Dennis Ingolfsland over at Recliner Commentaries passes on a report from WoodTV 8 in Grand Rapids, MI:
Christian publisher Zondervan is facing a $60 million federal lawsuit filed by a man who claims he and other homosexuals have suffered based on what the suit claims is a misinterpretation of the Bible.
Because the “Gay” movement is all about, you know, live-and-let-live.
“He believed ardently in [Reader’s] Digest’s populist mission of making well-written books with strong stories and interesting characters available to people who might not otherwise be readers,” Stephen Zinsser said of his father, John S. Zinsser Jr., who was editor of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. Zinsser died on May 27.
“The first African-American inducted into the N.C. Journalism Hall of Fame,” Vivan Edmonds, publisher of The Carolina Times, has passed away. Her father started the paper in 1922 and continue to report the news and write his opinions even as a cross burned against him. “You took your life in your hands when you spoke out, when you challenged the power structure,” said a reporter from Raleigh-Durham, N.C. area.
I wasn’t much of a blogger last week, and I won’t be much of one this week. Part of my busyness will be preparing for Mother’s Day next Sunday. I have a beautiful, enchanting wife, a mother of four, who deserves better from me at every turn, and I want to tell her so next weekend. If I can get around to it.
Anyway, here are some links of potential interest.
“Just last week, The Capital Times, a 90-year-old daily newspaper in Madison, Wis., ended its print version and began publishing only online.” A strong business/technology magazine publisher is working that way too.
Kristen asks about books being made into movies in light of Prince Caspian’s release next week.
The creator of “Family Guy,” Seth MacFarlane, has signed deal with 20th Century Fox TV “that would make him the highest-paid writer-producer working in television.”
Patrick Kurp is reading A Step from Death by Larry Woiwode:
Some of the most moving pages I’ve read thus far in A Step from Death concern the late William Maxwell, the novelist who edited Woiwode’s early work at The New Yorker. They shared another bond: Both lost their mothers while they were still boys – a loss always at the heart of Maxwell’s fiction. When they first speak of the unhealed rupture in their lives, Maxwell begins, “To lose a mother at that age –,” and stops. Woiwode writes:
“It’s all he says, and we sit in the resonance you feel in the air after a church bell rings in the steeple next door, and then a tear slides from a corner of his eye – the right the most prone to spill – and although he has said it to me, I know he’s referring to himself, too, and his mother, who died when he was ten, and he doesn’t say a word more. We attend to the resonance like tuning forks vibrating at the same frequency. He is sixty, resilient, cheerful, the only person I know who can speak with joie de vivre while tears runs, but he’s never been able to accept her death.”
Prison Legal News, a nonprofit publisher, is suing the Massachusetts Department of Correction Commissioner over a prison book policy that allows “only approved vendors to send books to prisoners.” The publisher is not on the list and believes the list is unconstitutional. I think prisons ought to have tight controls on inmate reading, even though that could lead to problems like this perhaps or a subtle indoctrination of another kind.
The Wicked Witch of Publishing, herself a three-time author, has launched a publishing company aimed at putting out of print books back on the shelf. Back2Press Books invites authors to join “THE 100,000+ CLUB” if they own the rights to their already published book and that book sold over 100k while in print.
“The problem is that publishing companies are content, even ecstatic, if a book sells more than 10,000 copies, let alone 100,000. Rarely do they continue to promote a proven bestseller at the expense of the newer books currently in the pipeline. After months or even years of helping to fill the publisher’s coffers, the 100,000+ bestseller eventually dies an unnatural death from negligent homicide,” says Scanlon [WWP].
WWP is the author of a book on the cure for jet lag, which appears to be the real deal and is available again at a discount prior to the official publishing release.
I’m delighted to report that I have received verbal (actually e-mail) acceptance of one of my novels by a new publisher.
I’m going to be discreet about naming names at this point, before a contract has actually been signed. I’ll say that the publisher is a newish Christian house, and that I will be their first fiction author.
The novel is West Oversea, the third volume in The Saga of Erling Skjalgsson.
A romance author and her publisher are divorcing after “irreconcilable editorial differences” developed over the last few months. At first the publisher defended the writer, saying copied passages from resource material was acceptably or fairly used, but they have since changed their minds.
Author Nora Roberts commented, “By my definition, copying another’s work and passing it as your own equals plagiarism.”