Monthly Archives: April 2011

Did you Know?

Google’s New Trivia Game Tests Your Knowledge & Your Search Skills

 

Google has just launched a new trivia game – A Google a Day – to the delight and perhaps even to the dismay of trivia lovers. Normally, when you quiz someone about their knowledge of historical facts, literary figures, capitals, sports champions, and other minutiae, the rules are “no cheating.” No looking up the answer in books. And certainly no Googling.

But the Google a Day puzzle encourages you to do just that,use the search engine to find the answer.

via [Read Write Web] Google’s New Trivia Game Tests Your Knowledge & Your Search Skills.

Did you Know?, General, Information, New Books

Truth about Blurbs – via MOBYLIVES

 

 

As publishers, we love getting good blurbs for our authors. At their most basic, they’re a simple marketing tool: for readers not familiar with an author, seeing a quote from another author they’re familiar with offers a way into a world they might not have exposed themselves to otherwise.

But there’s a trick to getting blurbs. It involves fostering the right relationships, leveraging contacts, calling in favors, and sometimes just plain extortion. Often enough, savvy readers understand this and no doubt many of them resist blurbs for just this reason.

Here is Mark Jude Poirier on blurbs:

A blurb from an author I actually know and dislike on a personal level—usually based on their abhorrent behavior in graduate school—means I will turn the book backward on the shelf in the bookstore or hide it under a stack of Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue.

via MOBYLIVES.

Did you Know?, General, Information

Publisher says she can’t afford to sell books on Amazon

A UK publisher’s lament: She loses more than £2 every time one of her books is sold on Amazon.

As Lynn Michell, publisher of the Scottish press Linen Press (“Great writing for women, by women”), explains in a commentary for the Guardian,

Amazon takes 60% of my RRP [cover price] (in the book trade, the bigger the sales outfit, the bigger the discount they demand from the publisher: Amazon 60%; Waterstones 50%; independent bookshop 35%). On a £11.99 book, Amazon’s takings are￡£7.20. Mine are £4.80.

Out of this comes £2.50 to pack and post the book to Amazon, and the author’s royalties on a heavily discounted book reduced to 50p. My writers lose out on an Amazon sale, too. That leaves 82p for Linen Press, but the book cost £4 to produce. So I lose £2.18 on every sale by Amazon.

via MOBYLIVES » Publisher says she can’t afford to sell books on Amazon.

Did you Know?, General, Information, New Books

NYPL Young Lions Announcement | HTMLGIANT

 

 

 

Every year, the New York Public Library award $25k to a writer under 35 based on a book she published the previous year. Here’s the full press release.

Here is this year’s list:

Citrus County by John Brandon (McSweeney’s)

Vida by Patricia Engel (Grove Press)

The Instructions by Adam Levin (McSweeney’s)

Death Is Not an Option by Suzanne Rivecca (W.W. Norton & Company)

Kapitoil by Teddy Wayne (Harper Perennial)

via NYPL Young Lions Announcement | HTMLGIANT.

Did you Know?, General, Information

American Society of Magazine Editors – Complete list of the 2011 National Magazine Awards Finalists

 

 

The New Yorker Leads 2011 Finalists

The 2011 National Magazine Award finalists include 54 titles. Twenty magazines received multiple nominations—led by The New Yorker with 9—and 6 magazines were nominated for the first time.

Aside from The New Yorker, magazines receiving multiple nominations this year are The Atlantic (4 nominations), Esquire (3), GQ (5), Harper’s Magazine (2), Los Angeles (3), Martha Stewart Living (2), Men’s Journal (2), National Geographic (4), New York (6), The New York Times Magazine (6), The Paris Review (2), Real Simple (3), Scientific American (2), Texas Monthly (2), TIME (2), Vanity Fair (2), Virginia Quarterly Review (6), W (3) and Wired (3).

The 6 never-before-nominated titles are Cooking Light, House Beautiful, Lapham’s Quarterly, OnEarth, The Sun and Women’s Health.

Group publishers with multiple nominations include Bloomberg L.P. (2 for Bloomberg Businessweek and Bloomberg Markets); Conde Nast (25 for Conde Nast Traveler, Golf Digest, GQ, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue, W and Wired); Emmis Communications (5 for Los Angeles and Texas Monthly); Hearst Magazines (8 for Esquire; Good Housekeeping; House Beautiful; Marie Claire; O, The Oprah Magazine and Popular Mechanics); Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia (2 for Martha Stewart Living); National Geographic Society (4 for National Geographic); Rodale (3 for Men’s Health, Runner’s World and Women’s Health); Time Inc. (9 for Cooking Light, Essence, Fortune, People, Real Simple and TIME); and Wenner Media (3 for Men’s Journal and Rolling Stone).

via American Society of Magazine Editors – Complete list of the 2011 National Magazine Awards Finalists.