But basically, if a publisher thinks your book won’t sell, it doesn’t matter who you know; who you’re sleeping with, where you went to university or how often you’ve been on TV – it still won’t be published.

Notice it’s not “if your publisher thinks your book isn’t good.”

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We are THRILLED AND TICKLED BEYOND BELIEF to announce the launch of Lizzie Skurnick Books, your gateway to the best YA from the 1930s through the 1970s. Get ready: Starting this fall, we’ll be publishing a novel a month for your pleasure, delectation, and book-collecting needs.

Vintage YA.

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According to a recent New York Post article, one parent is upset after students at York Prep in Manhattan were asked to write suicide notes from the perspective of a suicidal character in the book The Secret Life Of Bees. The assignment, which was given to ninth-grade students, asked them to justify –- from the perspective of character May Boatwright -– why they wanted to commit suicide.

I’m really surprised this went sideways.

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From the data he can see that two weeks after the release of The Fault in Our Stars he was no longer selling books through affiliate links clicked on by his followers on his Youtube or Twitter channels. This is a key point for those of us hearing that social media is everything.

Doesn’t hurt to have a huge social media following, but that only gets you so far, even if you are John Green.

Self-published titles make up 12% of all e-book sales, according to new findings from Bowker Market Research.

So if self-published titles are 12% of ebooks, and ebook are 20% of the overall book market, that means self-pubbed ebooks are just about 2% of all book sales. Maybe we can just calm down a little then.

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The premise of our service is simple. We offer a range of book subscription gift packages, available in three-, six- and 12-month options. Our customers choose a package, tell us a little about the person they’re buying it for, and we use this information to send the recipient a hand-picked, gift-wrapped book once a month.

Here’s how I can tell this is a good idea: I would both buy this and be thrilled to get one as a gift.

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But don’t worry; I have Nook Media’s back. As soon as I realized that the domains were unregistered I stepped up and paid the registration fees. And this morning, when I realized that @NookSnaps was unused, I snagged that as well.

Gah….someone at Barnes & Noble was asleep at the wheel here.

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By the end of the interview Turvey had gone from saying the publishers had told him directly, to saying they had merely told people on his team, to finally saying the publishers had “likely” told someone on his team.

I find this whole Apple/DOJ/publishers trial a complete snooze, but this one little nugget is pure gold.

Here are the most-read stories from the last week in Critical Linking…

Country music legend Dolly Parton has delivered nearly 50 million free books to children’s homes. Called Imagination Library, the program started in 1996 in one one rural Tennessee county and has spread to 1,400 communities across the United States, England and Canada.

We have some of these in our house right now. Unbelievable program.

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The problem, as Perez and others see it, is that Amazon’s publishing program simply misunderstands what fandom is about. To them, the often collaborative process of fan fiction can’t be shoehorned into a single ebook file.

I always forget how no one ever makes money off fandom.

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California and Texas may have been the states with the most bookstores in 2012, but the state with the most bookstores per capita was Montana.

You could have given me ten guesses and I still would have missed this by a country mile.

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Set in AD 2540, this influential novel goes way beyond the science fiction genre and asks many searching questions about the effects of technology, industrialization and mass production on society in general.  Priced at $8,750, this is the most expensive copy of Brave New World ever sold by AbeBooks.

First edition in a very good dust jacket. Not bad.

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“If a building is going to be built, it shouldn’t be a shopping center but a library. I know that’s a romantic idea but isn’t this whole protest a romantic idea?” 

The world could benefit from more romanticism and less practicality.

Set in AD 2540, this influential novel goes way beyond the science fiction genre and asks many searching questions about the effects of technology, industrialization and mass production on society in general.  Priced at $8,750, this is the most expensive copy of Brave New World ever sold by AbeBooks.

First edition in a very good dust jacket. Not bad.

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I ask Homes what she intends to do with her £30,000 winnings. The answer is not quite as exciting as I had imagined: “I took out a home loan while writing the novel because it took so long to write. So I’m going to pay that back. I’ve also been wearing the same pair of shoes for the last ten years, and as you can see, they’re wearing out, so I think I may actually get a new pair of fancy shoes. That’s the fancy life of a literary writer!”

This is one of those little facts about writing books that I think some folks with literary stars in their eyes should know.

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Mark Ryan, the DOJ’s lead attorney, asked the Penguin Group’s CEO David Shanks whether Amazon execs were happy when they were told they would be required to move to the agency model and lose control over ebook prices.

“No,” he said smiling. “They yelled, screamed, and threatened.”

Uncool.

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The heartwarming campaign added Justice League superhero logos to IV bags in the chemotherapy ward to make “a child-friendly version of the treatment” with Batman, Superman and other comic book heroes.

Very cool.

California and Texas may have been the states with the most bookstores in 2012, but the state with the most bookstores per capita was Montana.

You could have given me ten guesses and I still would have missed this by a country mile.

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As an author with a half century of literary success behind me, I can assure you the only way to make it in this industry is to meet as many publishers as you possibly can and then fuck them.

Funny stuff from The Onion, though why make this by Joyce Carol Oates? Seemed kinda arbitrary.

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Months after being apparently retired from Amazon’s e-reader line, the 9.7-inch Kindle DX is back in stock.

So strange. Though some people really love to read on e-ink, so this large format might find a niche. Possibly especially among those who like/need a large font?

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Real progress on the digital front would require companies like Apple and Amazon to collaborate to create a consistent format – and for now, they won’t, thanks to a combination of paranoia and proprietary and competitive concerns.

What I wouldn’t give for a file format standard for books like .mp3 is for music.

Baileys liquor has been announced as the new sponsor of the British-based women’s fiction prize, formerly the Orange Prize. This year’s winner will receive an award of close to $46,000 in a ceremony taking place Wednesday night in London.

Not sure the last time I thought about Baileys, so I guess this is working.

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The problem, as Perez and others see it, is that Amazon’s publishing program simply misunderstands what fandom is about. To them, the often collaborative process of fan fiction can’t be shoehorned into a single ebook file.

I always forget how no one ever makes money off fandom.

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Matt Damon, Christine Baranski and Gloria Reuben will join the lineup of noted actors scheduled to appear at “What Are We Worth? Shakespeare, Money, And Morals”

Shakespeare has the weird ability to get really famous people to do stuff for free. (Now a panel on that phenomenon is something I would attend).

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Of course, I now have a boss, but they are fairly liberal at letting us run the company the way we always have.

I’d give ten bucks to know what that “fairly” connotes.

Country music legend Dolly Parton has delivered nearly 50 million free books to children’s homes. Called Imagination Library, the program started in 1996 in one one rural Tennessee county and has spread to 1,400 communities across the United States, England and Canada.

We have some of these in our house right now. Unbelievable program.

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Prices of the rarest books are rising as the Internet drives the trade off dusty shelves and into the digital age, a leading expert said this weekend.

Supply has stayed the same, but the internet has tapped into a larger pool of demand. Good for you if you have a stash of first editions squirrelled away somewhere…

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Evoke is a platform that seeks to connect readers with new characters by making these emotional connections more salient. For the first time, books and the characters that inhabit them may be browsed based on the emotions they engender. Readers may determine if they wish to be inspired, challenged, amused, or informed during their next read based on content generated by an audience-in-common.

Evoke won the publishing hackathon. I’m guessing there’s not going to be a section on “unlikeable” characters…

Astoria Bookshop will be the borough’s only independent book store — and Beach thinks the gentrifying neighborhood will support her store at 31-29 31st St.

That “gentrifying” snuck in there is pretty interesting, eh?

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BEA felt like a battle of cynicism versus enthusiasm…

This is the paradox of today’s book world. It is wonderful time to be a reader and damn hard time to be a seller.

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Back in 2009 Rangoon, Burma resident Ye Htet Oo started running an unauthorized library, “and was told he could face three months in jail for every book he lent without permission from the censorship board.”

This dude is the coolest.

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so i got a phone call today from a representative of Amazon! apparently, he was given the task of reaching out to independent bookstores in order to ‘build’ a ‘relationship’ with the indies in order to ‘partner’ with us in a program to sell Kindles in our store…yea, really

In all fairness, this guy’s last job was selling ice to Eskimos.

The only type of paid review that Amazon supports is an editorial review. An editorial review is a more formal evaluation of a book usually written by an editor or expert within a genre, but can also be written by family and friends. If you have received an editorial review of your book that you’d like to post to the Editorial Review section of your book’s detail page, please visit our Author Central Help Page.

This is a weird little part of Amazon’s review policy. Editorial reviews written by family and friends can be submitted for the editorial review section, but are not allowed in the customer review section. Odd.

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The publisher suggests that customers pay $10 for the download, but there is a drop down option to pay other amounts including: nothing, $2, $5, $25, $50 or $100.

Brave. Hope it works out for them.

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“[T]he launch of the pay model is the most important and most successful business decision made by The New York Times in many years. We have around 700,000 paid digital subscribers across the company’s products so far and a new nine-figure revenue stream that is still growing.”

Gotta ask yourself, though, how many other successful business decisions has the NYT made recently. Still, good for them.

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Amis is one of the finest stylists alive, but I thought “Lionel Asbo” was a bad novel. A really bad novel. In fact, my review of “Lionel Asbo” was a finalist for the Hatchet Job — a prize given for the most negative book review of the year. And yet, on the new paperback — on thefront cover, no less — appears this ringing endorsement from The Washington Post: “Amis is a force unto himself… . There is, quite simply, no one else like him.”

All true. But caveat emptor. That line is drawn from a review of “London Fields” that my colleague Jonathan Yardley wrote … 23 years ago.

This is pretty embarrassing stuff from the publisher.

I thought I’d take a look at the SAT Subject Test in literature as a mini case study. I chose the Literature test because it’s a subject I’m supposed to know something about. After all, I have a B.A. and a PhD in English. I have spent the last 25 years thinking about, writing about, talking about, and teaching literature. A one-hour subject test designed to test high school students on their reading comprehension should be a cakewalk.

Well, I was wrong. Or, at least, the high number of incorrect answers on my answer sheet suggested that someone or something was wrong.

Of course she didn’t do well.  She was taught how to think, not how to take a test.

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Qworty has destructively edited the pages of other writers. He has made numerous edits to his own page while obsessively hiding his true identity. And yet there have never been any significant consequences for his actions. For those of us who love Wikipedia, the ramifications of the Qworty saga are not comforting: If Qworty has been allowed to run free for so long — sabotaging the “truth” however he sees fit, writing his own postmodern novel — how many others are also creating spiteful havoc under the hood, where no one is watching? 

And this is why English teachers everywhere tell their students that Wikipedia is not a valid source for their research papers.

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Do women writers get asked this more than male ones? Bet your buttons they do. The snaps and snails and puppy-dog’s tails are great for boys. The sugar and spice is still expected for girls. Up to a point.

No one is better than Atwood at a snappy comeback.