At htmlgiant, Lily Hoang asks: Is the NEA punishing writers who have published books at BlazeVox, which in some cases has required authors to pay a percentage of their own publishing costs?
A twelve-hundred-page erotic novel some are calling “mommy porn” has landed at the top of the New York Times bestseller list for combined print and ebook fiction. Fifty Shades of Gray, which originated as Twilight fan fiction, reimagines “the Bella and Edward love affair set in contemporary Seattle, Washington, with Bella as the young college graduate virgin and Edward as the masterful billionaire with secret sexual predilections.” So far, the book has been hard to find in print: published by a small press in Australia, it has sold 90 percent of its copies to ebook readers. But this week, it’s everywhere: Vintage Books is publishing the book after buying it for a reported seven figures.
Slate close-reads the trailer for the first movie adaptation of Kerouac’s On the Road.
Fifty hours in the life of a book critic: The Los Angeles Times’ Carolyn Kellogg gives an insider’s look at the National Book Critics Circle: the meetings, the dinners, the awards ceremony.
Publishing used to be a closed-off and enigmatic world . . . until Twitter arrived. Ceri Radford on how online feuds and publising hashtags are changing the nature of literary conversation.
Literary magazine Hoot keeps it short and sweet. Very short, in fact—the newly launched monthly magazine fits entirely on a postcard.
Launched this week, Random House’s new Author Portal allows writers to obtain more information about their book sales. The portal, which is open to RH authors, “allows access to weekly consumer purchase data, as well as copies shipped into the marketplace over the last 10 years, broken [down] by sales channel and publishing format.” Unless you're a best-seller, it sounds like torture...
