Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—from publishing reports to academic announcements to literary dispatches—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today’s stories:
In the latest development in its ongoing battle with Hachette, Amazon has outlined its sales strategy while addressing the publisher directly in a post on its Kindle forum. While calling for e-books to be sold at $9.99 rather than $14.99, the Internet retailer also suggested it receive 30 percent of the total revenue while Hachette would split the remaining 70 percent evenly with its authors, adding that authors are currently given “too small a portion.” (Forbes)
Meanwhile, following a recent Codex poll that showed a decline in consumer use of Amazon to purchase books, Publishing Trends offers two graphs displaying the purchasing habits of publishing-industry professionals based on an informal survey.
Jesse Ventura was awarded $1.8 million by a federal court in Minnesota yesterday after a trial in which the former professional wrestler and politician argued that he had been slandered in a memoir by Chris Kyle, a military sniper who was killed last year. In his book, Kyle claimed Ventura had made disparaging remarks about Navy SEALs, which resulted in a scuffle in a California bar. (Los Angeles Times)
Entertainment companies Warner Bros. and RatPac have concluded a deal to option the film rights on author Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Goldfinch. (Variety)
All of Macmillan’s frontlist e-book titles will be made available to users of its public library pilot program—which began last year—according to an announcement made yesterday by the publisher. (Publishers Weekly)
After integrating with self-publishing platform FastPencil, note-taking app Evernote recently added a feature allowing users to create an e-book or PDF document. (GalleyCat)
As part of the final week of Tell Me More, NPR’s program devoted to race and diversity, poet Nikki Giovanni is interviewed about death, her recovery from lung cancer, and her grandmother’s cooking.
Peter Mendelsund, an associate art director at Knopf who has designed nearly six hundred book jackets including covers for books by Franz Kafka, Stieg Larsson, and Leo Tolstoy, discusses the difficulty of designing covers for his own forthcoming books. (New York Times)
