Publishing Industry

Matt McCarthy's professional baseball career flamed out after one season, 2002, with the Provo Angels in the lowly Pioneer League. He was quietly released the following spring. Now, McCarthy has published "Odd Man Out: A Year on the Mound with a Minor League Misfit," and the notoriety the memoir has generated ensures that he will be enshrined in baseball and publishing lore.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Jane Austen novel in possession of added gore will be a surefire bestseller. That's the conclusion reached by publishers since the success of "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies," an unlikely literary sensation created by adding dollops of "ultraviolent zombie mayhem" to Austen's classic love story. "Zombies" -- billed as 85% Austen's original text and 15% brand-new blood and guts -- has become a bestseller since it was published earlier this year, with 750,000 copies in print.

As publishers pray for a new children's series to equal Harry Potter and await the next novel by "The Da Vinci Code" author Dan Brown, a report released Friday predicts a tight market for at least the next few years. The Book Industry Study Group, a nonprofit organization supported by the publishing industry, projects a 3% to 4% growth through 2011, when revenue should top $43 billion. The BISG expects little change in the actual number of books sold. "The hits will keep doing well, but other books will have troubles," said BISG senior researcher Albert N. Greco, a professor of marketing at the Fordham University Graduate School of Business.

This fall, there will be nothing bigger in bookstores than Hurricane Dan. On Sept. 15, Dan Brown's "The Lost Symbol," the follow-up to "The Da Vinci Code" -- which sold 80 million copies worldwide and is said to be the biggest-selling novel ever -- arrives with high expectations; fans have spent six years waiting for Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon's next adventure. As a consequence, perhaps, some publishers have gotten quieter literary fiction on the shelves in advance. Los Angeles novelist Michelle Huneven's "Blame" is about the lifetime of consequences that result from an alcoholic's mistake.

Will digital books catch fire this holiday? According to an online survey, 1 in 5 shoppers said they planned to buy an electronic book reader such as a Sony Reader or Amazon Kindle this year. When asked what they would like to get as a gift, about 1 in 10 cited a digital book reader. Portable music players, once the hot holiday ticket, got just 3.4% of the vote, while game consoles came in at 6%, according to the survey commissioned by Retrevo, a gadget review website. Likely buyers tend to be men under 35 years old who are living in the Northeast, where more people use public transportation, with an average annual household income of more than $100,000, according to the survey of 771 respondents.

The Orange County Register is killing its daily stand-alone business news section, the latest sign of the financial pressures affecting U.S. newspapers. Business news will be carried inside the paper's main news section Monday through Saturday, effective Jan. 30, the Register reported on its website Monday, and the Monday business tabloid will be discontinued after next week's edition. Stock and mutual fund listings will "largely be eliminated," the paper reported.

As the writers strike drags on, there's at least one small corner of the industry that hasn't been grinding to a halt over the last months: literary departments at the major talent agencies, which are getting inundated with book proposals and story ideas for novels from out-of-work screenwriters.

As the publishing world reeled over yet another faked memoir -- this one by a supposed former drug-running foster child from South-Central Los Angeles who was actually raised by her middle-class family in Sherman Oaks -- those involved with the book's publication tried to explain how they fell for the deception. "Love and Consequences" tells the story of a part Native American L.A.

NEW YORK -- The latest report about the publishing industry doesn't compile sales figures, track the market for fiction or lament the future of reading. It does tell a great deal about books -- not what they say but what they're made of. "Environmental Trends and Climate Impacts" is an 86-page summary, printed on 50% post-consumer recycled paper and full of charts about fiber, endangered forests and carbon footprints. The news: The book world, which uses up more than 1.

NOT LONG ago, I found myself seated with a pimp and three high-priced escorts, the kind favored by the former governor of the great state of New York. I was in a lawn chair while the four of them were in a hot tub -- what is the word? -- gamboling in the steamy water and . . . But I'm getting ahead of myself. Once upon a time, an author published a book and left the selling to the experts in the marketing department. This was the case as recently as last week.