William Boyd

Soon after turning out the latest James Bond novel, British author William Boyd agreed to write another thriller based on a world famous brand. The Land Rover. Boyd's nearly 17,000-word story, "The Vanishing Game," coming out Wednesday as a free download through Amazon.com, Apple and www.thevanishinggame.com , tells of a 35-year-old British actor named Alec Dunbar and the troubles he encounters when a pretty young woman convinces him to deliver a flask filled with clear liquid from London to Scotland. His transport is a certain four-wheel-drive vehicle.

The moment of receiving your first book jacket is one that every author remembers. I was so excited when I got mine - a jacket, for a book, written by me, that was going to be published - it took me a while to realise it wasn't quite right. When the time came for the smaller, mass market paperback edition of the book concerned (a memoir about my golfing adolescence, called Nice Jumper) and my agent and I suggested a change of image, my publishers were only too happy to work towards something that suited everyone.

When the first issue of its new Chinese-language edition appears next month, the London-based literary journal Granta, a publication that has existed in English since the Victorian era, will have a presence in four of the five most widely spoken languages. But plans for the globalization of a leading quarterly that proudly calls itself “the magazine of new writing” don’t stop there.

“In five years I could see us with 15 or 17 foreign editions,” John Freeman, the editor of Granta, said in an interview in New York this summer.

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

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