B+ Reviews / Book Reviews / Recommended Readschildren's book / gender bias / picture books / reading1 Comments
From New York Times bestselling and Newbery Honor–winning author Shannon Hale and award-winning illustrator Tracy Subisak, comes a zany picture book that pokes fun at overly gendered notions of “boy books” and “girl books” and celebrates the pleasure of a good book. Stanley’s thrilled for bookmobile day—until the old man ... more >
Publishing Newsbook clubs / gender bias / parenting / reading / Twitter6 Comments
Twitter app brings free NFL games to Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, and the Xbox One – Twitter is branching out (and trying to cash in) by having a version of its app on Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, and Microsoft’s Xbox One, where it’s all about live streaming (although you can ... more >
Publishing NewsAmazon / Apple / bookstores / customer service / gender bias / OED / security / sleep11 Comments
Amazon’s customer service backdoor – A very frightening account of how customer service can give someone trying to get your personal information, including a credit card number, a “backdoor,” as long as they have enough details (name, email address) to provide to the customer service agent. One commenter notes that he ... more >
Publishing Newsemployment / employment law / gender bias / maternity leave / paternity leave / photography / publishing4 Comments
Homme de Plume: What I Learned Sending My Novel Out Under a Male Name – A fascinating and frustrating piece by Catherine Nichols on her experience sending out her book manuscript under her own name and under a man’s name. Not only did she get more responses with a male pseudonym, ... more >
Publishing NewsEbooks / gender bias / marketing / smartphones / wattpad10 Comments
Wattpad Year in Review – 2013 – Wattpad had an impressive year. If converted to paper, they claim the totality of Wattpad stories in 2013 would weigh more than 1,000 elephants. Among the amazingness, they report that 7,544,914 pieces of fan fiction were uploaded to Wattpad, and material was available ... more >
Publishing Newsbook prices / book-covers / copyright / Fantasy Romance / gender bias / Smashwords3 Comments
Smashwords: New Smashwords Survey Helps Authors Sell More eBooks – Mark Coker shares some Smashwords data with the public. How much of this can be extrapolated to overall sales is unknown. Some interesting points include that the #1 bestselling book outsells the #500 by 37 times in total revenue; longer ... more >