There's an excellent article in the 12 March issue of Publishers Weekly by Edward Russell-Walling. I think the strapline says it all:

'A dodgy retail scene and an increasingly celebrity-oriented culture are leaving little room for reason.'

The special feature is there to forearm (forewarn?) publishers coming to the UK for the London Book Fair next month. The Fair itself leaves little room for reason but at least it has moved from last year's disastrous experiment of housing it somewhere between Tower Bridge and the Western outskirts of Moscow. This shot is of Olympia. The fair moves to Earls Court but I don't suppose the aerial view ill be much different.

Visitors will, as the feature suggests, find a very strange atmosphere. Publishers are, by and large, faring quite well (or they say they are). On the other hand, trade publishers continue to be squeezed between the highest levels of discount to retailers in the world ( I can't prove this but I think it's true) and the highest relative level of author advances in the world (again I can't prove it but I think it's true). In parallel, they are having to make investments in a digital future with no proven business model to support it. They are having to battle with their American colleagues about territorial rights and in particular the necessity of acquiring exclusive EU rights. And there is effectively retail price deflation driven by th esupermarkets.

The retail environment is consolidating and there may be more on the horizon with the recent Borders announcement and advances for celebrities and best-selling authors show no sign of abatement.

And yet the parties will continue to be lavish. The Book Fair will be a triumph. Deals will be struck. The book world will continue as ever to defy gravity.

Meanwhile the Cricket World Cup continues to amaze and I'm very glad I didn't respond to the comments on an earlier posting. My favourites to win, India, are out. As are Pakistan in strange circumstances. For the good of the game, I'm now going with New Zealand.

About this time of year every year I dust down my ageing dinner jacket and wonder whether I can put up with the agony of cramming myself into it for the annual Wisden dinner. This year I decided to pluck up courage and buy a new one so that I could enjoy the dinner and its associations with Spring and a new Summer without acute discomfort. But this year's event looks like being overshadowed by the unsavoury and deeply depressing case of Who Killed Bob Woolmer (and why). The cricket section of today's Times gives some indication of the understandable domination of the issue. Forgive the strange typography.

The best we never had

Bob Woolmer had few equals as a coach, but his native country were never to benefit

Endless talent, endless problems

Ivo Tennant, who was working with the former England batsman on a new book, says his friend had been charmed by the nation

'I believed that Cronje never fixed any match’

Woolmer found it impossible to believe that the captain of South Africa would contemplate an involvement with bookmakers

Autopsy reveals Bob Woolmer was murdered

Jamaican police confirm British-born Pakistan coach Bob Woolmer was strangled to death and launch a murder probe

Bob Woolmer 1948-2007

Man of the world

As Bob Woolmer’s biographer, I was privileged to tell the story of a man who fulfilled himself as a outstanding coach

Woolmer: the boys’ own pragmatist

I played for England with Bob Woolmer, but it was as a coach that I came to respect him

Cricket paying high price for naivety

Due to recent events, questions are being asked of the ICC’s handling of corruption and whether they have reverted to complacency

Bob Woolmer: obituary

‘Citizen of world cricket’ who was a highly respected coach of South Africa and then Pakistan

A search on the ever useful Wisden Archive gives even more information about Woolmer's career. Anyway, Wednesday (or is it Thursday morning) sees the publication of Wisden 2007 which is still under wraps but is sure to be yet another triumph for its editor, Matthew Engel, who is also publishing his Extracts from the Red Notebooks this week. Rarely have I enjoyed a set of proofs so much. Do grab a copy of the book - and simply enjoy.

Publishing, thank goodness, is heterogenous. Mass-market, school and college textbooks, scientific research, literary fiction, poetry, music, religious, popular science are all important genres and have their own sets of editorial and commercial characteristics. One hugely important area is high-quality non-fiction of the sort that Macmillan has been engaged in since the days of Keynes's General Theory of Employment and other seminal works. We are still highly active in this field and I have asked Airie Stuart of Palgrave Macmillan in New York to share some of her thoughts with us.

The market for serious nonfiction has changed dramatically over the last couple of decades. The success of authors such as Stephen Greenblatt, Jared Diamond, Malcolm Gladwell and Thomas Friedman are evidence that there is a potentially large readership for challenging ideas, historical narratives and counterintuitive analysis. For publishers of these kinds of books, the continued success has brought with it a whole new set of challenges.

Over the last couple of decades, the primary aim of most literary agents has been to sell books to the highest bidder, with marketing and editorial considerations taking a back seat. And who can blame the agents? Publishers enable them. If editors see something they like, they often pre-empt for a huge sum of money or get swept up into auction fever, with little consideration for the profit and loss reckoning that will come two years later.

Many editors evaluate proposals at face value; if they don't see what they like they pass and move on. This is, of course, often a function of time constraints in the face of the volume of submissions and day to day tasks. Yet the downside is that editors are rarely able to give much thought and time to reshaping and developing a proposal with an eye toward the larger trajectory of an author’s career. What if an author is doing fascinating research in one area but wants to write about an altogether different one that many others are writing about? What will happen to the all-important sales track if an author's second book idea is not as strong as his first? What if an idea is not fully developed? When is it worth it to overspend for a trophy author? How does one pay sensibly when even assistant professors with dissertations they want to turn into books are represented by top-tier agencies?

These scenarios and questions are endemic to the publishing of serious, commercial non-fiction. And not every company can, or should, take the easy path to answering them. We certainly can't take that approach at Palgrave Macmillan.

I'm proud to say that our authors actually receive royalty checks. In this kind of give-and-take we are not just victims to the going rate, the frenzied auction or the travesty of overpaying for books left and right that might not earn out.  And we have the fulfillment of knowing that we've brought something to the table, too.

It's been a very strange week for cricket, the game for gentlemen. For those who don't follow the game the story is that one of the weakest sides in the world (Ireland) beat one of the strongest (Pakistan). It was about as likely as Jeffrey Archer winning the Booker Prize. The Pakistan manager, a former English international, Bob Woolmer, was found dead in his hotel room the next morning. Various theories emerged - a heart attack, stress of losing, depression, suicide, match fixing - but it now appears he was strangled. Who would have thought that cricket would lead the sporting world in murder?

While on crime I was delighted to receive this from the Publishers Association's head of e-crime (shouldn't it be head of anti-e-crime?), Rob Hamadi. Another example of why all publishers should be members of the Publishers Association (whose website will improve, I promise).

'I have recently returned from the North of England, where I was assisting police by analysing evidence seized during a raid on an address for another matter. The seized items included a large quantity of recordable CDs and DVDs containing audio books including Star Wars, Stephen King, Harry Potter, James Bond, Narnia, Dan Brown, Michel Thomas and a quantity of old BBC radio material.

The occupant of the address has admitted to operating a number of ebay accounts, some of which are known to me as having been responsible for the sale of quantities of counterfeit audio books in the UK. From the information provided and other evidence seized I have been able to link the individual to several other accounts, and hence to the large scale sale of counterfeit audio books. For example, using one piece of paperwork seized during the raid I was able to link the offender to an ebay account (which he had not admitted to operating) for which I hold evidence of receipts of almost £2000 corresponding to sales of 92 counterfeit copies of Harry Potter audio books in the 30 days leading up to 15 July 2006.

On a happier note I'm delighted to record that Wilbur Smith's latest book, The Quest, has been launched ahead of everywhere else in South Africa and has entered the bestseller list there at number one (six times more sales in the week than Richard Branson at number 2). Here is an old-fashioned pile-em-high display from the CNA Bookshop in Sandton in Johannesburg.

For those gagging for more about the Publishing Innovation Conference I wrote about last week but which was drowned out by the reaction to my BBC Jam remarks go to the excellent Girl Friday blog.

And finally, in the run-up to Holy Week and with the Gospel According to Judas riding high, I couldn't resist this photo. I hope that neither Jeffrey nor the Vatican feel this is blasphemous.

I promised yesterday to update you on the Roman adventure but was frustrated by technoproblems. The Foreign Press Club in Rome where we launched Judas wouldn't let me use their computer. The BA lounge at Rome airport doesn't have a screen. The public PC was surrounded by YouTube-loving users. My computer at home couldn't find the correct server at 5.30am and I've just lost today's story by pressing the wrong button at the wrong time! Grrrr.

So, in brief we held a press conference and about seventy people attended including camera crews and journalists. The authors gave excellent reports on the. Questions from the floor were numerous and not as barbed as I had antcipated. The responses were starightforward and witty.

Within minutes we had our first review by someone who had actually read the book.

'And it came to pass that Jeffrey Archer, being an ennobled novelist and fallen politician, set forth to defend Judas Iscariot, the man who ratted out Jesus Christ for 30 pieces of silver.

The odd thing is that Archer's defense, written in Biblical verse and published today as ``The Gospel According to Judas, by Benjamin Iscariot,'' is an engaging work worthy of reflection as Easter approaches.'

The downloadable audio version read by Desmond Tutu made the front page of Audible almost immediately.

Within hours the story was global.

As I said yesterday, there will be carpers but so far the reception has been positive and the idea that a 'new' Gospel can encourage more people to take a serious interest in Christianity over and above the Da Vinci Code hoopla is catching on. Archer's co-author, Frank Moloney, said yesterday that the authors' job was done; the book has a life of its own; it is up to the public to decide whether they approve.

Incidentally, one journalist commented that Archer was likely to make more money out of this than Judas's thirty pieces of silver. My inflation charts don't go back that far and I'm not sure how much the pieces of silver weighed but it could be that earning more than Judas is tougher than you might think. This is publishing after all, not Hollywood.

The dynamic duo are in London today (to compete for space with Gordon Brown's last budget speech) and in Dublin later this week.

I attended an extraordinary event last night at the Ristorante due ladroni (two thieves). We were there to celebrate the simultaneous publication in nine languages (Italian, German, Serbian, Polish, Spanish, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch, and English - an almost unique achievement in itself) of The Gospel according to Judas by Jeffrey Archer and Frank Moloney. Only the French (of the obvious language groups) have so far failed to come to the party.There is a major press conference today with the world's TV, radio and newspaper journalists turning up in force. Some news stories are beginning to filter through already.

I have absolutely no doubt that some reviewers will sneer at Jeffrey. There may be Christians who will be offended at the idea of a 'new' gospel - and by the 'disgraced Tory peer' (as the press nearly always describe him) to boot. But you only have to listen to his co-author, who is a very distinguished theologian and very close to the centres of influence in the Church, to realise that this book is special. And that Jeffrey is no Satan.

You can read an extract (in English) here.

More later as the day develops.

It was a weekend of high depression (contradiction in terms?) for an England sports supporter. An appalling display against Wales at rugby set the tone (England lost), an underwhelming performance against Canada at cricket (yes, Canada and cricket in the same sentence, we couldn't even bowl them out in 50 overs, but at least we won).And then, on a much more serious note, the former England player and Pakistan coach, Bob Woolmer, died yesterday.

But as Alok commented yesterday, there was good news too:

'Ireland has caused one of the major upsets of Cricket World Cup by beating Pakistan on St. Patrick's Day. On the other hand, Bangladesh handed out India its worst & humiliating defeat while trying to overcome the tragic loss of one of their young test cricketer.

Inspiration of two different but slighly similar sorts (St. Patrick's Day is also believed to be Death Anniversary) turned minnows into tigers.'

If only the Ireland rugby team hadn't faffed around in the last seconds of their game against Italy they would have won the Six Nations Championship (France sneaked it by a last-minute try against Scotland by a guy called Elvis).

For those of you interested in history in the making, take a look at the history feature on the website of Palgrave Macmilan USA. It represents an extraordinary list of books on topics of immediate interest, most of them rather disturbing.