Canadian publisher Commonwealth, who had entered into “joint contracts” (aka vanity publishing) with an estimated 2,000 authors and had an annual budget of $6 million, declared bankruptcy in March. With lawsuits threatened by disgruntled writers and employees, publisher Don Phelan went into hiding, only to resurface briefly to blame an “internal and external conspiracy” for his problems, saying he would represent himself in class action suits brought against the firm by its clients.

Despite an announcement in May that Stanislaus Tal’s TAL Literary Agency had been sold to a company called Extreme Entertainment, it later emerged that Tal represented few if any authors and some royalties paid to the agency had never been reported.

The American Congress passed the Copyright Term Extension Act, adding a further twenty years to copyrights for individuals, bringing the length of copyright in the US up to life plus seventy years, and into line with the European copyright law which was amended in 1995. After vigorous lobbying by the Walt Disney Company (who was faced with losing its exclusive copyright to Mickey Mouse in 2003), another twenty years was added to the already existing seventy-five years of corporate copyrights. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act also gave full protection to work appearing on-line.

It was the summer of Stephen King. After his move in 1997 to Simon & Schuster for a $2 million advance and nearly 50 per cent of the profits, his big release for the year was the novel Bag of Bones. It was about bestselling author Mike Noonan, suffering from writer’s block following the unexpected death of his wife and their unborn child, who found himself caught up in a supernatural mystery centred around Dark Score Lake and a town in the grip of a tyrannical millionaire. In America the book had a first printing of 1,360,000 copies from Scribner, backed by a $1 million promotional budget.