My Obsessions

Call me old school, but I voted for Odysseus. Not only do I still remember the opening lines in The Odyssey…and after years and years of searching finally tracked down the translation I read in the 9th grade…the influence of this character and his quests trickles through so much great fiction since then.

Don’t mean to pick on Donna Fasano (aka Donna Clayton), but why is it that Reece, epublished in 2012 by Donna Fasano as part of her Single Daddy Club series, is actually Beauty and the Bachelor, by Donna Clayton, a 1997 Silhouette Romance? More to the point, why did I have to research this to find out? My guess is that the rights to the book reverted back to the author, but that Harlequin owns the copyright. If anyone knows, please enlighten me!

The lawsuit alleges the son-in-law, Samuel Pinkus, failed to properly protect the copyright of the book after his father-in-law, Eugene Winick—who had represented Lee as a literary agent since the book was published in 1960 through the firm McIntosh and Otis—became ill a decade ago. The 87-year-old author alleges Pinkus took advantage of her declining hearing and eyesight seven years ago to get her to assign the book’s copyright to him and a company he controlled.

FYI, Flynn wrote the A graded review for AAR back in the day.

From The Guardian interview:

“Flynn’s book has sold more than 2m copies worldwide, but the anecdote she tells most proudly concerns her cousin: shortly after she read it, her normally frugal husband happened to suggest that they go on a luxury holiday; her first, fleeting thought was that he might be plotting to kill her.

“‘That’s exactly my goal: to make spouses look askance at each other,’ Flynn deadpans…”

“Each year the Publishers’ Association rolls out a bunch of numbers canvassing the last year’s book sales. Given what we think we know about physical books, this year’s numbers are something of a surprise. For starters, book sales overall — that is, both digital and physical formats — actually rose 4% in 2012 (over $5 million). That’s a record, made even sweeter because 2011 revenue had been negative — a 2% slump from 2010.

“We can thank digital for much of the gain, of course, with overall digital sales up a whopping 66%, split between e-book sales (up 134%) and digital fiction sales (up 149%). And yes, physical book sales were down, though with a mere 1% dip, only slightly. But what I’m not sure anyone was expecting was this: Total sales of physical books in the fiction genre actually grew by 3%. Take a bow, Fifty Shades of Grey.

“Another area physical book sales grew: children’s books. Why? Well, the rate at which readers are shifting from physical to digital books appears to be related to what each genre tends to do best or uniquely: PA reports 26% of fiction sales were digital, but that figure drops to 5% for nonfiction and just 3% for children’s books.” ~ Matt Peckham