Knopf

Los Angeles Times Book Prize Winners for 2013
April 22, 2013

This year’s winners of the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes have been revealed, celebrating the best books of the year. Below, we’ve linked to free samples of the award-winning books for your reading pleasure. The winners were announced at ceremony on Friday.

Los Angeles Times Book Prizes 2012 Winners:

Biography: Robert A. Caro / The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson(Knopf)
Current Interest

Scott Porch: Who Will Win The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2013?
April 10, 2013

On Monday afternoon, the Pulitzer Prize Board will announce the winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Or not. Last year, for the first time in 35 years, there was no prize awarded for fiction. Imagine Bono walking on stage to award the Grammy for Album of the Year and announcing that there wouldn't be an award for Album of the Year. It was like that. The snub earned the Pulitzer Prizes more publicity -- and not the good kind -- than the actual awards …

Night Shade Books' would-be owners on their controversial deal: "We're the good guys"
April 8, 2013

Night Shade Books has published some of the coolest books of the past several years, but it's also run into financial difficulties. Now Night Shade is trying to sell out to two other entities, in a deal that authors and agents have criticized. We talked to the prospective buyers, and they explained their side of things.

"We're the good guys," insists Jarred Weisfeld with Start Publishing. "We're the ones who are coming in and trying to save something."

In our half-hour phone interview with Weisfeld and his partner in this buyout, Tony Lyons with Skyhorse Publishing, that theme came up several

Authors back push to use straw pulp paper for books
March 21, 2013

With almost 10-million copies already sold and still a bestseller 12 years after it was first released, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi is the definitive opposite of a rare book. But there is a new edition of 350 signed copies currently housed in the office of a Vancouver environmental group that collectors will surely notice. That’s because the entire edition is printed on paper made in part from agricultural waste.

Martel enthusiastically joined fellow author Alice Munro, who signed 50 waste-based copies of Dear Life in the same cause: saving forests…

Would you pay to browse in a real bookstore?
February 11, 2013

Chapter 1: You stumble upon an interesting book at your neighborhood bookstore.

Chapter 2: You go home and order it from Amazon for half as much.

Chapter 9: Your favorite bookstore is bankrupt.

Booksellers call it “showrooming,” and it drives them crazy — and out of business. Barnes & Noble believes that 40 percent of its customers use the store as a place to discover and examine titles, but then buy the books online.

How might “real” bookstores fight back against their Amazonian nemesis?

BookScout: Speaking with SVP of Digital Marketplace Development Amanda Close about Random House's new discoverability app
January 30, 2013

Last week, following a soft-launch the week prior, Random House marched out BookScout, a Facebook app designed to link readers with books they'll like but might not have discovered on their own.

We asked Amanda Close, Senior Vice President, Digital Marketplace Development at Random House, to take us through the steps of getting an app like BookScout into the world, and how it plans to hone it going forward.

Book Business' The Best We Read 2012
January 10, 2013

Right before everyone ran off for the holidays, we asked the Book Business staff and contributors one question: What was the best book you read in 2012. It didn't need to have been published in 2012, just one that they read in the calendar year. These are the results:

British publisher drops Lawrence Wright's new Scientology book
January 9, 2013

British publisher Transworld has canceled its plans to publish "Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief" by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Lawrence Wright. The book will be published in the U.S. by Knopf on Jan. 17.

The reason Transworld dropped the book has attracted attention, according to the Telegraph. "The decision not to publish in this country has prompted questions, particularly as Transworld had previously agreed to it," the paper says. "It seems likely that the threat of libel action in the UK may have contributed to the decision."

Book Deal for Author Ends Circuitous Path Back to Mainstream
January 6, 2013

In 1999, a young writer named Jenny Offill published a debut novel called “Last Things,” about a young child being home-schooled by a mother who is slowly going insane. The New York Times called the book, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, “remarkable,” and The Los Angeles Times made Ms. Offill a finalist for its award to new writers.

Then Ms. Offill essentially retreated for 13 years.

Scientology Fascinates the Author Lawrence Wright
January 2, 2013

The writer Lawrence Wright doesn’t seem at all the sort of person you’d find in public wearing a black cowboy shirt emblazoned with big white buffalos. He’s shy, soft-spoken, a little professorial. But as if he didn’t have enough to do, besides working on three plays simultaneously and getting ready to publish a new book in two weeks, Mr. Wright has been taking piano lessons with Floyd Domino, the two-time Grammy winner, and on a recent Saturday, in his buffalo shirt…