During the month of April, the Todd Library will join with other libraries nationwide in observance of National Library Week sponsored by the American Library Association. Come join us in the celebration of libraries, librarians and the pleasures, as well as the importance of reading/knowledge. Check out our “Classification Quiz” as well.
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.
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.
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 womenâ€), 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.
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)