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Forget the personal trainer. That’s so last year. Anyone who’s anyone has a personal screenwriter. See, it’s not enough to have one, two, three, ten screenwriters toil over a script — the star or director also needs to bring along someone who understands his or her vision. Very important. Of course, being a personal screenwriter […]

Just this past weekend, we found ourself in a bookstore, lost in the Young Adult titles. We remarked, quite casually, to the mother that the YA craze was bigger than we’d believed. She, being the smug type, assured us that we don’t know everything. Well, we know this: Dorchester is stepping out of the YA […]

If, perchance, you’re looking for clues about the legitimacy of your publisher, may we offer up the following: For one thing, some e-mails from Ivery were riddled with misspellings and bad grammar. For another, when Geniesse asked [Martha] Ivery to fix some typos in his manuscript, she told him it wasn’t worth bothering about, since […]

Okay, we don’t know that for sure, but it does remain a fact that editors are human, just like most of the rest of us. MediaBistro, in its continuing series of editor interviews, reminds us of that fact. The series also lets us peek inside the publishing business without the painfully awkward conversational lulls that […]

Let us state for the record that we’d talk about M.J. Rose’s latest marketing idea even if $5 wasn’t being donated to Reading is Fundamental. But, boy, the second we heard the news, the little animated character from the RIF commercials of our childhood danced across our mind. Luckily, we pulled out of Memory Lane […]

At the risk of overstating the obvious, cats don’t need to be entertained. Fed, yes. Scratched, yes. Convinced that going outside is a bad idea, yes. But when push comes to shove, they’re excellent at amusing themselves. Name another creature who turns staring off into space into an art form. Other than writers. But then […]

Not everyone’s memories are appropriate fodder for books. Especially when those memories are relatively humdrum. To wit: It was at Keewaydin, [Michael] Eisner writes, that he learned the value of mutual respect, teamwork and leadership, along with such enduring life lessons as “Help the other fellow” and “Be a fair winner and a good loser.” […]

We lauded the iPod experiment at the South Huntington Public Library in South Huntington, New York when it was announced, and it’s good to know our enthusiasm has been repaid. Library customers are embracing the technology. [Yeah, yeah, yeah, we know. But it’s always good to have alternatives.] Book Standard looks at the growing industry […]

For the three or four of you who aren’t reading the new Emerging Writers Network blog every day, we wanted to point out that the latest interview with literary journal editors has been posted (we will not, however, point out that Dan Wickett is leaving us in the blogging dust; that should go without saying). […]

We were confused way back when Melissa Bank’s The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing was labeled “chicklit”. Naturally our confusion stemmed from our inability to properly connect dots; the book read, to us, like a collection of connected short stories. That the stories were written by a woman and featured a female protagonist did […]