RIASS stuff:
Review: Possessed by Niki Valentine'Rating: 
And you wonder why Im so cynical at such a'tender age.
Review: Big Sky River by Linda Lael Miller'Rating: 'Cowboys, chicken farms and a hero called Boone. You know you want to read this.
Review: Barefoot by Elin Hilderbrand''Rating: 'Lots of drama in this one, and you may need tissues.
Other bookish stuff:
23 Amazon KDP authors each sold over 250K copies of their books in 2012
How to raise the stakes in the first fifty pages of your novel'Another way of thinking of stakes is in terms of the'or-else'factor. The hero will achieve his objective ' or else what? What bad thing will happen if he fails? If the protagonist and his crew don't figure out a way to deflect an incoming asteroid, the'or else'is that Earth will be destroyed.
Do book critics in Australia need to pick up their game?'Thin criticism turns reviewing into infomercial, allows established writers merely to churn out material, reinforces industry nepotism, and denies new authors the reception they need to flourish. The result: a watery literary field.
The treachery of translators'The lesson I learned from Adair, a really serious translator, is this: You can't get it right, so the only thing you can do is make it better.
An interview with Newbery winner KA Applegate'Applegate notes, she recently found a scrap of paper, something she had written a few years ago. On it were the words, Should I give up on Ivan or not? She says, I was at one of those many places you get to in a book, where I say, I just can't make it work. For some reason this piece of paper stuck around. I'm going to have it framed.
The future of the author-publisher relationship'The future I would like to propose is one in which the publisher truly serves as a partner that seeks to empower its authors, and freely shares as much knowledge and information as it has available. Those of us who have worked in publishing know that publishers are rarely forthcoming with authors about marketing plans or sales data, and we hold back information'we don't want to open up 'a can of worms.' But this mindset can't survive in a future where each author expects full transparency and up-to-date information from business partners, not to mention trust and respect. Authors shouldn't be told they are responsible for marketing and promotion while not be given all the tools needed to be successful at the task, but that is exactly what is happening today. Authors will have too many options to accept such a situation in the future.
Courier Prime: a new font for screenwriters
American Indians in childrens literature published between 1955-1965
25 hard truths about writing and publishing'It's easy to believe that'other books'are your competition. They are in a very'loose, very'generalsense, sure ' certainly at the stage of acquisition, anyway. But readers aren't a one-book-a-year type. They read lots of books. Their attention is finite and they can only pick up so many books, but generally speaking'my book'is not competing with'your book. No, what you're competing against is'everything else that's not a book. Movies! Television! Games!
Follow us on Blog Lovin'