Friday, 6 July 2012

Compass Points 6


Compass Points  (6)
Your weekly round up of publishing news, publicity information and trivia!

This week at Compass we are enjoying reading Watermelons – a highly entertaining and very provocative new title by James Delingpole which is published in October.  James Delingpole is the bestselling British author and blogger who helped expose the Climategate scandal back in 2009. At its very roots, argues Delingpole, climate change is an ideological battle, not a scientific one. In other words, it's green on the outside and red on the inside. At the end of the day, according to Delingpole, these "watermelons" of the modern environmental movement do not want to save the world. They want to rule it.

“I haven’t tasted chocolate for ten years and now I’m walking down the street unwrapping a Kit-Kat. It tastes amazing. Remember when Kate Moss said ‘Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels’? She’s wrong: chocolate does. When I think of the wasted tears, the evenings spent alone, the friends lost, all those shared meals I’ve avoided... it strikes me as incredibly sad. I’ll never get those years back.”
At the age of 32, Emma Woolf decided to face the biggest challenge of her life: to let go of her addiction to hunger, exercise and control, and finally beat anorexia. An Apple a Day is a compelling and life-affirming true story of love and recovery – just published and getting a lot of very positive press coverage. The issue of body image is never far away in the media – and now Emma (who is the great niece of Virginia Woolf incidentally!) is just about to start writing a weekly weekend column for The Sun – which will heighten her profile still further.

Fifty Shades of Grey? More like Fifty Shades of Horrendously Badly Written – come on, let’s make sure the bookselling public have plenty of opportunity to read the original and best. Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure by John Cleland was first published in England in 1748 and is generally considered the first original English pornographic novel. One of the most prosecuted and banned books in history; it is republished by Arcturus Classics in August – and with a terrific retail price of £3.99 it’s a no-brainer to add to every bookshop’s mummy porn – sorry erotic fiction – display.

Publicity is building for The Hundred Year Old Man who Climbed out of the Window and Disappeared - the international publishing sensation which has sold over two million copies across the globe and is published in the UK by Hesperus this month. Waterstones have just announced that they have chosen it as one of their next twelve Book Club reads.

Real books or eBooks? The debate rages on. Why not watch this cute film  to help you make up your mind!

This newsletter is sent weekly to over 400 booksellers. If you would like to order any of the titles mentioned, then please click here to go to the Compass New Titles website.

That’s all for now folks, more next week!

1 comment:

  1. Just to say we love Compass Points and look forward to the weekly email, great idea.

    Good idea too about Fanny Hill, think we should do a window featuring 'mummy porn'.

    ReplyDelete