Signet is so over Cassie Edwards. From the Boston Globe (”Romance writer, publisher split up over plagiarism claims,” by Hillel Italie):

NEW YORK—Romance writer Cassie Edwards and publisher Signet Books have decided to break up after allegations emerged in January that in she lifted passages in several of her books from other sources.

“Signet has conducted an extensive review of all its Cassie Edwards novels and due to irreconcilable editorial differences, Ms. Edwards and Signet have mutually agreed to part ways,” the publisher said in a statement Friday.

“Cassie Edwards novels will no longer be published with Signet Books. All rights to Ms. Edwards’ previously published Signet books have reverted to the author.”

Remember Thomas Kohnstamm? Well, he’s in the news again. His claims that Lonely Planet guides are not entirely trustworthy have irked a number of people, including, er, Lonely Planet. On their site, they address his charges, although they respond to one of his biggest complaints in a fairly vague manner:

5. Thomas claims he was not paid enough by Lonely Planet to do the job without shortcuts. While we ask a lot of our authors, we lead the industry in the fees we pay, and are committed to a yearly review of author fees. 

Yes, but what if no one in the travel-guide industry pays their correspondents enough to do a thorough job? Wouldn’t that be an interesting story? (And hardly unimaginable: many freelancing gigs pay so poorly that they rely on the notion of writers doing the work for free/for fun/for their resumes….)

There’s plenty of chatter at the Lonely Planet forums.

BBC, which owns 75% of Lonely Planet, reports on the foofaraw (”Lonely Planet rebuts ‘fake’ claim“), and–hey, this is interesting:

Other travel writers, while not endorsing Mr Kohnstamm’s methods, said he was reporting genuine failures in the travel-writing industry - that writers are poorly paid, have to cover their own costs, and were expected to check a vast amount of detail.

As for myself, when Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? came across my desk, I had a strong feeling of deja vu, given that I had recently published a short story about a Hunter S. Thompson-wannabe travel writer (”If You Should Have Any Need at All“) in the Chicago Reader last December.

I’ve avoided mentioning the latest Harry Potter news–primarily because my fingers fight back when I try to type “J. K. Rowling”–but I must force them to obey. If you haven’t been following it, Rowling and Warner Brothers are suing tiny publisher RDR Books for RDR’s plan to publish Steven Vander Ark’s book, The Harry Potter Lexicon, based on his website of the same name.

RDR claims they’re operating in the long-lived tradition of literary companions, while Rowling calls it “wholesale theft.” RDR says they’ve paid the author a tiny advance for a small print run; Rowling clearly feels it sets a dangerous precedent.

Reasonable people, of course, can disagree on these matters, although reasonable people also might feel that a billionaire author could find some accommodation with a thousandaire publisher and an author who is quite clearly one of the author’s biggest fans. Pottermania would have happened without The Harry Potter Lexicon, of course, but it’s precisely that kind of effort that helped the phenomenon along.

But this besieged billionaire now finds herself forced to leave her castle and defend her very right to earn a living. The stress of fending off earnest lexicographers has forced the juggernaut of youth fantasy fiction to a standstill (”Rowling Testifies against Lexicon Author,” by Anemona Hartocollis, New York Times):

It has been so difficult, she said, that her normal writing life has been all but paralyzed by “stress and heartache.”

“It has really decimated the demands of my creative work for the last month,” she testified, at least once stoically holding back tears as she talked about the Potter books as if they were her children.

“You lose the threads, you worry if you’ll ever be able to pick them up again,” she said.

Really, Ms. Hartocollis, stoically?

And now Ms. Rowling is making Mr. Vander Ark, a former librarian, cry (”Sued by Harry Potter’s Creator, Lexicographer Breaks Down on the Stand,” by Anemona Hartocollis, NYT):

Then he burst out crying. “Sorry,” he said, regaining his composure. “It’s been difficult because there’s been a lot of criticism, obviously, and that was never the intention.”

It was an emotional culmination to three hours of testimony in which Mr. Vander Ark gushed over Ms. Rowling and her work like the devoted fan that he claimed to be, and disarmingly preceded almost every answer to a question with an “Um.”

One of RDR’s lawyers makes a reasonable guess as to why Rowling is really pulling out the hammer and tongs (”Rowling to Testify in Trial Over Potter Lexicon,” by Motoko Rich, NYT):

David Hammer, another lawyer representing RDR Books, said he believed that Ms. Rowling was acting out of vanity. “She wants to be the only one to write this encyclopedia about Harry Potter,” he said. “She’s determined to write it, and she doesn’t want competitors.”

But, personally, based on the following remark, I think it boils down to aesthetics:

She also objected to what she called the book’s “facetious asides,” like a comment about whether Hagrid could fit into a booth at McDonald’s.

“I think it’s dire,” she said. “I think it’s atrocious.”

Arnost Lustig has won the Franz Kafka Prize. Details are sketchy, but it is reported that the Czech will take home a $10,000 check (or, if you prefer, cheque). You might think that there’s some favoritism at work here, but, in the eight-year history of the prize, Lustig is only the second Czech to win it.

The prize, though prestigious, carries with it a unique burden. Previous winners report recurring nightmares of living in a bureaucratic and impersonal world, and also persistent sensations of having undergone unsavory transmogrifications. But, even for prize-winning authors, writing can sometimes be a trial.

Just got news of Hard Case Crime’s January 2009 title:

In an e-mail blast, publisher Charles Ardai shared a few facts about this reprint’s provenance:

…this is by far the rarest of all Block’s books. He wrote it under a pseudonym he never used before or since, it’s never been published under his real name (or this title), and he couldn’t even locate a copy of it himself for thirty years!

From the sample chapter:

The taxi, one headlight out and one fender crimped, cut through downtown Tampa and headed into Ybor City. Turner sat in the back seat with his eyes half closed. He was a tall, thin ramrod of a man who was never tense and yet never entirely relaxed. His hair was the color of damp sand, his eyes steel gray. His lips were thin and he rarely smiled. He was not smiling now.

The stub of a cigarette burned between the second and third fingers of his right hand. The fingers were yellow-brown from the thousands and thousands of cigarettes which had curled their tar-laden smoke around them. He looked at the cigarette, raised it to his lips for a final drag. The smoke was strong. He rolled down the window and flipped the butt into the street.

I seem to remember a book written by 13 authors…oh, yes: Naked Came the Manatee (1997). And, in fact, Carl Hiaasen, Elmore Leonard, et al appropriated the concept from a practical joke called Naked Came the Stranger (1969). Now there’s an Internet start-up that’s hoping to turn a hoax and a lark into a business model. According to Publishers Weekly (”WEbook Launches Collaborative Book-Writing Site,” by Lynn Andriani), WEbook “is hoping to do for novel writing what American Idol did for music and what Wikipedia did for information.”

Essentially, WEbook hopes that people will come to its site to write books and then vote on which ones should be published.

Within the site, there are dozens of (mostly nonfiction) subject areas where members can start writing. Members can designate their work as "private," which allows them to keep the rights and share it only with their friends, or make it "public," which is where WEbook makes its money: if a book garners enough votes from the WEbook community, WEbook copyedits, typesets and publishes the book, giving the author and contributors a 5% royalty on sales.

Their first book, Pandora, a thriller with 17 authors (but 34 total contributors), came out last month. Is it any good? Sample chapters are available at WEbook. Sample paragraphs:

Pandora took a deep breath. "You know I love you, but I can’t be with someone I don’t trust," she exhaled. "Is there something I should know?"

Chris shook his head in disbelief. How could the woman resting in the next room, a woman he’d only met twice, know something that only five other people in the world knew? How had she divined the secret Chris had carefully guarded since he was eighteen? What the hell was her secret?

Oh look, here’s another one: Naked Came the Phoenix (2001).

According to recent polls by Harris Interactive, Americans’ favorite genre is crime fiction and their favorite book is the Bible. I’m sure Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great, 2007) could make a one-liner out of that, but I’ll just posit my suspicion that not everyone who picked the Bible has read it cover to cover.

Here’s the rest of the list:

#1 - The Bible
 
#2 - Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell
 
#3 - Lord of the Rings (series), by J.R.R. Tolkien
 
#4 - Harry Potter (series), by J.K. Rowling
 
#5 - The Stand, by Stephen King
 
#6 - The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown
 
#7 - To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
 
#8 - Angels and Demons, by Dan Brown
 
#9 - Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand

#10 - Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger

The Harris site has breakdowns by gender, race/ethnicity, generation, political party, region, and education. Interestingly, Democrats, Republicans, and Independents all agree on Gone with the Wind as the second-best book.

Also in the New York Times (”In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop,” by Matt Richtel), a report on bloggers who are dying on (or near) the job. I know the feeling: tightness in the chest, shortness of breath….

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

I really don’t mean to make light of this. Fortunately, the demands of book blogging aren’t anything like those of tech bloggers. But I’m sure many of us can relate to the feeling that, in this wired world, it can be hard to turn work off. So let’s all take this as a wake-up call, so we don’t end up like this guy:

"I haven’t died yet," said Michael Arrington, the founder and co-editor of TechCrunch, a popular technology blog. The site has brought in millions in advertising revenue, but there has been a hefty cost. Mr. Arrington says he has gained 30 pounds in the last three years, developed a severe sleeping disorder and turned his home into an office for him and four employees. "At some point, I’ll have a nervous breakdown and be admitted to the hospital, or something else will happen."

"This is not sustainable," he said.

And now, I’m going out for some fresh air. Just as soon as I finish blogging and updating Booklist Online.

(Thanks, Donna!)

Yesterday, the New York Times reported on a real book with a fake author, but there’s no scandal involved. Last fall, as part of a storyline on All My Children, perfume magnate Kendall Hart decided to try her hand at a little novel writing. Two months later, the book, Charm!, was published on the TV show–and in real life, too. It’s sold over 100,000 copies to date. And, in a few days, you’ll be able to buy a perfume called “Charm,” too.

Amazingly, this synergistic ploy is a copycat (”The Book Is Real Enough. It’s the Author That’s Fake,” by Joanne Kaufman):

These are not the first instances of daytime drama brand extensions, according to Lynn Leahey, editorial director of Soap Opera Digest. Indeed, Kendall’s own mother, Erica Kane, who is played by Susan Lucci, produced the novel "Having it All" in 1997. It too was published in real life by Hyperion.

CBS has pulled the same stunt. In 2002, "Guiding Light" offered "Lorelei’s Guiding Light: An Intimate Diary," "which filled in the blanks of a character’s life during a period when she wasn’t with the show," said Ms. Leahey. In 2006, "As the World Turns" came out with "Oakdale Confidential," which dealt with the past of a character, Katie Peretti, who was credited on the cover as co-author.

Perhaps Ms. Peretti was a role model for Marcie Walsh, the police department receptionist on ABC’s "One Life to Live," who two years ago was credited with "The Killing Club," a best-selling mystery that was published by Hyperion. (The actual author was the soap’s head writer at the time, Michael Malone. Later, a "One Life to Live" character known as Hayes bought a copy of "The Killing Club" on an episode of the show and began bumping off members of the local populace based on methods used in the book.)

The 2008 Pulitzer Prize winners have been announced. Here are the books:

Fiction

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz (Riverhead)

History

What Hath God Wrought, by Daniel Walker Howe (Oxford Univ.)

Biography

Eden’s Outcasts, by John Matteson (Norton)

Poetry

Time and Materials, by Robert Hass (Ecco/HarperCollins)

Poetry

Failure, by Philip Schultz (Harcourt)

General Nonfiction

The Years of Extermination, by Saul Friedlander (HarperCollins)