Cover Stories: Product placement; Granta regroupings; crime prizes

There was a furore when Fay Weldon placed a Bulgari bauble in a novel. Now comes the news that the mighty Random House will take product placement to a new level. Its sales development department has brokered a deal with BMW for a series of "bespoke audiobooks" for BMW cars. Karin Slaughter, Don Winslow and Simon Kernick have been commissioned to write "an exclusive story for BMW". Each tale will feature a different model and last for an average journey time. A pity that Random CEO Gail Rebuck is conveyed about town in a Mercedes.

* A tough game, London publishing: one month you're Joan of Arc, the next Cruella de Vil. And Tetra-Pak heiress Sigrid Rausing has now found that out. The patron of fêted new indie Portobello, and owner of Granta, she has made the publishers of the latter's book and magazine arms redundant. Gail Lynch and Sally Lewis, both highly esteemed, leave immediately; Granta plans to appoint a MD for the group by April. Where have we heard this week's wails of complaint before? Ah yes, when Philip Gwyn Jones - Portobello's founder - was sacked by HarperCollins when it closed down Flamingo.

* Duncan Lawrie, the private bank whose arrival as sponsor of the Crime Writers' Association awards coincided with a widely-criticised ban on foreign authors, is to back a new prize for crime fiction in translation. The Duncan Lawrie International Dagger will give £5,000 to the writer of the year's best crime novel in a language other than English, plus £1,000 to its translator. It still falls a long way short of the £20,000 purse now on offer to Anglophone writers - but, to be fair, the overall award was, until last year, worth only £3,000.