Authors

It was Almost Gone With the Wind...

NYTimes reports: SOUTHPORT, CT — Long thought to have been burned the way the North set fire to the cotton at Tara, the final typescript of the last four chapters of Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone With the Wind” has turned up in the Pequot Library in this Yankee seaport town. If not quite a spoil of war, the manuscript is a relic of some publishing skirmishes, and it will go on exhibit starting on Saturday, before traveling to Atlanta, Mitchell’s hometown, in time for the 75th anniversary of the novel’s publication in June.

A page from the final draft of a late chapter of “Gone With the Wind.”

The chapters, which contain some of the novel’s most memorable lines — like, “My dear, I don’t give a damn” and “After all, tomorrow is another day” — were given to the Pequot in the early 1950s by George Brett Jr., the president of Macmillan, Mitchell’s publisher, and a longtime benefactor of the library. Some pages from the manuscript were actually displayed at the Pequot twice before — in a 1979 exhibition of Macmillan first editions, also donated by Mr. Brett, and in 1991 for a show honoring “Scarlett,” Alexandra Ripley’s authorized, if not very good, sequel to “Gone With the Wind.” -- Read More

Star of Self-Publishing Signs Book Deal

Amanda Hocking earned around 2 million selling her own books online. Now she has sold the rights to some of her books to a major publisher for another 2 million.

Full story here

Noted Self-Publisher May Be Close to a Book Deal

Amanda Hocking, the darling of the self-publishing world, has been shopping a four-book series to major publishers, attracting bids of well over $1 million for world English rights, two publishing executives said.

Full post at NYT.com

Open letter to Cory Doctorow

A letter to Cory Doctorow asking him to allow purchasers of his ebooks to OWN them.

West Of Here': What Happened To The Frontier?

From NPR's Morning Edition:

In his new book, "West of Here", novelist Jonathan Evison takes readers back to one of the last unexplored territories of the American West: Washington state's Olympic Peninsula ... In essence, the book is a conversation between past and present, between hopeful settlers and modern-day strugglers.

Evison began his research by poking around in the local libraries of towns up and down the Olympic Peninsula: "I found that at all these little libraries in Port Angeles and Sequim and Shelton and all these peninsula towns, you can find all these wonderful little tape-bound manuscripts. Some of them are 15 pages long, some of them are 100 pages long, but they're personalized, first-person accounts of frontier living."

Anonymous author sticks pages of his unpublished novel to lampposts around New York

Anonymous author sticks pages of his unpublished novel to lampposts around New York
It’s certainly a novel way to spread the word about your new book. An anonymous writer is serialising their mysterious new work on lampposts in Manhattan, New York, under the title 'Holy Crap'.
The author, who has stuck pages onto different lampposts around the East Village, will be attracting excitement in literary circles as readers try to work out the plot.

Narnia producer and author Perry Moore dies at 39

Perry Moore, a co-producer of The Chronicles of Narnia film franchise and the author of a novel about a gay superhero, has died aged 39. His 2007 book Hero
won a Lambda Literary Award best novel prize.

Full story at BBC.com

Touchdown at the Library

From the website of Jamie Ford, author of The Hotel On the Corner of Bitter and Sweet.

"Where were you on Superbowl Sunday? I was at...the Seattle Central Library. Yes, months ago I agreed to an event on February 6th, not realizing I was going to end up head-to-head with that abstract pseudo-holiday dedicated to taped-knuckles and million-dollar commercials, with its 5-hour pregame show, and the copious consumption of hot-wings and guacamole.

At first I feared it'd be one of those sparsely attended affairs—just me, the janitor, and a few of our closest friends. But to my surprise (and rapt delight) nearly 150 people showed up, not counting the hundreds of others just gettin' their library on, on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

All I can say is, God bless a literate America."

Writer of Redwall Series, Dies at 71

From the NYT

Brian Jacques, Writer of Redwall Series, Dies at 71
By MARGALIT FOX
Published: February 9, 2011

He was a longshoreman and a long-haul trucker; a merchant mariner and a railway fireman; a boxer, a bus driver and a British bobby. But it wasn’t until he became a milkman that Brian Jacques found his métier.......Read more here

How Authors Move Their Own Merchandise

How Authors Move Their Own Merchandise
The expense incurred by giveaways is often money well spent. Such freebies generate reader goodwill and provide an author with more Facebook friends as well as a larger email list (useful for publicizing the next book and giving the author's agent a bargaining chip when negotiating a new contract with a publisher). Most important, they may goose preorders. Particularly for up-and-coming authors, advance purchases "get the attention of publishers, which may get them to put more muscle behind the book," said Anne-Lise Spitzer, the creative marketing director for Knopf.

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