Post from Lee Goldberg
Thursday, March 11, 2010, 6:00 pm
Read more: Writing

“As dark and twisted as anything Hammett or Chandler ever dreamed up [...] leaving Travis McGee in the dust.” Kirkus, Starred Review My favorite, and most acclaimed book, THE MAN WITH THE IRON-ON BADGE, is now available in a Kindle…

Post from Lee Goldberg
Thursday, February 4, 2010, 4:13 am
Read more: Writing

My Mom, Jan Curran, is thrilled about the tremendous reader response that her memoir Active Senior Living has been getting on Amazon, the Kindle Discussion forums, and on the Kindleboard. Here are just a few examples. G Murphy writes: This…

Post from Lee Goldberg
Wednesday, February 3, 2010, 9:33 pm
Read more: Writing

Author Christa Faust is so happy that her new book has found a home with Hard Case Crime, who been enthusiastic supporters of hers and published her previous books to great acclaim, that she has tattooed their logo on her…

Post from Alex Wire
Monday, February 1, 2010, 9:41 pm
Read more: Writing

I seem to have lost the ability to read during the day, at least without falling asleep. I hope it’s just tiredness and not a permanent fault I’ve developed. In Plath’s The Bell Jar it’s when she realises she can no longer read that she first attempts …

Post from Lee Goldberg
Monday, February 1, 2010, 1:42 am
Read more: Writing

Amazon recently stopped selling titles from Macmillan and its subsidiaries because the publisher refuses to abide by a $9.99 cap on prices for ebooks. Today, Amazon grand poobah Jeff Bezos released a statement on the matter saying that he’d eventually…

Post from Lee Goldberg
Saturday, January 30, 2010, 5:45 am
Read more: Writing

Kevin Weiss, the CEO of the vanity press Author Solutions, posted a video on YouTube asking the Mystery Writers of America, Science Fiction Writers of America, and the Romance Writers of America to meet with him to discuss all the…

Post from Writers Write
Saturday, January 30, 2010, 2:00 am
Read more: Writing

Deadline Hollywood Daily reports
that this spring — probably at the Cannes film festival — a new documentary about J.D. Salinger will be released. The project has been kept under wraps — it took five years to make and has extensive new information about the recently deceased author of The Catcher in the Rye. Mike Fleming, who has actually seen the film, had this to say about some of the film’s revelations:

There also are details of: his WWII soldiering in Normandy and interrogation of Nazi prisoners; his love affair with Eugene O’Neill’s daughter Oona, and the crushing disappointment of losing her to Charlie Chaplin while Salinger fought in Europe; Salinger’s habit of locking himself away in his New Hampshire cinderblock bunker for weeks at a time to write; his penchant for taking a week to craft a single sentence; the damage his silences caused his family; the futile efforts of friends to re-introduce him to the world; Salinger’s protectiveness towards his work; his refusal to sell anything to Hollywood, turning down 8-figure offers and first-class filmmakers like Billy Wilder and Steven Spielberg; his determination to maintain total control over his prose (so that when a New Yorker editor once added a comma, Salinger never spoke to him again).



Even more intriguing, Salerno’s documentary also reports on what J.D. Salinger literary works might be in the famed secret vault, where 45 years of unpublished writings are rumored to be kept.

Post from Alex Wire
Friday, January 29, 2010, 4:48 pm
Read more: Writing

If you really want to hear about it, I am one of those people who, after reading The Catcher in the Rye for the first time, “went around for months afterwards being Holden”. Years later I even confused my friends by signing up to Facebook under a C…

Post from Writers Write
Friday, January 29, 2010, 12:50 am
Read more: Writing

J.D. Salinger, author of Catcher in the Rye, Nine Stories and Franny and Zooey has died. He was 91. The Seattle Post Intelligencer wrote in its obituary:

Salinger died of natural causes at his home on Wednesday, the author’s son said in a statement from Salinger’s longtime literary representative, Harold Ober Agency. He had lived for decades in self-imposed isolation in the small, remote house in Cornish, N.H.



“The Catcher in the Rye,” with its immortal teenage protagonist, the twisted, rebellious Holden Caulfield, came out in 1951, a time of anxious, Cold War conformity and the dawn of modern adolescence. The Book-of-the-Month Club, which made “Catcher” a featured selection, advised that for “anyone who has ever brought up a son” the novel will be “a source of wonder and delight — and concern.”



Enraged by all the “phonies” who make “me so depressed I go crazy,” Holden soon became American literature’s most famous anti-hero since Huckleberry Finn. The novel’s sales are astonishing — more than 60 million copies worldwide — and its impact incalculable. Decades after publication, the book remains a defining expression of that most American of dreams: to never grow up.

Post from routepublishing
Wednesday, January 27, 2010, 3:31 pm
Read more: Writing

A series of small interviews with the authors featured in The Route Book at Bedtime has been posted on route-online.com The Route Book at Bedtime (Route 22) is a book of 12 stories that aims to capture those moments of deep emotional significance which return to us in our dreams. But what is the story behind the stories? In this feature, 10 of the authors talk about the inspiration behind the work. Here are a few samples.

Post from routepublishing
Tuesday, January 26, 2010, 3:24 pm
Read more: Writing

A Review of The Train of Ice and Fire features in Candela, the newly launched magazine for Latin and Spanish lifestyle in the UK.

Post from Writers Write
Friday, January 22, 2010, 8:00 pm
Read more: Writing

Amazon.com announced
today that it will create an App store for the Kindle which will go live later this year. Amazon.com has asked developers to create programs for the Kindle, in a move designed to go head on with the upcoming Apple tablet launch. For example, Handmark is building an active Zagat guide featuring their ratings, reviews and more for restaurants in cities around the world. PC World reports:

The Kindle Development Kit (KDK) will be available in limited beta form next month and the new software and other content from the initiative is expected to be in the Kindle Store later this year, Amazon said in a statement.



Examples of what kind of content people can expect for their Kindles include travel books with real-time weather updates and current events, cookbooks that recommend menus for people with allergies or different kinds of parties, and the inclusion of word games and puzzles for the Kindle.



The KDK gives software developers access to programming interfaces, sample code, tools and documentation to build content for Kindle’s high-resolution electronic paper and to use its 3G capability and other functions.

Post from Writers Write
Wednesday, January 20, 2010, 7:00 pm
Read more: Writing

CNET reports
that Amazon.com is increasing the royalty amount it pays to
publisher and authors who use the Kindle Digital Text Platform (DTP) to 70 percent of the list price of their e-books.
Analysts say the move is an attempt to head off competitor Apple which is rumored to be launching its new tablet computer on January 27.
The price jump is equal to what Apple pays developers for apps sold in its app store.

Starting on June 30, Amazon says that for each Kindle book sold, authors and publishers who select the new 70 percent royalty option will receive 70 percent of the list price, minus delivery costs. This new option will be in addition to and will not replace the existing DTP standard royalty option, which is set at a 65-35 split, with 65 percent going to Amazon.



Amazon didn’t have any comment about whether the new pricing was a response to Apple’s royalty program for its App Store, which offers thousands of e-books as self-contained apps along with e-reader apps from Amazon (Kindle Reader, Stanza), Barnes & Noble, and other e-book stores. But it did say that delivery costs will be based on file size and pricing will be 15 cents per megabyte.



“At today’s median DTP file size of 368KB, delivery costs would be less than $0.06 per unit sold,” the news release notes. “This new program can thus enable authors and publishers to make more money on every sale. For example, on an $8.99 book an author would make $3.15 with the standard option, and $6.25 with the new 70 percent option.”

Post from Lee Goldberg
Tuesday, January 19, 2010, 9:20 pm
Read more: Writing

I’ve had a long, on-and-off love affair with Robert B. Parker’s books, and although I have criticized his last few novels, I will deeply miss him, and not just as a reader of his work. He had an enormous impact…

Post from Writers Write
Tuesday, January 19, 2010, 2:00 pm
Read more: Writing

Classics scholar, author and screenwriter Erich Segal has died
after suffering a heart attack. He had been battling Parkinson’s disease for 25 years, according to his daughter Francesca. Segal was 72. Segal taught at Princeton, Yale, Harvard and Oxford, but is best known for writing the novel Love Story and for co-writing the classic Beatles cartoon Yellow Submarine. The New York Times reports:

Mr. Segal was unusual among American popular novelists and American scholars: he was both. In addition to Love Story, the heart-tugging tale of a Harvard scion and his love affair with a Radcliffe scholarship student who dies shortly after their marriage, Mr. Segal wrote several other novels, including Oliver’s Story, a sequel to Love Story; The Class, which traces the fates of five members of the Harvard class of 1958; and Doctors, a melodrama about childhood friends who go through medical school together.



After Yellow Submarine, he wrote screenplays for, among other films, Love Story, the 1970 version of the novel that starred Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw, and A Change of Seasons (1980), about a marriage gone awry, with Anthony Hopkins, Shirley MacLaine and Bo Derek.

Post from routepublishing
Monday, January 18, 2010, 1:43 pm
Read more: Uncategorized, Writing

We start the new decade with the man most likely to shape it. ‘Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future.’ Barack Obama’s Nobel lecture in full sets out a course of action for the coming ten years. Available as epub (Sony reader, iPhone etc) and pdf ebook formats

Post from Writers Write
Thursday, January 14, 2010, 9:00 pm
Read more: Writing

Fans of Cervante’s Don Quixote de la Mancha are determined to put
the entire book on Twitter, one tweet at a time. They estimate that it will take 8,200-odd tweets to get through the first volume. That’s a lot of tweets.

The Twijote project, as it is known, aims to publish the 470-odd pages of the first volume of Don Quixote’s adventures using just the 140-character blocks of text allowed by Twitter. It has set itself strict rules, of the honourable but potentially foolish kind that Don Quixote and his creator, Miguel de Cervantes, might have approved of.



The 8,200-odd tweets needed to get to the end of the first volume must come from one-off visitors to the Twijote site. They are given the next block of 140 characters of text to put on Twitter.
“We reckon it will take about a year, if people stick with it,” said Pablo Lopez, a web designer from the north-western Spanish city of Vigo who thought up the project. “The idea is to show that culture can exist in social media – that it is not just a place for nerds and freaks,” he said.



Twijote has no sponsors and no ambition to make money. “It is something we put up to see what would happen,” said Lopez, who pulled in web designers from his company to help. “I had the idea one day and came into the office and persuaded people it was worth doing.”

Post from Writers Write
Friday, January 8, 2010, 12:00 am
Read more: Writing

Three writers groups have sent
a letter to 60 members of Congress listing their reasons for opposing the Google Book Settlement. The National Writers Union, The American Society of Journalists and Authors, and the Science Fiction Writers of America sent the letters to members of Congress who are authors.
Quill and Quire has an excerpt from the letter:

The ramifications of the amended settlement for any one author and any one book are exceptionally complex. We’ve talked to our members, authors like yourself. The ones who got the notice found it incomprehensible and just shook their heads in confusion. Go to the settlement website’s poorly implemented database and see for yourself how tricky this is — has your book been scanned? Is it commercially available? Should you opt out? If you do nothing, you’re automatically included in the settlement. If you opt out, Google doesn’t even guarantee that it won’t steal your work in the future.



It isn’t fair. There are millions of book authors in this country who could be locked into an agreement they don’t understand and didn’t ask for. The Authors Guild represents only a tiny fraction of published writers, yet the new regulatory board set up in the proposed settlement will override individual book contracts — not to mention common law and even the Constitutional protection of copyright. Mary Beth Peters, Register of Copyrights, testified before the House Judiciary Committee that the settlement would “turn copyright on its head.” Nothing in the revised U.S.settlement changes that.

Post from Writers Write
Thursday, January 7, 2010, 12:00 am
Read more: Writing

Publisher’s Weekly reports that Kirkus Reviews will continue to publish while waiting for a potential sale to go through.

In an email to colleagues today, Kirkus Reviews managing editor and nonfiction editor Eric Liebetrau said the publication, which last month was said to be closing with staff leaving by the end of 2009, is working toward an arrangement with an acquiring company to continue publication. Liebetrau said details will be forthcoming in the next two to three weeks, but asked publishers to “please begin sending galleys to the appropriate editors immediately. We will publish a second issue in January, and then reassess the situation and hopefully continue publication in February and beyond.”

Post from Writers Write
Monday, January 4, 2010, 9:00 pm
Read more: Writing

Bestselling mystery author P.D. James blasted the BBC in a surprising interview with the British broadcasting network. Baroness James blasted the organization for its bloated executive salaries and failure to pay sufficient amounts to writers and producers of programming.

“I think [the BBC] has changed,” said Baroness James, who was one of its governors between 1988 and 1993. “And sometimes it seems like a very large and unwieldy ship that’s been floating there since 1920 taking on more and more and more cargo, building more decks to accommodate it, recruiting more officers – all very comfortably cabined, usually at salaries far greater than their predecessors enjoyed — and with a crew somewhat discontented and some a little mutinous, the ship rather sinking close to the Plimsoll line and the customers feeling they paid too much for the journey and not quite sure where they’re going, or indeed, who is the captain.”



After conceding that although her view was perhaps “a little unfair”, she said it was how many people saw the BBC, and she then slammed a couple more torpedoes into the tubes as she raised the subject of corporation remuneration.



“It is extraordinary that 375 [BBC managers] earn over 100,000 [pounds] and 37-plus more than the prime minister,” she said. “An organisation that has 37 of its managers earning more than the prime minister ought to ask itself ‘Is this justified?’ ”