Marnie Pehrson explains how to find out how many books you have to sell on Amazon to obtain Amazon best-seller status in the category of your choice. …and, incidentally, how to figure out how many books everybody else is selling in any category you want. Brilliant!
Off-Topic but Funny
http://youtu.be/4krCLa7-F-c This was one of the first 3D movies my wife and I saw together. We liked it. 90 minutes of food jokes, but they keep being funny. 🙂 I watched it last year on a 3D TV and, unlike most 3D movies I see that way, it gave me a headache.  I’m guessing they’ve improved the 3D for the … Read More
Marilyn Monroe’s Reading List
Via GalleyCat and Gothamist: Library Thing has made a list of 261 titles that were a part of Monroe’s personal library. Books on the list include: Out Of My Later Years by Albert Einstein; Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert; The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner; as well as poetry collections from Robert Frost, John Milton, and Edgar Allen … Read More
Will Google Compete with Amazon as a Bookseller?
via TechCrunch:  Google Is Building A Same-Day Amazon Prime Competitor, “Google Shopping Express”: Google is stealthily preparing to launch an Amazon Prime competitor called “Google Shopping Express.” According to one source the service will be $10 or $15 cheaper than Amazon Prime, so $69 or $64 a year and offer same-day delivery from brick-and-mortar stores like Target, Walmart, Walgreens and Safeway … Read More
50 Rudyard Kipling Poems Discovered!
via The Guardian: A discovery in a lighter mood is a stash of comic verse that Kipling wrote on a ship sailing from Adelaide to Ceylon, which is believed to have been read aloud by the author to his fellow passengers. “It was a ship of the P&O / Put forth to sail the sea,” wrote Kipling, going on to … Read More
Twitter Etiquette
Jeff Bullas offers some excellent rules of Tweeting. I found the following two particularly useful: Rule #2 Please, please don’t use more than 3 hashtags in a tweet. If you do use three hashtags, do it sparingly. It’s just annoying. Rule #3 This rule is going to go against what most “tweeps” believe! Don’t strive for followers. Strive for engagement. … Read More
The Harry Potter Books are Getting Brand New Covers. See the First One Here.
Scholastic Reveals New Book Cover For ‘Harry Potter And The Sorcerer’s Stone’. Today, Scholastic revealed the first of seven new book covers for the Harry Potter series. The new trade paperback editions will come out in September, to coincide with the 15th anniversary of the U.S. publication of the series. The cover artist for the books is Kazu Kibuishi, who … Read More
40-Year Old Lost T.S. Eliot Letter Found
via Salon.com. Read about one of T.S. Elliot’s most famous poems here.
Hilarious Reasons Publishers Rejected Harry Potter and Other Classic Best-Sellers
via Cracked.com. And did you know this? Author J.K. Rowling might have approximately all of the money now, but things didn’t start out that way. Once upon a time, Rowling was living off of government assistance, retyping complete copies of the manuscript for Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone to send out to publishers because she was too broke to … Read More
Nolan Bushnell, Founder of Atari, Chooses to Self-Publish His New Book on Steve Jobs
via Nolan Bushnell could easily have gone with a Big 6 publisher, but he preferred to self-publish. Here’s why: But when he tried to find an outlet for the book, How to Find the Next Steve Jobs, Bushnell got frustrated with the traditional publishing houses. It would take up to four years to edit it and publish it, they said. … Read More