In the Things We Never Needed To Know category… Bowker - the folks in charge of those ISBNs - have done a little analyzing for us. Since I know you’ve been wondering about the average cost of a romance novel and the average number of pages in a science fiction book, well, worry [...]

Publishers Marketplace has a handy feature for those with obsessive/compulsive issues. [Read: all authors.] You type in the ISBN of your book (of anyone’s book or books) and this handy system tells you your daily sales rank on Amazon and B&N. Sure, the numbers don’t really mean anything, but who the [...]

Some people hate chick lit. Some people, like this woman, take that dislike to a near pathological level:
Quite frankly their lurid pink presence on bookshop shelves irritates the hell out of me. This is a fairly irrational hatred but I will attempt to explain why I could cheerfully garrotte the publishers of such novels.
Garrotte? [...]

This week in the writing world has established one thing: lying is the new black. An hour in jail versus 87 abuse-filled days - come on, anyone can make that mistake. I bet it felt like 87 days. Maybe that’s what James Frey meant.
Then there’s the Oprah-doesn’t-like-bad-press issue…
While we [...]

Leave it to Harriet Klausner to highlight one of my fears…
I was looking at Bad Boys in Kilts by Donna Kauffman on the B&N website. Cute cover. I like Donna’s writing. Very excited about this book.
Klausner gave Bad Boys in Kilts 5 stars and a great review. But, the [...]

Number 9 on the Barnes & Noble Contemporary romance Top Ten List is Singled Out by Trisha Ashley. I’ve never heard of the book or the author. What’s strange about the listing - yes, there’s something strange here - is that it has a publication date of January 2006, but it’s listed as a [...]

We all have those days. The ones where we remember exactly where we were when XXX happened. For me, the downing of flight Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland is one of those.
Ken Dornstein lost his brother David on the flight. David left behind notebooks and letters. As a [...]

Finding actual book sales numbers is not an easy task. There are some general figures out there. With the help of Bookscan we can see some specifics. Here were the top 10 books of 2005 with number of units sold:
1. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, J.K. Rowling: 7,024,000
2. A Million [...]

In a conversation over at PBR I registered my dislike for multiple POV in the sense of reading books that introduce the POV of the mailman, dog and potted plant. Having just finished pontificating on this issue, I picked up People and saw this description for The Thin Place by Kathryn Davis:
Tossed [...]

This book has the potential to be pretty funny - 50 Boyfriends Worse Than Yours by Justin Racz. Here’s a peek at the goodies inside:
There’s Thrifty, who thinks taking you out to Chuck E Cheese is charming; Goth Guy, who borrows your make-up; Large Pet Owner, who wears his Python around the house. [...]