There’s an art to book blurbing, as anyone who’s tried to write one can tell you. Over at the Kenyon Review, Jake Adam York takes a stab at classifying them. For example, there’s the “Lavish” type:
The genre of the recommendation letter, a friend once observed, is hyperbole. Everything has to be stated in [...]

In her thoughtful, entertaining new collection, Signs and Wonders, Alix Ohlin lures readers into what seem like lulls, and then, there it is: a car crash. A coma. A missing child. A man licking a woman’s leg.

Looking for a new podcast to add to your rotation? Late Night Library provides an audio book club for emerging writers. In this interview, founders Paul Martone and Erin Hoover discuss why and how they started “the all-hours home of debut fiction and poetry.”

The always-fascinating TYWKIWDBI points us to the origin of the blurb. According to Wikipedia,

The word blurb originated in 1907. American humorist Gelett Burgess’s short 1906 book Are You a Bromide? was presented in a limited edition to an annual trade association dinner. The custom at such events was to have a dust jacket promoting [...]

In possibly the cutest book promotion campaign ever, Melville House has started an adopt-a-penguin program to—oh, I’ll just let them explain:
To celebrate our publication of Andrey Kurkov‘s beloved Russian crime-fiction series starring a penguin named Misha, Melville House is announcing a new Adopt-a-Penguin program.
No, really… We will adopt a penguin in the name of any [...]

Earlier this summer, we looked at BookCrossing, a website that allows users to “catch” and “release” books around the world and track where their books have gone. Now author Laura Harrington is using BookCrossing in an unusual promotion for her novel, Alice Bliss. Writes Harrington:
Where’s Alice Bliss? is a campaign to send copies [...]

My friends who are literary agents have told me about the many ways authors try to catch their attention: packages of cookies sent with their manuscripts; queries tucked into oven mitts shaped like sunflowers (of all things). But this might be the ultimate guerrilla book promotion: faking a kidnapping to promote your book. [...]

We’ve written several posts over the years about the emergence of DIY book tours, marketing and self-publicity (read them here, and here, and here). Not only do self-published authors need to get their hustle on, but writers who publish with small presses, or find themselves mid-level (or lower) on a big house’s list can find [...]

The following guest post is by Josie Keenan, an FWR intern and second-year student at the University of Michigan.
More and more these days, I find myself bemoaning the fate of books. As Lee discussed in her recent blog “Let’s get digital”, downloadable books have been available for some time now. Digitization is one aspect [...]

Lots of digital ink has been spilled this week about James Frey’s Full Fathom Five endeavor. In simple terms, the company has enlisted bright young writers (most from MFA programs) to try to write the next big Young Adult series, a la Twilight or Harry Potter. Hillary Busis on MEDIAite has an article looking at [...]