Crown Group Splits, Publishers Announce Joint Digital Strategy, and More

by
Adrian Versteegh
12.9.09

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:

The Crown Publishing Group—the largest and most diverse division of Random House—is being split into separately managed components, CEO Markus Dohle announced yesterday (New York Times). Along with the restructuring, current Crown president Jenny Frost is stepping down in favor of Maya Mavjee, executive publisher of Doubleday Canada (Publishers Weekly).

“I come to bury Caesar, not big him up”: A theatre group for at-risk youth in London is using street slang and text-speak to reinvent Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (Daily Mail).

Deacon Maccubbin, the owner of Lambda Rising—which announced its impending closure earlier this month—is planning to write a book about his iconic D.C. bookstore (Washington City Paper).

Neil Levin, formerly of the National Book Network, has launched EverPub, a marketing and social networking service for authors (Publishers Weekly).

German author and recent Nobel Prize-winner Herta Müller—who spent the first part of her career as a dissident in Ceausescu’s Romania—has urged Westerners to be more outspoken about human rights abuses in China (Associated Press).

Joint plans for a digital storefront and an electronic reading application were announced yesterday by publishers Conde Nast, Hearst, Meredith, News Corp., and Time (NewsFactor).

Walt Whitman is singing the praises of Levi’s here in the States, but poetry has also been turning up lately in British advertising (Guardian).

Cory Doctorow and a group of fellow science fiction authors are raising money for charity by auctioning off “tuckerizations”—opportunities to have characters in upcoming works named after real people (Boing Boing).

Norman Mailer was right:  A new study suggests that mild depression can lead to more careful thinking—and better writing (Good).