Booksquare

No, not from us. Far too lazy to come up with something creative (we were informed that we may devote our remaining hours today to “goofing off”. . .then we were quizzed on royalty calculations; at no point, can the concept of net revenues be considered lighthearted conversation). Our friend Karen Palmer, guest-blogging at The […]

We received the following request from Colleen Mondor and are happy to pass it on: As you may have read in the Bookslut blog last week, (I am a regular contributor over there), I am working with a group in Baton Rouge who are helping children sheltered with their families at Southern University. We have […]

We are cheap and we are easy. Not necessarily in that order. Thus we derived more pleasure than normal from Ian McEwan’s short essay on the travails of giving away free books. Yes, yes, we know, who wouldn’t want a free book? Men, as it turns out: The guys were a different proposition. They frowned […]

We like to think that someone at the Author’s Guild agonized over their decision to sue Google for copyright infringement. And while many will disagree with us, we believe this is a shortsighted reaction, if only because Google is doing something libraries can’t do — creating a modern, digital version of the card catalog. While […]

If you hang around fiction circles long enough, you hear an amusing little fact: romance novels are nothing but female porn. This is, of course, a response to the some of these books have sex in them. Or so we thought. A couple of, uh, brilliant, analytical thinkers have used a dictionary (Webster’s, which we […]

Our friend Kate Rothwell has done the unthinkable: she’s gone and taken a look at book promotion, examining what works and doesn’t work. We agree with one of her readers, Paperback Writer, who notes that tchotchkes aren’t the best use of your publicity dollar. Kate talks specifically about promotion for the romance market, but with […]

In these times of tight budgets, we can appreciate the need for creative fundraising approaches. Thus we point you to a new calendar. Yes, kids, just in time for your early holiday shopping comes “Desperate Librarians”. Twelve months of librarians and books doing things that, apparently, librarians and books do. “It’s probably going to be […]

If we were to be put in charge of the government (and let us assure that nobody would be that brave), two of our initial acts would be to modernize the Patent Office and revisit copyright laws. Probably in that order, but we can be capricious. Google’s plans to digitize the world continue at a […]

The husband adds new fiction to his reading repertoire rarely. Life is too short to turn down the pleasures of yet another lengthy work on recursive scripts. However, when a new author joins the husband’s team, he’s a member for life. Thus, we are bit excited about the new George Saunders book around here (The […]

We like radical notions (especially those that start with, “Maybe we should go out for Chinese food tonight”), but prefer solid plans (“Let’s go out for Chinese food tonight”). A plan to deal with the morass that is book returns certainly would catch our attention, but as we read one publisher’s call to arms, we […]