This week! Books!
Workers affiliated with HarperCollins’ union went on strike this week for better pay and benefits, including a minimum salary of $50,000 and greater commitments to a diverse workplace.
The billionaire has bought The Twitter and there is Much Happening. Every dispatch from my former colleague Casey Newton’s Platformer newsletter is completely epic and more than worth the price of admission. If you’re among those who fled to Mastodon you can find me here, but let’s be honest folks, that site is appropriately named because it’s going the way of actual mastodons in like two months.
The repercussions of the ruling that blocked Penguin Random House’s acquisition of Simon & Schuster are continuing to set in. Michael Cader has a really excellent analysis in Publishers Lunch this week ($) about Judge Pan’s ruling, the holes she poked in PRH’s expert testimony, and where things go from here. A window could still be open to HarperCollins or Hachette acquiring Simon & Schuster, which would create another behemoth the current size of Penguin Random House.
In writing advice, Lincoln Michel advises removing “trite physicality” in your writing, (which I call “aimless stage direction“), and in honor of NaNoWriMo, Vanessa Zoltan advises you to not just write a novel, but write a bad one.
I came across this article too late to read it this morning, but am absolutely saving it for the weekend: A Brief History of Shipwrecks in Literature.
What do you do if you’ve achieved your dreams early in life, and where do you turn? Veronica Roth was a mega-bestseller at 22 with Divergent, and she has an awesome post about calibrating goals that you will probably find helpful no matter the success you’ve achieved.
This week in bestsellers
Here are the top five NY Times bestsellers in a few key categories. (All links are affiliate links):
Adult print and e-book fiction:
- It Starts With Us by Colleen Hoover
- Going Rogue by Janet Evanovich
- It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover
- Triple Cross by James Patterson
- The Boys From Biloxi by John Grisham
Adult print and e-book nonfiction:
- Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing by Matthew Perry
- Surrender by Bono
- The Philosophy of the Modern Song by Bob Dylan
- I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy
- Cinema Speculation by Quentin Tarantino
Young adult hardcover:
- Long Live the Pumpkin King by Shea Ernshaw
- The First to Die at the End by Adam Silvera
- The Luminaries by Susan Dennard
- One of Us is Lying by Karen M. McManus
- The Ones We Burn by Rebecca Mix
Middle grade hardcover:
- The Hocus Pocus Spell Book by Eric Geron
- Warriors: A Starless Clan: Sky by Erin Hunter
- Wonder by R.J. Palacio
- Odder by Katherine Patterson
- The Complete Cookbook for Young Chefs by America’s Test Kitchen Kids
This week on the blog
In case you missed them, here are this week’s posts:
Don’t forget that you can nominate your first page and query for a free critique on the blog:
And keep up with the discussion in all the places!
And finally, the human body is really the stuff of science fiction, and I really enjoyed this really well-written article about how metabolism works. If, like me, you’ve forgotten a lot of you learned in high school biology (sorry, Mr. Richards!), it’s a really fun read.
Have a great weekend!
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Photo: The Huntington Library, San Marino, CA
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A Brief History of Shipwrecks was indeed interesting, all the way to the book it’s excerpted from, Out of the Depths: A History of Shipwrecks. Unfortunately, not only is it reported as out of stock, it’s also $32.55 (on sale). No ebook on that page, and I didn’t look further.