Reading tastes

According to a study funded by the Quick Reads sponsor Galaxy, 27% of the British population have been inspired by a book to make ‘positive life changes' and 41% of regular readers regard the habit as a better antidote to stress than meeting friends.  Read more

There is an increasing trend for older people to write their own memoir and then to self-publish it, sometimes in a nice gift edition.  Read more

Stieg Larsson notwithstanding, what are the chances of a translated author selling well in the big English-speaking markets of the US and the UK? The received wisdom has always been that translations into English are tough going financially, with it proving virtually impossible to make the figures work without an English-language publisher on both sides of the Atlantic to pay for the cos  Read more

The romance genre is doing very nicely, thank you, in spite of the recession. When conglomerate publishers such as HarperCollins and Simon and Schuster have been announcing sharp downturns in sales (see last week's News Review ), Harlequin/Mills & Boon (the US and UK companies respectively) just go from strength to strength.   Read more

Astonishing new figures just released by Bowker in the States show that US book production declined by 3% in 2008 but print on demand publishing almost doubled. This means that a staggering 275,232 new titles and new editions were published, but this figure is actually down from the 284,370 that were published in 2007.   Read more