The Guardian's Word of Mouth blog reports that Jamie Oliver is launching his own food rag. Jamie Magazine hits WHSmith newsstands and stores in the UK on Thursday. "Oliver takes many of the magazine's photographs himself, and copy is packaged in Jamie's trademark 'alright geezer' style, a 'no bullshit' here, a comparison of a flavour to an 'acid-house party rave' there—although there are also more worthy pages on the politics of tipping."...
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Those of you interested in the book biz may have read about a new venture that aims to rejigger how authors are paid, creating a system that may ultimately benefit both authors and publishers. Authors typically get advances, or money up front from the publisher. Often times, that's all the money an author sees from a book. That's because a book has to "earn out" the advance before an author can start sharing in the royalties. So if a writer gets, say, a $60,000 advance and the sale of each book counts toward, oh, $3 of that $60,000, the book has to sell 20,000 copies before the publisher recoups the advance and starts paying out royalties. Sadly, a lot of...
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Grant Achatz (pictured), the acclaimed chef-owner of Alinea battling cancer (his spokesperson just announced that nearly 80 percent of his tumor has been shrunken by chemotherapy), is writing a cookbook. No man-bites-dog news there. But that's where the similarity to a traditional cookbook publishing model and arrangement ends. In a move that looks to the movie business for inspiration, Achatz and his business partner, Nick Kokonas, have produced a trailer for the book that shows us just how far they're willing to push the publishing envelope in the direction of the internet....
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