Booksquare

The first annual Quills Awards has come and gone. Except we think there’s going to be a televised special. We will continue to puzzle over the lack of suspense airing a show after the awards have been announced will create*. We swear that sentence made sense before we typed it. We will also puzzle over […]

We will warn you in advance that we are feeling disagreeable this morning*. And we will admit we read Brenda Coulter’s post on romance novels and reviewing while in this mood. She started her post with this statement, quite possibly certain that someone would take exception to her position: The world of published romance writers […]

Rumors have been swirling for some time that Harlequin Enterprises was planning to move into the African American market. In-house development was reportedly proceeding and helpful observers sat on the sidelines, wondering if this was yet another boondoggle. Then the publishing giant (they are more than romance, you know) turned around and did something practical […]

Laila Lalami (known to many as MoorishGirl) has written as essay for Powell’s about the strange relationship American fiction has with poverty. Or rather it’s about the lack of relationship. She asks: And yet, despite the increasing divide between the haves and the have-nots that affects the entire world, where is the talk of the […]

We have never fully understood why the fine folks at National Novel Writing Month chose November for their annual endurance test — clearly someone in charge didn’t fully study the complext negotiations and processes involved with preparing Thanksgiving dinner. After dealing with family issues, who has the energy to write 50,000 words in a single […]

Okay, not really. Others have far more energy for following the Wild World of Awards, and we leave the analysis to them. It is our job to find those nuggets of useful advice in the swirl of news. For example, Ron Hogan continues his guest stint at Galleycat (at what point does a guest become […]

Yesterday, we explored the dead business, today we explore a business that can scare people to death: marketing. Lynn embraces self-promotion with a zeal that is awe-inspiring (also a zeal that would send a weaker constitution to the naps). She looks at what has worked for her, what hasn’t worked, and how promoting her new […]

Remember the olden days when record labels (that’s what they were called back then — records) put the fear of Elvis in us by saying that home taping would bring about the end of the world as we know it? After a week of of considering the results of Book Industry Study Group’s survey, they’re […]

It’s time for yet another Booksquare confession: to this day, we resent the birth of our youngest sister. Not because she was the baby. Nor because she was cuter with a better name. Not even because she’s tall, relatively speaking. Our resentment comes from the fact that she was born at the exact moment that […]

There is a special joy that comes with laziness — in today’s example, we do an interview, but the interviewee does all the work. How cool is that? With our usual mix of guile and deal-sweetening, we convinced Lynn Isenberg to spill about her latest novel, The Funeral Planner. In fact, she had so much […]