Is Barnes & Noble high-pressuring writers to link their sites to its online store? Our friends at GalleyCat have the story, following up on SmartBitches, Trashy Books. Somebody at one publisher is even said to have emailed writers: “I’m not exaggerating when I say they WILL NOT ORDER the book unless their site is listed.” Ouch! Now here’s a special e-book angle. When happens when interbook linking is common? Will B&N---and Amazon!---seek special favors? And do some very nasty things to avoid disintermediation? In fairness to B&N: GalleyCat reports: “One editor writes in to...

That’s the headline over a Telegraph article by Andrew Keen. Read and, if you’d like, rant back in our comments area. As a debut novelist published in E and P, I’m wondering if my soul is intact. Did the trade paperback edition save it? Or must I tell Twilight Times Books to kill off the e-book edition? Keen’s actual words: “The traditional book is the most physical of things, a text to be bent and fingered and written on and imprinted with human signatures. Something to be physically loved. The ebook revolution changes all that. In the...

The Solomon Scandals, my Washington suspense novel from Twilight Times Books, will be discussed tonight at 8 p.m. Eastern Daylight in a global OPAL chatcast. Got any questions for me in advance? Email them to Tom Peters, the librarian serving as moderator---who can choose. Tom will give away five free nonDRMed copies of the book (ePub format), at the end of the chatcast. He’ll pick the winners. Maybe for the best question? Scandals is also available as a trade paperback. At any time, blind people and other persons with reading-related disabilities...

The Solomon Scandals, my Washington novel published by Twilight Times Books as a paperback and e-book, will be discussed 8 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday, July 28, a week later than scheduled earlier. Tom Peters, a trained academic librarian, will interview me for  Online Programming for All Libraries and also accept questions from others. Anyone can participate. See a quick description of the book (obsolete date listed) and how-to details for the chat. The latest Scandals review is from Brad’s Reader. If you’d like to mention your own book in the comments section of this post, be my guest. Links welcome, including...

The venerable Trover Shop on Pennsylvania Avenue is closing after 51 years of selling to both the famous and obscure on Capitol Hill. Only a card shop, at another location, will be left. Hits me directly in the pocketbook. My novel, The Solomon Scandals, has been on sale there in trade paperback. I’m not sure what the solution is. Perhaps  libraries and independent bookstores could get together to do locally originated POD books that could also appear in E. The most successful titles could be farmed out to conventional publishers. Far from a total solution! But perhaps part...

How might Google battle Amazon’s Kindle side? And just how might Apple strive to displace the Amazon Kindle for the title of “iPod of e-books”? Your thoughts? To help you out, here are two starting links and related ones: Google’s strategy to take out the Kindle, from iReaderreview.com. By year’s end, will Google “be selling nearly every book in the Kindle Store and also giving away a ton of books”? And could there be more extensive give-aways in 2010? Maybe. As I noted today, Amazon apparently will be inserting ads in...

David and I had a great time at the MobileRead meet up. Here are a couple of shots of various readers in Nate the Great’s impressive collection. MobileRead's policy is not to publish pictures of its members---to ensure their privacy---so I haven't included any other pictures here. Kaz won an autographed copy of David's book The Solomon Scandals and Nate won a CD from Steve Jordan with his latest SF book. It was great fun to put some faces to the names I've been reading all these years. Technorati Tags: Nate the Great,Steve Jordan Books,Lens...

Related: “Writing Historical Fiction,” Paula Berinstein’s Writing Show interview about my novel The Solomon Scandals, is now online. – D.R. A Chicago-born writer named Isaac Rosenfeld could have been a Saul Bellow. Michael Dirda tells how Rosenfeld was “a front runner in the race to produce the Great Jewish American Novel.” Instead, however, Rosenfeld, the subject of a new biography by Steven J. Zipperstein, too often forsook GJANs for talking, drinking, partying, and writing notebook entries. In 1956 Rosenfeld died of a heart attack at the not-so-ripe-old-age of 38. His friend Saul Bellow---who’d lived just blocks away and even written for the...

Tried Facebook to advertise an e-book or p-book? If so, what kind of results have you gotten? I’m giving Facebook a shot right now to promote The Solomon Scandals, my D.C. newspaper novel that Twilight Times Books is publishing in both formats. You won’t see the Facebook ad unless you live within 25 miles of D.C. and are of prime buying age for Scandals. In addition I’ve targeted such keywords as “editor,” “fiction,” “journalism,” “newspapers,” “novels,” “reporter,” “staff writer” and “suspense.” No offense to non-DC-area residents or nonwriters. The idea is simply to optimize the buy rate among those...

A free MP3 of the start of The Solomon Scandals---one hour of a total of about eight---is now online for everyone to download for iPods or other players. Click here to get the file, which includes an audio overview. Big thanks to librarian Tom Peters, the narrator, who’ll be leading a discussion of this Washington suspense novel at 9 p.m. on July 21 for Online Programming for All Libraries. If you’re blind or otherwise print-challenged, you can catch up with Tom for the rest of the installments as they become available. Meanwhile you can read a text...

Road Show, a Hollywood comedy directed by the legendary Hal Roach, is a free public domain movie these days---with a little twist. One of the three screenwriters was Arnold Belgard (1907-1967), a distant relative on my late mother’s side of the family. Three “Bonanza” and nine “Lassie” episodes were also among Belgard’s many scripts. What’s more, he wrote some dialogue for The Fabulous Joe, a talking dog movie, which is fitting since The Solomon Scandals is the only D.C. newspaper novel that ends with a talking Afghan Hound doing a Truman send up at the Cosmos Club. No...

Update: The Scandals discussion has been rescheduled for 8 p.m., July 28. Stuck in the middle of nowhere---without a bookstore or  library near by with good book discussion groups? You might check out the OPAL global chatcasts, which mix audio and text and encourage audience participation. The main host is Tom Peters of TAP Information Services. Tom---an academic librarian well regarded for his work with public libraries---spends hours and hours preparing for these programs. They should be of interest to many, but writers in particular, given Tom’s detailed analyses of characters, plots and literary styles. On June 23 at 9 p.m. Eastern...