Howard Jacobson

The mini-memoir: a new and welcome ebook trend (The Guardian) It may surprise readers of Howard Jacobson’s latest novel, Zoo Time, a thinly disguised rant against modern literature, to learn that its famously fogeyish author has written an ebook. The Swag Man, published by American Jewish magazine Tablet, is a 31-page mini-memoir combining childhood tales of 1940s and 50s [...]

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Bloomsbury has announced an 11.5% rise in turnover to 103.2m (up from 92.6m in 2011) for the year ending 29th February 2012. Total continuing turnover was up 16.9% to 97.4m (83.3m). Pre-tax profit was up 13.6% to 4.8m (4.3m). Pre-tax profit before acquisition costs, restructuring and relocation costs and a loss on disposal of German subsidiary Bloomsbury Verlag was up 25.2% to 9.4m (7.5m). Continuing pre-tax profit before those costs was up 53% to 12.1m (7.9m). The company cited 159% growth of e-book sales to a total of 5.7m (up from 2.2m in 2011). Meanwhile Bloomsbury's Academic & Professional

After Paul Torday related his latest adventure in the digital new world, here is Fleet Street veteran Walter Ellis on the trials of self-publishing on Amazon. Soon kindled and soon burnt: The gentle art of online publishing The idea of a level playing field is that everyone engaged in a competitive activity should have the same opportunity to achieve success as everybody else. Kindle is supposed to offer independent authors a level playing field. But does it? So far as I can tell, unknown authors who break into the Top 1,000 are quite rare, though nowhere near as rare