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The Pulitzer prize-winning classic by Harper Lee, To Kill a
Mockingbird, has topped a World Book Day 2006 poll conducted
by the Museum, Libraries and Archives Council, in which librarians
around the country were asked the question, "Which book
should every adult read before they die?" The book, which
has been a staple of schoolroom reading lists for many years,
also came second in another poll on our favourite happy endings
Diana Ashcroft, one of the librarians who voted for the book,
said: "It has all the factors of a great read. It is touching
and funny but has a serious message about prejudice, fighting
for justice and coming of age."
To Kill a Mocking Bird heads an odd triumvirate at the top of
the librarians' list: it is followed by the Bible and, in third
place, the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Further down the rankings,
a mixture of classics and popular contemporary titles feature.
Dickens and Austen both appear in the top 10, along with Philip
Pullman's His Dark Material trilogy and Sebastian Faulks' first
world war novel, Birdsong. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
and The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger also find
a place in the top 30, alongside more established classics such
as A Clockwork Orange and the Lord of the Flies.
Mark Wood, chairman of the MLA, commented: "This goes to
show that if you are stuck for something to read, you should
ask a librarian."
(Museums, Libraries and Archives Council press release, March
2006)
Oprah Winfrey, the pioneer of the television bookclub phenomenon
is returning to UK television for the first time in three
years. The current US season of "The Oprah Winfrey Show"
will be broadcast as part of ITV2's daytime schedule in early
2006.
(The Bookseller, 28 October 2005)
Publishers can spend a fortune promoting their hottest literary
discoveries. Bookshops can deploy all their marketing ingenuity
to produce imaginative displays. But when the book-buying
public comes to choose a new read, it is word of mouth that
counts. A World Book Day survey has confirmed what authors
from Louis de Bernieres to Alexander McCall Smith can attest
- nothing sells better than the recommendation of a friend
or relative.
One in four of those polled said the last book they read
was on the basis of what a colleague or family member had
told them, with almost a third of under-35s citing it as the
most important factor. Only loyalty to a favoured author counted
as much, with 26% of readers saying their last choice of a
book for pleasure was because they had read others by the
same author. In a disappointing result for the promotional
teams who spend up to £100 million on book advertising
every year, only 6% said they chose a book because they saw
it advertised, with 7% citing the cover design as the deciding
factor.
(Independent, 3 March 2005)
The top 10 'word of mouth' bestsellers, graded by UK sales
to date, are:
1 The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (2.2m)
2 The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-time by Mark
Haddon (1.5m)
3 The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold (1.3m)
4 Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres (1.29m)
5 Eats, Shoots And Leaves by Lynne Truss (0.94m)
6 The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith
(0.9m)
7 Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks (0.85m)
8 Memoirs Of A Geisha by Arthur Golden (0.67m)
9 The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho (0.64m)
10 Schott's Original Miscellany by Ben Schott (0.63m)
(Source: Nielsen Bookscan)
The following titles will be featured on the BBC1 show, which
will run for eight programmes in April 2005. The programme is
fronted by Jeremy Vine, and each book is championed by distinguished
advocates and reading groups in a studio audience. The titles
to be included are:
The Icarus Girl, Helen Oyeyemi
The Kite Runner, Khaled Hossenini
The Ninth Life of Louis Drax, Liz Jenson
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, David Sedaris
The Last Crossing, Guy Vanderhaeghe
Light on Snow, Anita Shreve
Feast, Nigella Lawson
Fools Rush In, Bill Carter
Let Me Go, Helga Schneider
Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami
A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian, Marina Lewycka
How to Breathe Underwater, Julie Orringer
Leonardo da Vinci, Charles Nicoll
About Grace, Anthony Doerr
Purple Hibiscus, Chimanda Ngozi Adiche
Becoming Strangers, Louise Dean
Chronicles: Volume One, Bob Dylan
Fleshmarket Close, Ian Rankin
How to be a Bad Bird Watcher, Simon Barnes
Not the End of the World, Geraldine McCaughrean
The Understudy, David Nicholls
Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
We Need to Talk About Kevin, Lionel Shriver
Inside Hitler's Bunker, Joachim Fest
(Bookseller, 11 February 2005)
In the glory days, the Book-Of-The-Month Club was the trendsetter
and tastemaker for generations. Along the way a host of new,
exciting writers, such as JD Salinger, were discovered and
then exposed to a wider audience. But faced with plunging
membership and under attack from brash rivals such as Oprah
Winfrey's book club, mass-market retailers and online booksellers
such as Amazon, the club which spawned a host of imitators
is undergoing a traumatic overhaul, which includes the elimination
of the panel literary judges who choose the books each month.
Its spokesman, Kevin Goldman, said that the editors who would
be making selections for readers from now on were the best
in publishing and that its selection of books was second to
none. The selection panel was first dropped in 1994 in an
effort to democratise the choice of books. Then it was reinstated
in 2001 when the club decided it needed to return some of
the literary prestige associated with the big-name writers.
Mr Goldman said: "We did that for four years and it was
a good programme but we are now going in a different direction…
We have to reinvent to keep going."
The club, which was founded in 1926, has experienced quite
a drop in membership. Currently there are 400,000 members,
compared to 1.5 million in 1988.
(Independent, 13 January 2005)
BBC1 has named the 12 panellists who will choose the books
featured on "Page Turners", its new book club show
fronted by Jeremy Vine. The judging panel consists of Marian
Keyes, Rod Liddle, Fay Weldon and Claudia Winkleman; industry
experts Joel Rickett of The Bookseller, Margaret Watson, former
president of CILIP, Susan Swift of the UK Film Council and
Penny Shapland of the Reading Agency; and Book Reviewers Ali
Harris of Company, Kerry Fowler of Good Housekeeping, Victoria
Woodhall of Eve, and Guy Pringle of newBOOKSmag. The panel
will select 24 "page turners" from a shortlist of
67 titles, including fiction non-fiction and children's books.
Three titles will feature on each of the eight daytime shows,
which are due to be broadcast in the spring. The selection
process will be overseen by Robert McCrum, literary editor
of the Observer.
(Bookseller, 7 January 2004)
Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice had been voted the most
important novel for women in the Watershed Fiction poll run
by Radio 4's "Women's Hour".
(Bookseller, 10 December 2004)
The 16 titles featured in Richard and Judy's Book Club and Summer
Reads promotions this year have sold close to four million copies
through Nielsen BookScan, and so the 10 titles chosen for 2005
are likely to draw dramatic sales increases. The Book Club scheme
will again culminate in a Richard and Judy Best Read Award at
the 2005 Nibbies.
The 10 titles for 2005 are:
The Sixth Lamentation by William Broderick
Perdita by Paula Byrne
The Promise of Happiness by Justin Cartwright
The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler
Feel: Robbie Williams by Chris Heath
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult
The American Boy by Andrew Taylor
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
(Bookseller, 10 December 2004)
The BBC has promised to give books regular prime-time coverage
in "The Culture Show", a new slot launching in mid-November.
The BBC2 programme will air at 7pm each Thursday. Schedules
are being finalised, but the show is likely to be led by topical
subjects and events and feature new titles, author interviews
and trend-related items. It will also include news and reviews
from the other arts. The content of the show will be similar
to - but will not replace - the weekly "Newsnight Review"
strand. Presenters for the programme are still to be finalised.
The BBC has been planning a book-led show since the success
of its Big Read campaign last year. It will be up against
a new books series from ITV, "Between the Covers",
due to launch in December.
(Bookseller, 8 October 2004)
Adults have voted The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by
CS Lewis the most inspiring book for children. In the poll,
3,500 adults were asked to name the book that sparked their
interest in reading. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,
published in 1950 to begin the Chronicles of Narnia, is followed
in the list by JRR Tolkien's the Hobbit, Robert Louis Stevenson's
Treasure Island, Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
and Enid Blyton's Five on a Treasure Island. Woolworth, which
commissioned the survey, said: "We wanted to remind UK
adults of what got them interested in reading, which hopefully
will have a knock-on effect to their kids."
Some 80 million copies of the Narnia titles, in many languages,
have been sold. They follow four children who enter a magical
land through a wardrobe and find themselves fighting a witch
with the help of a lion. The books have an underlying Christian
iconography. HarperCollins, their publisher, said that The
Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe "continues to inspire
to this day."
(The Times, 2 October 2004)
Ottakar's, the bookshop chain, achieved a 19% increase in
sales in the first half of the year boosted by the 24 stores
it bought from Hammick's last year and the impact of a celebrity
book club on the Richard and Judy show.
The firm recorded sales of £68m as the promotion of
books by celebrities on the TV show lured new customers into
the stores. It also benefited from a "4 for £10"
offer on Penguin 21st century classic novels. The like-for-like
sales growth for the period was 4%.
(Guardian, 24 September 2004)
The first novel chosen by the Daily Mail book club reached
number two in the bestseller charts. Anne Tyler's acclaimed
book, The Amateur Marriage, was offered by the Mail at half
price. As a result, more than 50,000 copies were sold in ten
days - more than four times the figure expected by the publishers.
Rachel Cugnomi of publishers Vintage said there was no doubt
that the book club had made a massive impact on the book's
success. "Anne Tyler has always sold in big numbers to
a large and extremely loyal fan base," she said. "But
teaming up with the Daily Mail has introduced her to a new
and wider audience."
(Mail, 17 September 2004)
A survey asking 400 women which books have made a difference
to their lives reveals some surprising choices.
While works by Jane Austen, the Brontës and George Eliot
are only to be expected on a list of essential female novels,
the inclusion of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy comes
as something of a surprise. But a survey of 400 women from
academia, the arts and publishing shows that women are as
likely to cite Douglas Adams's comedy as the book that made
a difference to their life as a novel by the feminist icon,
Virginia Woolf. The women were asked which novels had most
changed the way they viewed themselves by the team behind
the Orange Prize for Fiction, which celebrates women writers.
The novels could be written by men or women and could be
from anywhere in the world. And the resulting long list reveals
that an eclectic band of writers have marked the female psyche.
The most common response was "What a wonderful question,"
she said. "What has been brought home is that ranked
lists are only as good as the questions you ask and that every
list is only a beginning, a basis for further challenging
and questioning."
This list of 40 now serves as a launch pad for a national
vote to find the top 10 essential novels for women with listeners
to Radio 4's Woman's Hour invited to nominate their own suggestions.
A final list will be announced on 8 December.
The most-chosen author among the women polled so far was Jeanette
Winterson, who came to national attention with Oranges
Are Not the Only Fruit. That makes the list along with
two of her other works, The Passion and The Power
Book. Doris Lessing has two nominations, as do George
Eliot, Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë.
(Independent, 14 September 2004)
The Daily Mail is to start a new paperback book club promotion
in partnership with booksellers from September 2004. National
Book Token-branded coupons may be redeemed for each month's
selection at half price from participating bookshops. It will
feature celebrity endorsements of the selected titles and
interviews with authors. A bookclub website hosts discussion
boards and web chats with the authors. www.dailymail.co.uk/books
The first six titles in the Book Club are: The Amateur Marriage
by Anne Tyler, Frankie and Stankie by Barbara Trapido, Enduring
Love by Ian McEwan, Spies by Michael Frayn, The Colour by
Rose Tremain and The Birth of Venus by Sarah Dunant.
(Bookseller, 27 August 2004)
The Famous Five beat epics such as Lord of the Rings and
Treasure Island in a poll to find the top children's book.
Enid Blyton's series heads a list of the favourite 10 titles,
decided on by adults between the ages of 25 and 54. The Lion,
the Witch and the Wardrobe, by CS Lewis, came second, ahead
of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. Tolkein added
The Hobbit to his Lord of the Rings entry and a second Blyton
creation - The Secret Seven - was fourth in the survey conducted
by Cartoon Network.
(Mirror, 23 August 2004)
ITV is to launch a prime time books show. "Between
the Covers" will be fronted by Tony Cowell, brother of
the acerbic "Pop Idol" judge Simon Cowell. It will
feature author interviews, reviews and glimpses behind the publishing
process. It will also include a "Book Idol" strand
to find new literary talent and follow aspiring authors. The
slot will be co-hosted by Jonny Geller of literary agency Curtis
Brown. The show is likely to be sponsored by Waterstone's. Discussions
are also continuing with publishers to give the winning "Book
Idol" author a contract. Production is likely to begin
in late September, and ITV hopes to screen the first of the
eight-part series in a weeknight 7.30pm slot before Christmas,
with "Book Idol" launching in the new year. Future
series will depend on ratings.
Mr Cowell promised the show would popularise reading. "Just
reviewing books is a bit old hat - we want to show how the
publishing industry really works, and give a platform for
aspiring writers. We will get people excited about authors."
The show will further raise the mainstream media profile of
books, following the BBC's Big Read and Channel 4's "Richard
and Judy" which have lifted sales of featured titles.
The BBC is believed to be developing formats for a regular
books show. Mr Cowell said: "The timing is perfect. Richard
and Judy have helped to popularise books, and we want to expand
on that." Early ideas of the show include asking readers
in the studio to review a book, unaware that the author is
waiting backstage. Mr Cowell said: "I can't help but
trade on the Cowell name - but we don't intend to be too frightening."
Mr Geller said: "It's a great way of getting books talked
about in a way that isn't austere. Richard and Judy have done
so well because people don't know what to buy when they go
into a bookshop. If TV can help them choose, let's get involved."
(Bookseller, 30 July 2004)
When Joseph O'Connor's book The Star of the Sea was featured
on Richard and Judy's book club in January 2004, it was catapulted
from a moderate success to a bestseller. "The UK demand
for it just soared. Its effect on sales was astounding,"
said O'Connor. Of the 10 titles featured in the first series,
nearly all took off. Nigel Slater's Toast more than doubled
sales. David Nicholls' Starter For Ten experienced an
871% hike. The series culminated with the debut of the Richard
and Judy Best Read of the Year prize at the British Book Awards,
voted by viewers. The winner, The Lovely Bones by Alice
Sebold, has now sold well over a million copies.
What is their magic ingredient? For it would seem that R&J
mobilises the rump of British readers. If a Publishing News
survey is to be believed, an astonishing 1.8 million people
have picked up books as a result of R&J exposure. "In
terms of immediate impact on sales, nothing tops Richard and
Judy," says Scott Pack, chief buyer at Waterstone's. Their
approach is informal, inclusive and inestimably powerful. 'Publishers
know nothing sells a book like 'word of mouth'," says O'Connor.
The club is smudging the boundaries between literary and commercial
fiction and awakening influential people in the publishing industry
to the fact that you can have a massive hit with a history book.
(Independent, 28 June 2004)
Leo Tolstoy's 19th century classic, Anna Karenina, has become
a No 1 bestseller for Penguin Books a week after it was recommended
by Oprah Winfrey on her American talk show. She told millions
of viewers not to be afraid of its 837 pages as it was a "summer"
chance for everyone to "read one of the greatest love
stories of our time". Within a week the book headed the
US book charts compiled by the New York Times, USA Today and
Publishers' Weekly, easily outselling works by Nicholas Sparks
and Danielle Steel. Penguin has ordered a print run of 961,030
copies of the £11.00 book to match demand.
(Telegraph, 14 June 2004)
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