News & Notes is a weekly Saturday post featuring book- and publishing-related news, links to interesting articles and opinion pieces, and other cool stuff
Book News
- Federalist Paper #2 surfaces. The John Jay manuscript, thought missing since the 1890s, was discovered among the documents of the Brooklyn Historical Society. (New York Times)
- BEA weathers the move to Chicago, plus a heads-up on next year’s BEA. (Publishers Weekly)
- Amazon introduces VoiceView for Kindle, to improve accessibility for visually-impaired customers. It will be available on the Paperwhite; Amazon had already developed it for Fire tablets. It will require an adapter that plugs into the mini-USB port. Amazon has also added the customer-requested OpenDyslexic font to the Paperwhite’s font library.
- Goodreads Giveaways now includes Kindle books (Goodreads blog)
- Audible Users Can Now File Share (GalleyCat) I suspect there are some restrictions that the article doesn’t mention, but if you’re an Audible user, it’s worth checking out.
Worth Reading
- BEA 2016: Children’s Breakfast Speakers Agree: Books Change Lives. (Publishers Weekly) The speakers were Jamie Lee Curtis, Dav Pilkey, Sabaa Tahir, and Gene Luen Yang.
Great Blog Posts
- How to get the originality fairy to bless your posts (Becca and Books) (Many thanks to Got My Book for steering me to this post in last Sunday’s wrap-up!)
- How do you deal with comments? Lory of The Emerald City Book Review discusses replying to comments, visiting back, and various comment systems (WordPress, Disqus, etc.) The comments are worth reading, too. (Hmm, that was kind of meta.)
- Ever wonder what Hessian boots are? Fangs, Wands, and Fairy Dust explores the history of the Regency era’s favorite boot.
For Writers & Bloggers
- How Writers Ruin Their Amazon Links (Yes, You Probably Do It Too). And it’s not just writers. Bloggers need to pay attention to this too. Shorten those Amazon links! (Gwendolyn Kiste)
- Enter the “Book Studio 16 Shelfie Contest” held by HarperCollins. Submit a shelfie video of no more than 2 minutes.
Book & Movie Announcements
- Lisa Kleypas announced her 3rd Ravenels book in a video on her Facebook page… and if you’re a Wallflowers fan, you’re going to love this! There’s a link to the teaser pages, too. (Watch the video before you read the teaser.) I’m so excited about this one, I’ve already preordered it—and it won’t be out until February 2017!
- George R. R. Martin has released another excerpt from The Winds of Winter on his website. He will also be appearing as Guest of Honor at Balticon, the Baltimore-area SF/F convention, at the end of May.
Awesome Lists
- 10 Weird and Wonderful Words about Literature and Reading (Interesting Literature)
- The Top 100 Children’s Books on Goodreads (Goodreads) I’ve read 36 of them. It’s a good list.
- The Top 100 Young Adult Books of All Time (Goodreads) is heavily slanted toward the last 10 years, and has some overlap with the Top 100 Children’s Books list, but there are some terrific book suggestions here. I’ve read only 12 of them so far.
Really Cool / Just for Fun
Who is Sherlock Holmes (a TED-Ed Talk by Neil McCaw)
Bookish Quote
C. S. Lewis quote on pillow, by Books & Cupcakes (available on Redbubble)
Isn’t this gorgeous? You can get the same design on phone and laptop skins, mugs, totes, and as posters or prints. (Design by Books & Cupcakes; available through Redbubble)
That’s it for this week!
Steph from fangswandsandfairydust
Thanks for linking to my post!
Lark_Bookwyrm
You’re welcome! 🙂
Got My Book
Thanks for the Goodreads lists. I’ve read 40 of the Children’s ones but only 26/27 of the YA ones (there is one that sounds really familiar but I don’t remember for sure if I read it).
And I hope the Becca and Books article helps you. I’m finding that writing good titles is harder than it sounds. It can take me twice as long to come with a (lameish) title as it does to write & code the whole darn post.
Lark_Bookwyrm
I’m struggling with the title thing, too. I mean, when you’re reviewing a book, should the book title be in the post title? For searchability, if nothing else?
Got My Book
When I started, I was using a simple fill in the blank format: TITLE by AUTHOR [Review] – with any information about interviews etc added in there also. That’s what I would like to still be doing, it is simple and doesn’t require any thought.
I am now experimenting with – CATCHY POST TITLE: BOOK TITLE | Review + BONUS STUFF
Not only do I have to consider what might make someone click on it, I have to get the most important stuff in the first 55 characters or so (since that is all that Google shows)
Grrr
Got My Book recently posted…text: Yes/No? Blocking gifs on Goodreads | My Musings + Tutorial
Lark_Bookwyrm
That’s what I’m trying to do, too, but honestly, I can’t always think of a catchy post title. I didn’t know that about Google; that’s useful to know.
Lola
I am curious about Goodreads opening their giveaways for kindle books as well, i think this will be great for authors who can’t afford to ship paperbacks or don’t have paperback. So looking forward to see how that will take off.
I saw lots of posts from people at BEA on social media this week, wish I could attend one year. But I am afraid of planes, so that’s going to be difficult.
I always shorten my amazon links and these for Goodreads and B&N too. Simply because I hate the long links and figured they contained some information that wasn’t necessary, so i figured where t cut them off and always do so. Interesting post, I didn’t realize that about the qid part.
Lola recently posted…My To-Be Read List #21: the winner
Lark_Bookwyrm
I usually shorten my links too, removing the search information and sticking just to the actual book page URL. But I think a lot of people don’t realize.
I’m not sure how I feel about the Kindle giveaways on Goodreads. On one hand, it will open it up to people who can’t easily ship print books for one reason or another. OTOH, as more and more books get added, it’s getting harder to wade through all the stuff I’m not interested in to find the stuff I am interested in.
Stephanie
I love the C.S. Lewis quote pillow! Really awesome Blog Post links as well this week. Part of the reason I wanted to blog as a hobby was to have a creative outlet….and then I find myself really struggling to exercise that creativity. I need to do a better job of giving myself the time to exercise those atrophied muscles, lol.
I will definitely check out the possibility of sharing Audible books – that would be awesome! I’d like to be able to do that with ALL my kindle books as well.
Stephanie recently posted…Saturday in the Garden | TV Hangovers Lead to Reading Challenge Success
Lark_Bookwyrm
I struggle with the creativity part, too. So many bloggers seem to have this breezy, clever style of writing, including their use of catchy titles, and I’m just not great at that. But I keep working on developing a more creative style that fits who I am… even if I haven’t quite found it yet.
I enjoyed your Saturday post. Good news about the turtle. And don’t worry–when you finish the Percy Jackson series, you can head right into The Heroes of Olympus series (and you even get more Percy.) Of course, when you finish those, you’ll be in the same boat as the rest of us: reading the Magnus Chase series and Trials of Apollo series as they come out.
Stephanie
I’m glad you mentioned The Heroes of Olympus series! I just noticed that it existed and was wondering how it measured up to the PJ series. Glad to hear it is likely worth diving into to assuage the depression of finishing Percy Jackson!
Stephanie recently posted…Saturday in the Garden | TV Hangovers Lead to Reading Challenge Success
Lark_Bookwyrm
Don’t be thrown by the fact that there’s not much of Percy in the first Heroes of Olympus book–you get a lot of him later on. 🙂 Yes, definitely worth reading. Initially, I missed Percy’s first-person narration, but you’ll see why it wouldn’t work for this series; you need to follow too many people and they’re not always together.