New HarperCollins Unit to Try to Cut Writer Advances: HarperCollins Publishers is forming a new publishing group that will substitute profit-sharing with authors for cash advances and will try to eliminate the costly practice of allowing booksellers to return unsold copies. [NYT]
Leaving the ghetto: Short of money and short of food, V S Naipaul found his early life as a writer in Fifties London harsh. Then the BBC offered him a lifeline with a radio programme, Caribbean Voices. It became an important influence, but one he later felt obliged to disown. [New Statesman]
New reason to surf the blogosphere: Book deals: And then March 20 Random House announces that it has purchased the rights to a book by the blog’s founder, Christian Lander, an Internet copy writer. The price, according to a source familiar with the deal but not authorized to discuss the total, was about $300,000, a sum that many in the publishing and blogging communities believe is an astronomical amount for a book spawned from a blog, written by a previously unpublished author. [IHT]
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