Alvah's Books

Public Provides Giggles; Bloggers Get the Book Deal

By Jenna Wortham

After Duncan Birmingham, a comedy screenwriter in Los Angeles, got one too many holiday cards featuring miserable-looking pets wearing fake reindeer antlers, he realized the photos were great material for a blog.

Mr. Birmingham started Pets Who Want to Kill Themselves in early January, uploaded the first entry and asked readers to contribute. Within days, visitors were supplying him with snapshots of bulldogs in bunny costumes and cats wearing wigs. The blogosphere noticed – and so did the publishing world. Within a week, he was contacted by editors and literary agents. By the second month, he said, he had sold a book based on the photos to Three Rivers Press, an imprint at Crown Publishing Group, for “enough money to buy a Lincoln Town Car” – with change left over.

To read the rest of the article, click the headline.

Last night I followed all the tweets on Twitter concerning this sales ranking controversy at Amazon.com. All I can say was that feathers were very ruffled. To learn more about what happened, below is the article from Publishers Weekly:

 Amazon Says Glitch to Blame for “New” Adult Policy

By Rachel Deahl & Jim Milliot — Publishers Weekly, 4/12/2009 5:49:00 PM

A groundswell of outrage, concern and confusion sprang up over the weekend, largely via Twitter, in response to what authors and others believed was a decision by Amazon to remove “adult” titles from its sales rankings. On Sunday evening, however, an Amazon spokesperson said that a “glitch” had occurred in its sales ranking feature that was in the process of being fixed. The spokesperson added that there was no new policy regarding “adult” titles. As of Monday morning, a number of titles affected by the glitch were still without sales rankings. No one at Amazon was available this morning to discuss when the problem might be fixed or what caused the glitch. 

 To read more about the Amazon ranking debacle go to Publishers Weekly.

Recession Fuels Readers’ Escapist Urges

By MOTOKO RICH

In a recession, what people want is a happy ending. 

At a time when booksellers are struggling to lure readers, sales of romance novels are outstripping most other categories of books and giving some buoyancy to an otherwise sluggish market.

Harlequin Enterprises, the queen of the romance world, reported that fourth-quarter earnings were up 32 percent over the same period a year earlier, and Donna Hayes, Harlequin’s chief executive, said that sales in the first quarter of this year remained very strong. While sales of adult fiction overall were basically flat last year, according to Nielsen Bookscan, which tracks about 70 percent of retail sales, the romance category was up 7 percent after holding fairly steady for the previous four years.

To read the rest of the article go to The New York Times  book section.

For a Brooklyn Tale, and Its Author, a Second Chance at a First Impression

By Eric Konigsberg

So woefully forgotten are L. J. Davis’s novels of Brooklyn that not even he has copies on hand in his apartment. Boxes of the unsold books, along with the rest of his collection 5,000 or so volumes by other authors, were relegated to storage two years ago, when Mr. Davis sold the Boerum Hill town house that had been his home since 1965 and moved into a postwar condominium around the corner.

To read the rest of the article go to The New York Times Book section.