Bookish News and Publishing Tidbits 16 March 2012

RIASS stuff:

Coming up: a review of'Mister Toppit, a guest post from Kate Forsyth, an interview with Joel Naoum from Momentum publishing, and interviews with Michael Grant and Richard Hine.

Just a note that I'll be tango dancing my way through Argentina in April, and would love to receive some guest posts to feature during that time. Feel free to drop me a line at readinasinglesitting@gmail.com.

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'Other bookish stuff:

Kyung-sook Shin the first female winner of the Man Asian Literary Prize

Maslows Hierarchy of needs and book characters:

But how do you determine a character's motivation? Take the heroine who wants to win the top spot in a competition. Why is winning so important to her?'Because she wants the prestige. Because she wants the acceptance of her family. A writer could immediately move to the third level of Maslow's hierarchy.

Hey, Harry Potter fans! Have you been to platform 9 3/4?:

Do e-books make it harder to recall what you just'read?

There are some subtle distinctions that favor print [over digital books], which may matter in the long run. In one study involving psychology students, the medium did seem to matter. 'We bombarded poor psychology students with economics that they didn't know,' says [Kate Garland, lecturer in psychology]. Two differences emerged. First, more repetition was required with computer reading to impart the same information. Second, the book readers seemed to digest the material more fully.

Dickens of a job. How the authors literary career was forged in parliamentary tumult:

The future novelist was still a teenager when he started work as a reporter on The Mirror of Parliament, but over the course of five years he covered some of the most turbulent events in Westminsters history.'Verbatim parliamentary accounts were hugely popular at the time, with reports of what was said appearing on the front pages of newspapers or sold separately at a profit.

Fifty Shades of Grey'boosting sales of grey ties?

Why is YA dystopian literature so big right now?''I think it coincides with young people's anxieties about the future, in that it's about a heroic figure triumphing over the odds, but what drew me to write that kind of story was simply that it gave me a big canvas in which to explore love, betrayal and mistakes,' says Author Moira Young.

A fun list of terrible sf/f film remakes

Little, Brown Gives 200,000 James Patterson Books to Armed Forces

Isobel Carmody answers 10 terrifying questions over at Booktopia

Behind the scenes of Back in the Soldiers Arms

Elaborate colour-coding system for editing (or lovers of colour)

Hunger Games helps boost Scholastic sales in third quarter

Best Australian Blogs competition (ahem)

One of the many purposes of libraries: dominoes