News & Notes – 3/08/2025

News & Notes is a weekly Saturday post featuring book- and publishing-related news, links to interesting articles and opinion pieces, and other cool stuff.

NOTE on paywalls: Publisher’s Weekly and The Guardian may require you to sign up for a free account in order to read their content. Both The New York Times and the Washington Post have paywalls, but allow a small number of free articles per month.

Bookish News

• Sale of Ellen Raskin Estate Reveals Unpublished ‘Westing Game’ Sequel (Publishers Weekly)
• Oklahoma Anti-Pornography Bill: What It Means for Romance Writers (Authors Guild) The article is from Feb. 5. The bill (Oklahoma SB593) has not yet been voted on.
• ABA Goes Into Damage Control Mode After Contentious WI2025 Community Forum (Publishers Weekly)
• The Libby Book Award Winners Are Here! (Libby/Overdrive)

Worth Reading/Viewing

• Are We in a Golden Age of Plagiarism? (Grace Lapointe, Book Riot) On ChatGPT, generative AI, and plagiarism.
• 56 Small Tasks to Be Proactive Against Book Censorship in 2025 and Beyond (Kelly Jensen, Book Riot)
• Little Free Library Study Reveals Benefits for Book-Impoverished Communities (Publishers Weekly)
• I have been an AI researcher for 40 years. What tech giants are doing to book publishing is akin to theft (Toby Walsh, The Guardian)
• Black-owned Austin bookstore champions banned books and community (KUT News)
• ‘Books picked me up on bad days’: how reading romance helped Lucy Mangan through grief (The Guardian)

For Writers & Bloggers

• Free Class: Barriers to Writing, and how to get past them. Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author and Writing Excuses cohost Mary Robinette Kowal posted this free 30-minute class on her Patreon in November 2024. I have taken a couple of Kowal’s classes; she is an excellent writing teacher.
• Free Class: Writing Despite Existential Crisis or Despair. Appropriate for the current zeitgeist, I suspect. The 53-minute talk from Feb. 2025 is free on author Sandra Taylor’s Patreon.
• Does anyone care about book blogging anymore? (Overcaffeinated Nerd)
• Let’s Talk Bookish About Reading Challenges (A Dance with Books)

For the free classes, you may have to create a Patreon account, but you don’t have to subscribe to the authors.

Book Lists

• The Once and Future Spring: 10 Marvelous New SFF Books Out March 2025 (Book Riot) It’s a good list, but I don’t understand how whoever put the list together missed Mary Robinette Kowal’s 4th Lady Astronaut book, The Martian Contingency (Mar. 18.)
• The New York Public Library’s Best New Romance List 2025 (SBTB) Sarah at Smart Bitches Trashy Books sat down with Kate Fais of the NYPL for a Q&A about their list of the best new romance books (mostly from 2024.) The article includes the full list of titles.
• Five Witches and Witches to Fall In Love With (Stephanie Burgis, for Reactor)
• 15 New March Romances to Get You Ready for Spring (Book Riot)
• 12 New Mystery, Thrillers, & True Crime for March 2025 (Book Riot)
• The Books Behind the 2025 Academy Award Nominations (Publishers Weekly)

Bookish Quote

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