It looks like things in the book social networking world are heating up.It seems that in their race to gain market share Shelfari has engaged in some pretty dubious behavior including astroturfing (posting on blogs pretending to be users, not employees) and partaking in widespread spamming campaigns.Tim Spalding founder of LibraryThing has documented the travesty over at the Thingology blog. The post is titled Shelfari Spam: "basically social network rapists" with the quote coming from a Gawker post on the issue.Before you get into the well he is the competition of course he is going to knock them read the...
Children’s Book Week
Children looking through window of Magnolia Branch Library, Seattle in 1943Since 1919 the week before Thanksgiving has been designated Children's Book Week. It is the longest running literacy event in the country.Beside all the hoopla and events planned across the country Children's Book Week has always been a showcase for poster art.Jessie Wilcox Smith did the first poster back in 1919. It was titled More Books in the Home and it was so successful that they used it for five years in a row!Here is a link to a list of the poster artists and themes since 1919.
The Color of Romance
"Between the kitty litter and the toothpaste, on a lonely aisle of your supermarket, they cry out for love. Highlander Untamed! Unleash the Night! To Pleasure a Prince! The Boss's Wife for a Week! Willingly Bedded, Forcibly Wedded!"So begins Brian Miller's piece in the Seattle Weekly, A Billion Dollar Romance Novel Industry, And its Lonely Black Author. Miller profiles the Seattle romance novelist Edwina Martin-Arnold and in the process gives us a peek into the world of Romance publishing.How big an industry is it:The genre accounts for 26.4 percent of all popular fiction salesIt annually produces around 6,000 titlesHarlequin, the...
Murder They Wrote
Over at the Wall Street Journal's Opinion Journal true crime and mystery author Harold Schechter shares his list of the top five books written about sensational murder trials. The piece is called "Killer Stories: Sensational murder trials are at their most transfixing in these works."The top five are:1. "The Murder of Helen Jewett" by Patricia Cline Cohen (Knopf, 1998).2. "Dead Certainties" by Simon Schama (Knopf, 1991).3. "The Minister and the Choir Singer" by William M. Kunstler (William Morrow, 1964)4. "Compulsion" by Meyer Levin (Simon & Schuster, 1956).5. "Kidnap" by George Waller (Dial, 1961).Schecther provides a one paragraph synopsis of each...
Picador Breaks the Ice: Will issue hardbacks and paperbacks simultaneously
I was wondering how long it was going to take a major publisher to come to their senses and release the hardback and paperback at the same time.Joel Rickett at the Guardian is reporting that beginning in the Spring of 2008 Picador will "release all new novels in paperback editions, alongside a small run of hardbacks, breaking with the trade convention of staggered publication dates."Andrew Kidd, publisher of the prestigious Macmillan imprint says:"When are we going to accept that we live in a [paperback] country; that only a tiny handful of authors command enough reader loyalty to achieve viable hardback...