“Stopped hanging other people’s art.”

— a journal entry by Ad Reinhardt (1913-1967)

Imagine you’ve walked into a bookstore, browsing for something new. Besides an explicit recommendation, how do you decide what to read? If you’re like most people, you reach for a book that looks interesting… based on the cover. Mokoto Rich of the New York Times discusses how the e-book era may prevent [...]

Jeremy recently posted about Allison Amend’s tips for a do-it-yourself book tour. Author-arranged promotions are becoming more and more common as publishers cut back on marketing and publicity, and the L.A. Times has some firsthand accounts of what such a book tour can be like:
A cat peeing in an author’s bag? A writer waking [...]

Step 1: Wait for a celebrity to buy your book.
Step 2: Be sure the book is in the celebrity’s backseat when he crashes his car in the middle of the night.
Step 3: ???
Step 4: PROFIT!

Have you met The Nervous Breakdown yet? Founded by author Brad Listi, this new website is intended as a new space for authors to promote their work. The fiction section’s aim, as explained in an open letter, is
not only akin to that of all good literary magazines–to showcase some of the most vibrant [...]

First came blog-based books like Julie and Julia. Then came books based on Internet memes like LOLcats. Recently we’ve seen a spate of Twitter-based books, ranging from Matt Stewart’s novel The French Revolution to TwitterWit to Justin Halpern’s Shit My Dad Says.
How far will the trend go? Now, even your Facebook status [...]

You’ve got to hand it to novelist Brad Meltzer for bouncing back from brutal criticism of his novel Book of Lies with this hilarious YouTube video. His grandmother and members of the Little League team he coaches all take a turn quoting, rather gleefully, from published pillories, urging viewers to buy the book so they, [...]

As you can see on the left sidebar, FWR is now Twitterpated (name: “fictionwriters”). Come follow us…
I had mixed feelings at first about tweeting. It’s one thing to offer readers detours and chances to read more about an author, book, or issue via hyperlinks, but as an all-volunteer labor-of-love site, did we really need to [...]