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Posts Tagged ‘Random House’

Mainstream publishing suddenly seems to have fallen in love with the idea of issuing short stories in digital formats. Orbit Short Fiction, the science fiction and fantasy imprint of the Hatchette Book Group which launched in the US in April, has announced that it will be publishing short stories in the UK from the start of 2012. And last week, Dan Franklin announced that Random House is launching a company-wide short story brand called Story Cuts, which will publish stories by the likes of Ruth Rendell and Julian Barnes.

The Bookseller reports Franklin as saying: “This is the iTunes model, really. It hasn’t ever been applied to books yet . . . ‘ Not so!! In the UK, Etherbooks and Shortfire Press are two digital-only publishers that have been specialising in short fiction for quite some time.

Etherbooks have a free app available from the AppStore, and via that you can download short content by various authors –  including Paul MacCartney, Hilary Mantel and me – at various prices (mostly 69p). Shortfire stories can be read in PDF form or on Kindles, e-readers and mobiles and cost 99p.  Both companies have been active  for some time and can be congratulated on being ahead of the pack.

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Next week is the closing date for  a prize for unpublished writers that is beginning to develop quite a reputation for launching careers. Roshi Fernando, whose novel Homesick won the Impress Prize For New Writers in 2009, will now be published by Bloomsbury in the UK and Commonwealth, and in the US by Knopf, an imprint of Random House. Ginny Baily’s debut novel Africa Junction, which was shortlisted for the Impress Prize in 2007, has been published in 2011 by the Random House imprint Harvill Secker.

Roshi Fernando was also shortlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award this year.

More information about entering the prize here: Impress Prize

This week, ‘super agent’ Ed Victor announced that he is setting up a new digital and print on demand publishing venture, Bedford Square Books, which will release six titles by authors his agency represents this September, with another six planned for January 2012. Authors’ royalties will be 50% as opposed to the 26% traditionally on offer from publishers for ebooks.  Now, The Bookseller reports that agencies Curtis Brown and Blake Friedman are planning to follow his example. Agent Sonia Land has already made 100 of Catherine Cookson’s out of print titles available as e-books, apparently frustrated by the lack of interest from the traditional publishers. She reacted to the news of Bedford Square Books by warning publishers to “rethink their legacy operation”.

In July last year, US literary agent Andrew Wylie (AKA ‘the Jackal’), created an imprint called Odyssey Books and struck a deal with Amazon to make a number of classic titles by some of his extremely famous clients –  for example, Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, Nabokov’s Lolita – available on Kindle. Random House reacted furiously by declaring that it now regarded the the Wylie Agency as a direct competitor. In the end Wylie was forced to scale down his plans, although books like Brideshead Revisited and The Naked and the Dead are still available on Odyssey.

As yet, Ed Victor’s move has not attracted such ire. The CEO of the Publishers Association, Richard Mollet, wished Victor luck and added that he “hope[d] he would consider joining the PA”.

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The Short  Review has news of the Edge Hill Prize – the UK’s only literary award for published collections of short stories. Titles on the longlist reveal an intriguing mix of major publishers such as Penguin, Random House and Bloomsbury, and very small independents like Tindal Street, Impress Books and Salt (the latter has just been told it has lost its Arts Council funding). The shortlist will be announced in May. Click on any of the titles in orange to go to the Short Review website for the review of that particular book.

Edge Hill Longlist:

• Martin Bax – Memoirs of a Gone World (Salt Publishing).
• Alan Beard – You Don’t Have to Say (Tindal Street Press).
• Peter Bromley – Sky Light and Other Stories (Biscuit).
• Jo Cannon – Insignificant Gestures (Pewter Rose Press).
• Roshi Fernando – Homesick (Impress Books).
• David Gaffney – The Half-life of Songs (Salt Publishing).
• Vanessa Gebbie – Storm Warning, Echoes of Conflict (Salt Publishing).review coming soon
• James Kelman – If it is Your Life (Penguin).
• Andre Mangeot – True North (Salt Publishing). review coming soon
• Jay Merill – God of the Pigeons (Salt Publishing).
• Magnus Mills – Screwtop Thompson (Bloomsbury).
• Graham Mort – Touch (Seren).
• Nik Perring – Not So Perfect (Roast Books).
• Susannah Rickards – Hot Kitchen Snow (Salt Publishing). review coming soon
• Michele Roberts – Mud, Stories and Sex and Love (Virago).
• Polly Samson – Perfect Lives (Virago). review coming soon
• Helen Simpson – Inflight Entertainment (Random House).
• Fiona Thackeray – The Secret’s in the Folding (Pewter Rose Press).
• Tom Vowler – The Method and Other Stories (Salt Publishing).
• Susie Wild – The Art of Contraception (Parthian).

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