All posts by trav

At the heart of it all, I’m a fan. A fan of books and bookstores. A fan of fiction and non-fiction. A fan of authors and publishers. And most of all I’m a fan of great conversations sparked by books. All that to say - I really need more bookshelves.

Vote now!

The Quills list has been released. This book award show is televised and sponsored/supported by all the major media conglomerates.

Basically everybody gets to vote on their favorite books and the books with the most votes wins. You can vote for your faves here. The polls close on September 30th.
The site also shows videos from last year’s award show. Here’s a list of the 2005 Quills winners.

The 2006 Quills will be shown on NBC, October 10th from New York City.

Author arrested

Like many in Birmingham I went to the Joshilyn Jackson signing Between, Georgia, at the Alabama Booksmith, back in July. This was about three weeks before Jackson was ARRESTED on August 10th!!!

Was Jackson a criminal mastermind? Was Jackson really a raving madperson posing as a sunday school teaching soccer mom that writes books on the side to help ends meet?
Nope. Jackson’s crime was that her “papers were not in order”.

Sounds like something from a Hogan’s Heroes episode doesn’t it?

Continue reading Author arrested

Six degrees of…

There’s a new online tool for tracking down authors similar to those near and dear to your heart. Just type in your fave scribe into the The Literature Map and it will form a breathing author cloud around that person. By measuring proximity, you can judge who this program things you’ll enjoy most.

Thanks to Book, Inq. and Books, Words, and Writing for letting everyone know about this.

Book Break-Beats

Apparently, some big name authors are tossing in soundtracks with their books now?!?!? Somehow I’ve missed this trend, but GalleyCat pulls it all together from WSJ articles and blogs.

Folks like James Patterson, Michael Connelly,Lemony Snicket and Bret Easton Ellis are tossing in the tunes with their books. Most of the cd’s are just collections of songs we’ve all heard but may be “inspired by” the book? Some of the authors offer “listening lists” on their sites too.
I’m betting we’ll see more of this cross-media manipulation as behemoth companies gobble up all the music and book companies under one roof. It’d be a boon if they could use their books to sell cd’s and cd’s to sell their books.

We’ll just have to wait and see if this trend will succeedor flop.