much fun I had as a child when given these golden reading tickets

If you are feeling gloomy and back-to-workish this morning, then let me cheer you up: take a look at this note, complete with a £4 book token, which a reader has just discovered in a bookshop. Signed only by "Lucy", the writer says that "even though it is not much, I thought it would be nice to start the year by doing something for someone else", and wishes the finder "an amazing 2013". (Thanks to AuthorScoop, which alerted me to it.)

How lovely. It's been years since anybody gave me a book token, but they used to be a regular staple of Christmases and birthdays past, and the trip to the WH Smith's in town to spend them was always a huge treat. I'm trying to remember what I bought – there was a lot of Brian Jacques, I can remember choosing a bumper Enid Blyton collection (Island of Adventure, etc) which I was forced to ration out on a holiday, and there was definitely Tanith Lee. I had a collection of stickers, of the "this book belongs to" variety, and it was a thrill sticking them into my new purchases.

I wonder if the small act of kindness by "Lucy" might be a new direction for book-crossing (which, incidentally, has never brought a book to me. Perhaps it's karma – the only book ever I've left for someone else to find was Conrad Williams's The Unblemished, ditched on a seat on the number 63 bus because it frightened me so much I couldn't have it in the house.) She's certainly inspired me, at any rate, not only to start giving book tokens to the children in my life who are old enough, because there's nothing better than having the autonomy to choose your own book, but also to plot my own sneaky piece of book token-crossing. Inhabitants of north-west London: be warned. A £4 book token is about to be hidden inside a book in a shop near you …

BooksellersAlison Flood
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Penguin Random House merger begins a new chapter for publishing

The new industry giant has made room for a wide variety of new initiatives that are good news for authors, publishers and readers

Richard Ford's brilliant new novel Canada opens audaciously: "First, I'll tell you about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later". An account of the dramas in publishing last year might begin in similar vein: "First, I'll tell you about Agency pricing and the Department of Justice. Then about the mergers that happened later." 2012 was a fascinating year in publishing, a year of accelerated change, culminating in the Penguin Random merger. 2013 has kicked off with Pearson (Penguin's owner) investing in the Nook e-reader. Whatever one might think about the wisdom of these strategies, both these events are bold moves in the war for the heart of the reader, and indicate dramatic change.

For some time the market for writing has been in demonstrable good health in the UK, with a large audience buying a great number of books. From the rise of Waterstones in the 1980s, through the mass-market explosion of the 90s, and more recently the arrival of writing for the web and the ebook with the new self-publishing model, UK readers have been a substantial, various audience with an appetite for books and reading. The hunger has been for writing from around the world, but it is especially well-served by a highly productive community of writers in Britain and Ireland, many of whom are read across the globe. Reading and writing are strong in the UK, not in crisis.

The revolution is happening in the pipeline between writers and their readers. The merger of Penguin and Random House currently taking place will create a large and powerful international publishing business that has at its disposal the most powerful and well-known consumer books brand in the world: Penguin. The move should not be misread as a retreat or a simple attempt to drill out cost but as a direct move towards the consumer and against the technology businesses that have become powerful in the market. It will be followed by further aggregation of the largest publishers – talks have been reported between HarperCollins and Simon and Schuster.

So what does this mean for reading, writing and publishing? It is certainly a dramatic opening chord in a new movement, a movement that will be high tempo and full of development of familiar subjects in new ways.

Firstly, there will be change to the structure of the industry with fewer large players with greater strength, better placed to support the value of both authors' copyrights and publisher activities. Publishers (and therefore writers) have been too vulnerable to the rapid aggregation of retail power both on and offline and stronger publishing structures will be good for writers so long as these larger publishing entities are clear their role is to create value for both writers and shareholders.

Secondly, smaller publishers can thrive in this context as a more clearly differentiated option for writers. These publishers will offer a more intimate, imagination-based and niche partnership for writers. They can develop business models – look at And Other Stories' subscription model, or Unbound's use of crowd funding. They can move fast and be experimental. Much of the digital innovation is coming from independent publishers – examples include Faber's poetry apps, Constable and Robinson's Honest John web business, Profile's Frankenstein, Bloomsbury's Berg library.

Thirdly, niche publishing will thrive as publisher brands begin to be asserted more strongly. At present there is too much duplication and me-too-ism in publishing due to the number of larger businesses, with too many publishers saturating niches with mediocre product, feeding their own machines' needs. Readers deserve a clearer offer, better targeted to their interests and needs. In the digital age the vertical niches – romance, military, poetry, science fiction etc – will rise and the relationship of readers in these areas will err towards the excellent publishing brands, away from general retail. This is already taking place – look at the work Mills & Boon and Angry Robot are doing with communities and their interaction with readers. Publishing brands are starting to emerge as consumer brands, not in all places, but in some. And perhaps the most interesting question for the new Random Penguin merger is what they do decide to do with Penguin as a consumer brand that is not even constrained by its own publishing, but orientated to the interests of its readers more generally. In other words, can it become a home for discovery of excellent reading as well as a great publisher?

This lastly points to the major question. Authors are talked about as brands in their own right, and this is correct. Publishers rarely achieve the status of becoming consumer brands of scale and significance. Is the next story for publishing going to be one dominated by global and local author and publisher brands, especially in niches? Authors and readers are at the centre of the world of books, and finding new ways to serve them will create further different structures. This merger may be seen as a starting pistol or perhaps an explosion in the heart of the old order dominated by the book trade. Richard Ford's novel ends, "We try. All of us. We try." Publishers better had. It will be worth it.

PublishingPenguinRandom HouseStephen Page
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