Book Biz Schafer Leaves Janklow For True Love, Own Agency By Neal on Jan. 31, 2008 - 11:48 AM When literary agent Kate Schafer was hanging out in the online community for the game City of Heroes, she came across another player who was writing short stories about the characters he was playing and contacted him to see if he ...
Awards Jury for Thurber Prize Announced By Neal on Jan. 31, 2008 - 11:47 AM Novelists Christopher Buckley and Robert Kaplow and memoirist/essayist Firoozeh Dumas have been named to the jury for this year’s Thurber Prize, awarded annually to “the outstanding book of humor writing published in t ...
Reviews Lots More Women Writers in the Sunday Paper By Neal on Jan. 31, 2008 - 11:00 AM Although the most recent profile of a woman novelist in the New York Times Magazine is, as best my crowd of researcher-readers has determined, the 2005 story on Gigi Levangie Grazer, many of you wrote in yesterday to supply inform ...
Authors Ishmael Beah Still Sticks by His Memoir By Neal on Jan. 31, 2008 - 9:05 AM Following up on last week’s flurry of stories about the Australian articles challenging the veracity of Ishmael Beah‘s A Long Way Gone, Hillel Italie scores Beah’s “first extended comments” on the sit ...
Reviews Want to Save Book Sections? Write Better Reviews By Neal on Jan. 31, 2008 - 9:00 AM William Skidelesky, the deputy editor of the Prospect, offers a British perspective on the “crisis” in book reviewing, that flowering of American book reviewers’ “anxieties about the vitality of literary cu ...
Trends Keeping the Manuscript Under Wraps, pt. 2 By Neal on Jan. 31, 2008 - 8:03 AM A scout who would prefer to go unnamed offers some clarification on yesterday’s item about those hot “watermarked” manuscripts. “Watermarked is a slight exaggeration,” this source says of one of the t ...
Book Biz Anything to This Online Marketing Thing Yet? By Neal on Jan. 31, 2008 - 8:01 AM Publishing Trends has posted the results of their survey on marketing books online, and it looks like old-school marketing isn’t going down without a fight: “Despite their embrace of all things digital, a surprising 50 ...
Digital Sony Reader Decked in Pink, Loaded with Romance By Neal on Jan. 31, 2008 - 8:00 AM Harlequin is teaming up with Sony for a Valentine’s-themed Sony Reader that, in addition to the hot-pink skin, comes bundled with 14 romance novels that only exist in e-book format, plus enough memory on the hard drive to st ...
Book Biz Oprah’s Favorite New Age Self Help Book By Neal on Jan. 30, 2008 - 2:18 PM I have to admit, didn’t see this one coming: After flirting along the border of literary and commercial fiction with Ken Follett, Oprah Winfrey has gone into full-scale commercial nonfiction mode by picking A New Earth: Awak ...
Book Bix Anonymous Readers Are a Cynical and Suspicious Lot By Neal on Jan. 30, 2008 - 1:59 PM Anonymous (always anonymous) readers among you persist in believing that Sunday’s New York Times Magazine story on Charles Bock must be the result of an unholy alliance between Daniel Menaker, Katherine Boutin, and Charles M ...