The Authors Guild

It’s over.

This morning, after a nasty and very public corporate stalemate, Amazon and Hachette jointly announced they have come to terms. Their new multiyear contract will allow Hachette to set its own e-book prices, but that arrangement will be tempered by “financial incentives” for Hachette to keep those prices low, according to the companies’ joint statement.

The dispute became big news in the book world this May, when it became known that Amazon was purposefully chilling Hachette authors’ book sales as a way to pressure Hachette to adopt the retailer’s preferred terms. The most immediate beneficiaries of the détente are Hachette authors, whose books will once again receive standard treatment from Amazon, their visibility and shipping time restored. In a letter to Hachette authors and agents, CEO Michael Pietsch promised that “Hachette titles will be restored as soon as possible to normal availability on Amazon, will be available for pre-order, and will be included in promotions on the site.”

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Many in the book world—including the Authors Guild—expressed disbelief when it was announced in March 2013 that Amazon and other private companies (including Google, as it turns out) were angling to purchase the Internet domain name “.book,” among other generic domain names. That dismay was substantiated yesterday when it became official that Amazon won “.book” at auction—for a cool $10 million, according to reports.

The auction was hosted by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which manages domain names—those letters that come at the end of a web address, such as “.com” or “.org.” We have long objected to ICANN’s decision to auction generic Internet domain names to the highest bidder. As former Guild President Scott Turow stated in a March 2013 open letter to ICANN, “Placing such generic domains in private hands is plainly anticompetitive, allowing already dominant, well-capitalized companies to expand and entrench their market power.”

In addition to remaining concerned about ICANN’s auctioning of generic domain names, the Authors Guild is dismayed that Amazon won the auction. “The ‘.book’ domain should not be owned by a for-profit company that is in a position to use it for its competitive advantage,” said the Guild’s Executive Director, Mary Rasenberger, “much less by Amazon, which we believe is already a monopolistic force in the publishing marketplace.”

by Campbell Geeslin

“Books about living a happy life have been in vogue for the past two decades,” said PW in an article called “Come on, Get Happy.” But the essay started off with a quote from Euripides, writing in 424 B.C.: “That man is happiest who lives from day to day and asks no more, gaining the simple goodness of life.”

BookScan said that the category was up 12% more than in 2013. PW asked, “Has the happiness market reached the saturation point?”

Happiness Is . . . 500 Things to Be Happy About is a current bestseller by Lisa Swerling and Ralph Lazar. One of their 500 moments of happiness occurs when one “recovers data from a dead computer.”

Maybe the happiest of all is the writer whose self-help book lands on the bestseller lists.

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Last week, concluding the final chapter of the three-year legal dispute between HarperCollins and digital publisher Open Road over the e-book rights to Jean Craighead George’s 1971 young-adult novel Julie of the Wolves, a court rejected HarperCollins’ attempt to recover over $1 million in lawyers’ fees from its opponent. But not everything came up roses for Open Road: the court awarded HarperCollins $30,000 in damages and also blocked Open Road from distributing its e-book edition.

This phase of the litigation—HarperCollins v. Open Road—came on the heels of a March 2014 ruling that Open Road’s e-book edition of Julie infringed on HarperCollins’ right to publish electronic versions of George’s classic. At issue was whether language in the 1971 contract between George and her publisher granted HarperCollins exclusive electronic rights. Complicating the interpretation of the contract was this little thorn: there was no market for e-books when the contract was signed. The court found, however, that the contract’s “forward-looking reference to technologies ‘now known or hereafter invented’ [was] sufficiently broad to draw within its ambit e-book publication.”

Many in the industry had wondered whether this case had the potential to chip away at the precedent of the watershed authors’ victory in 2001’s Random House v. Rosetta Books, which held that pre-digital-era contracts where an author grants her publisher the right to publish a work “in print book form” or even “in book form” with no mention of electronic rights should be interpreted to reserve electronic rights to the author.

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This week’s recent and upcoming books by our members include titles by Rex Burns, Eliza Freed, Parnell Hall, Chip Jacobs, Peter James, Glenn Kurtz, Susan Marsh, Peter Joffre Nye, Lila Perl, Randall Platt, Curt Smith, and Lisa Unger. Titles below the jump.

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This week’s batch of contests includes Columbia’s three Lukas Prizes. Deadlines for all contests range from Dec 1-10.

The Columbia School of Journalism is offering their annual Lukas Prizes. The J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award is given annually to aid in the completion of a significant work of nonfiction on a topic of American political or social concern. The winner will receive $30,000. Applicants must already have a contract with a publisher to write a nonfiction book and should send a copy of their original book proposal, a sample chapter from the book, photocopy of the publishing contract, and an explanation of how the award will advance the progress of the book. There is no entry fee for this award. The J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize is given annually to a book-length work of narrative nonfiction on a topic of American political or social concern that exemplifies the literary grace, commitment to serious research, and social concern that characterized the distinguished work of the award’s namesake. The winner will receive $10,000. Books must have been published between January 1, 2014 and December 31, 2014. Entry fee: $75. The Mark Lynton History Prize is awarded to a book-length work of history on any topic that best combines intellectual distinction with felicity of expression. The winner will receive $10,000. Books must have been published between January 1, 2014 and December 31, 2014. Entry fee: $75. Deadline (for all three prizes): December 10, 2014. For more information, please visit the website.

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by Campbell Geeslin

If ever there was a man who is quotable, it is Clive James, 75, the London critic, poet, TV host and guest, stage personality, novelist, autobiographer—and then some.

He was the subject of a profile titled “A Writer Whose Pen Never Rests, Even Facing Death” by Steven Erlanger in The New York Times.

James is suffering from leukemia, emphysema and kidney failure. He said he could “use up a lifetime supply of anything in two weeks.”

He told the Times, “like all writers who write poems, I would like it most if I were remembered for those—but it might not happen.”

He once compared Arnold Schwarzenegger in the movie “Pumping Iron” to “a brown condom filled with walnuts.”

A recent James book is Unreliable Memoirs. He said, “the Australians and British see it as a vision of Arcadia, although the Americans have never taken to it. They don’t like that word ‘unreliable.’ For the U.S. edition, I should have called it Totally Reliable Memoirs.”

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This week’s recent and upcoming books by our members include titles by Adria Bernardi, Larry Duberstein, Ju Ephraime, Michael de Guzman, Jean C. Joachim, Marilyn Johnson, Stephen Krensky, Glenn Kurtz, Ann M. Martin, Laura Pedersen, Aurelie Sheehan, and Martha Seif Simpson. Titles below the jump.

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This week’s batch of prizes is mostly for poets and fiction writers. The deadline for each contest is November 30.

The BOA Editions’ A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize is awarded to honor a poet’s first book. Poets must be at least 18 years of age and legal residents or citizens of the U.S. Manuscripts must be unpublished and 48-100 pages. Individual poems from the manuscript may have been published previously in magazines, journals, anthologies, chapbooks of 32 pages or less, or self-published books of 46 pages or less, but must be submitted in manuscript form. The winner will receive $1,500 and book publication by BOA Editions. Entry fee: $25. Deadline: November 30, 2014. For more information, please visit the website.

The Cider Press Review Book Award offers $1,500 and publication to a full-length book of poetry. The winner also receives 25 author’s copies. Submissions should be between 48-80 pages in length, written in English, and previously unpublished in book form (individual poems may have been previously published in journals, anthologies, etc.) Entry fee: $25. Deadline: November 30, 2014. For more information, please visit the website.

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by Campbell Geeslin

“I was born in a large Welsh town at the beginning of the Great War—an ugly, lovely town (or so it was and is to me) . . .”

It seemed only right to let a Dylan Thomas quote help mark the centennial of his birth, October 27, 1914. Cultural institutions in the U.S. and Britain “set the dial to Thomas nonstop, “ wrote William Grimes in The New York Times. In Swansea, his hometown in Wales, there was a Dylathon—36 hours of poems, letters and short stories read by Ian McKellen, Jonathan Pryce and Matthew Rhys. Prince Charles recorded “Fern Hill” for the occasion. A week-long festival was held in London.

In New York, the Poetry Center opened “Dylan Thomas in America: A Centennial Exhibition.” Thomas’s radio play “Under Milk Wood” was presented here and broadcast live in Wales. Actor Michael Sheen said, “Thomas is just hard-wired into the Welsh psyche. The poetry is everywhere.”

So let’s give Thomas the last words too: “Now I am a man no more no more/And a black reward for a roaring life.”

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