- Why are book award longlists so different? It’s all about personality, but not the authors’—the prizes’, so says the Guardian blog. The Guardian First Book Award, it reports, “sniff[s] out the edgy, the playful, the unexpected, those pesky books that occupy the spaces between genres.”
- Edible Communities takes over the world (okay, the nation), franchising Edible Ojai out to wannabee publishers of Edible “Your City Here”. The varied-quality magazines offer advice about everything from eating local, fish farming, elderberry and washing strawberries in champagne. You too could have one for $30,000 down, and $60,000 owed.
- If I had to leave a book behind in a hotel room, it might be an extra galley or maybe “The Slow Moon.” In UK Travelodge’s, it’s The Blair Years: The Alastair Campbell Diaries by Alistair Campbell, but even Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows doesn’t escape abandonment.
- Publisher: “I want a writer with a great story, good writing, marketing appeal, and oh yeah, s/he has to be hot.” Writer: “Isn’t my complete Faulkner memorabilia collection hot enough?” Why having a well-written novel may be becoming not good enough.
Beware the anatomy of wolves in men’s clothing. The AV club (the Onion’s entertainment newspaper and website) reviews Danielle Wood’s “Rosie Little’s Cautionary Tales for Girls.” Despite being linked from The Onion, the review and all else on the site is real. Reviewer Tasha Robinson says: “The stories aren’t always on point, but they’re often funny, and they add up to a sort of primer for a peculiar life.”
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Literary Lotus 
So true…Hollywood! It’s about $ and numbers in publishing. Hopefully another avenue will appear where literary novels are ‘hot’ again, too.
It’s Hollywood in publishing.No, it’s not enough to be a good writer, nor is it enough to have gifted prose.They want “platforms” now, so they can spin not your book, but YOU as many ways as they can!Yeah, I don’t like this any more than you, this “branding” of an author. But it’s what’s going on now, those who can will pick it up and roll with it.