July 2005 - Writers Magazine

News Review

• News Review assesses the Harry Potter phenomenon: 'Rowling has had many critics and many imitators, but none have managed to surpass the sheer page-turning quality of her books. This is the magic which keeps children coming back for more.'
• News Review reports on how Londoners have got back to work after the bomb blasts: 'It’s been an extraordinary couple of weeks in London...  Londoners, hardened to terror by the IRA campaigns of the past and the clear knowledge that the city was a likely Al Qaeda target, were mostly stoical. '
• Here comes Harry Potter! Outrage has been expressed in the book trade about the ‘wasted’ discount that all book retailers are giving away on a book which is so much in demand that many feel there is no need to cut the price.
• News Review looks at the changing face of bookselling: 'the net effect is fewer bookshops and more power concentrated in the hands of fewer big groups, both booksellers and publishers. Books, like other businesses, are suffering from globalisation.'

Comment

• 'The business is so f***ing hard now, and there's so much pressure on those working inside it, that either they don't have the time for (shall we say) pro bono discourse about (say) how to do some of the little things better; or they feel that giving away what few secrets they possess will put them at the sort of competitive disadvantage that might, soon, cost them their jobs.’ Mad Max Perkins of BookAngst 101
• 'To an outsider the British publishing industry can seem like a conspiracy intent on depriving English-speaking readers of the majority of the good books written in languages other than their own.'  John Carey, Chair of the judges of the Man Booker International Prize
• 'Book reviews should inspire reading.  They should excite, stimulate, agitate and empower readers to discover new books and avoid bad ones... But let's be honest. They don't, do they?…' Scott Pack of Waterstone's
• 'Somebody once said that one's real life is often the life that one does not lead... the story of the boy and the wolf sat in my filing cabinet, and came to life only when I realised that this was the world I had lost. This was the life I hadn't led. Michelle Paver, author of Wolf Brother, in The Times

Writers' Quotes

'Well, great authors are great people, but I believe that they are best seen at a distance.' Mrs Mitford