Forbes.com takes a look at Nora Roberts. Being a business-oriented magazine, they focus on the numbers and the fairly well-known story of how Nora Roberts became Nora Roberts. Since that part of the article could be skimmed, we allowed our attention to linger on the packaging aspect of the publishing business. It happens more often than you think, the repositioning of authors. Sometimes it’s due to declining or disappointing sales plaguing a talented author. Sometimes it’s the (in our estimation) bizzare belief that audiences cannot accept new directions from authors (have we ever mentioned that we think it’s the marketing […]

If, as we suspect, bestseller lists are some sort of symbiotic relationship between publishers and book review editors, then reviews seem to be the same. Movie reviews seem to exist for the pulling of out-of-context quotes for one sheets. Does anyone ever really walk up to those posters and say, “Hey, XXX loved the film, and despite his liberal use of ellipses, I’m so there!” We doubt it, but we also doubt that cover quotes on books truly sway many readers. Someday we’ll get off our lazy couch and do some research on this. In the meantime, we can have

Beatrice unknowingly taps into our unofficial Band of the Week while examining one of our favorite subjects: Wal-Mart and books. Yes, we know, it’s hard to believe, but they’re doing it again, this time with the new George Carlin book (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/140130134/alttags-20). According to their representative*: “We did not order this book,” says Karen Burk, a Wal-Mart spokeswoman. “It was shipped to us in error by one of our distributors.” Publishing sources say it’s unlikely that Wal-Mart — known to skip books that might be deemed politically or religiously provocative — would have ordered the book in the first place. But

One of our secret vices in life is lists. We adore logical groupings of information. Give us a countdown and we get very excited. We have done things we don’t want to admit to in attempts to find out what is at Number One. Just as the Top Forty is a bit of a myth (this, by the way, explains how so many people knew about U2 before Rick Dees), so are New York Times bestsellers. Though the exact methodology for determining the list is a supposedly closely guarded secret, one can be assured the chart toppers aren’t based on

First, we suggest you sit down because we are going to shock you. A major United States newspaper has managed to publish an entire article about romance novels without mentioning the B-phrase. In fact, if we had stuck with just the Yahoo! feed, we would have awarded the article our extremely rare Responsible Journalism plaque. Alas…the USA Today website features a caption with a gratitious B-phrase. Such is our good humor today, Ms. Cranky will not complain. We deem the article acceptable reading for all ages and genders. Strong, sexy women save the day, get their man

We thought, what the heck, this John Sayles interview is short, we’re playing with a few short stories…besides, it’s not like we’re eager to hit the freeway for another day of meetings. If we’d followed the advice of Ryoko (the cat who informs us when we’re not living up to her expectations — she talks a lot), we would have overlooked this article. And that would be a shame because we will now spend the rest of the day in the bubble known as Hollywood: My short stories are immersions into very specific worlds. There’s this idea implicit in my