My friend and occasional co-author Jay Levinson just passed away. He was eighty.
Jay helped invent the idea of the modern marketing book, pioneered Guerrilla Marketing (which has nothing to do with gorillas and everything to do with thinking independently and bravely) and influenced several generations of leaders.
Appeals court rejects fraud claim against ‘Three Cups of Tea’ author Mortenson | Star Tribune.
HELENA, Mont. — A federal appeals court on Wednesday rejected claims that author and humanitarian Greg Mortenson committed fraud by lying in his best-selling book “Three Cups of Tea” to boost sales and donations to the charity he co-founded.
Hollywood Ponders Movie on Book About Snowden – NYTimes.com.
LOS ANGELES — For more than a week, Hollywood has been exploring what could be one of the most difficult nonfiction projects it has ever tried: a proposed film based on the journalist Glenn Greenwald’s planned book about Edward J. Snowden, the fugitive whistle-blower.
We’ve been living through an e-book boomtime. Two years ago, Amazon turned heads by announcing that sales of digital books had eclipsed those of hardcovers, and the trend has only continued. But a recent pair of reports shows that a plateau may be coming.
via E-book sales decline: Do people not want to read books on tablets?.
Hot between the covers as publishers embrace raunch ratings.
The explicitness of trysts in romance novels is prompting mainstream publishers to introduce ”heat” ratings to forewarn – or entice – readers.
Mills & Boon has long had Sweet, Sexy and Blaze lines to guide readers and bloggers have used their own rating system for books, but now Penguin Australia’s romance e-book imprint has introduced to its website a heat-o-meter rating titles from sweet to spicy and hot.
”The last thing we want to do is to disappoint – or offend – readers and heat ratings tell readers exactly what they’re getting, up-front, when they buy a Destiny Romance,” says Penguin’s commissioning editor Carol George.
Who would have predicted that, in her late 80s, Harper Lee would have to file suit to get the control of “To Kill a Mockingbird” returned to her?According to a lawsuit filed in May, Lee, in failing health, had been “duped” into assigning the copyright of her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel to her literary agent, a lawyer.
via Harper Lee’s tragic ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ lawsuit – Los Angeles Times.
Fantastic Beasts carry Harry Potter back to the silver screen | Film | theguardian.com.
The Harry Potter films will live again. Warner Bros, the studio behind the Potter films, has announced it is working on a new feature series in conjunction with author JK Rowling, based on Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, the first-year textbook that Potter uses at Hogwarts school in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
In 2001 Rowling published Fantastic Beasts as a separate book in aid of the Comic Relief charity, with the book purporting to be Potter’s actual copy of the textbook, complete with his and his friends’ doodles and scribblings. It is a guide to “magizoology”, or the study of magical creatures, and was supposedly published in 1918, written by Newt Scamander, who will become the central character of the new film.
Rowling will work on the screenplay of the new film – her first – and the hope is that it will expand into a franchise along the same lines as Potter. The author said in a statement: “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is neither a prequel nor a sequel to the Harry Potter series, but an extension of the wizarding world … Newt’s story will start in New York, seventy years before Harry’s gets underway.”
NBF Names 5 (Women) Under 35 – Publishers Lunch.
The National Book Foundation announced their closely-watched list of 5 Under 35 authors — and “for the first time, the group of authors are all women.” Two of the featured authors are not scheduled to publish until 2014: Rona Jaffe Award winner Merritt Tierce’s Love Me Back (Doubleday, fall 2014) and Stegner Fellow Molly Antopol’s The UnAmericans (Norton, February 2014).
One title does not have an announced US publisher yet: Daisy Hildyard’s Hunters in the Snow, published by Jonathan Cape in the UK this summer.
The other two were both highlighted/excerpted in previous Publishers Lunch Buzz Books collections: Current Booker nominee NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names and Amanda Coplin’s BN Discover Awards winner The Orchardist.
Author sells Billy Joel bio to publisher.
We may get the inside scoop on Billy Joel’s life after all.
Music journalist Fred Schruers, who was working as the ghostwriter on Joel’s biography, “The Book of Joel,” until Joel pulled the plug less than three months before it was to be released in 2011, has sold a Joel biography to Crown Publishing Group. Joel has said he had no problem with the book, he just wasn’t interested in rehashing the past and decided not to release it. He told Newsday later that year it would probably be released after his death.
Though Joel isn’t involved with Schruers’ book and it will be considerably different from “The Book of Joel,” he said he will not fight publication. “Fred Schruers is free to write whatever kind of book he wants based on the firsthand information he gathered during the time he spent with me,” Joel said in a statement.
The British literary world has been stunned by news that the Man Booker prize is set to allow American writers to enter from next year, with authors questioning whether it would lose its “character” and even prevent the emergence of domestic talent.
The Man Booker, which currently allows entries from British, Irish and Commonwealth authors, is the most prestigious prize in British literature; past winners include Salman Rushdie, Iris Murdoch and JM Coetzee.