Journalist and author Katherine Boo has won the New York Public Library’s 2013 Helen Bernstein Book Award for Behind The Beautiful Forevers.

The $15,000 award goes to “journalists whose books have brought clarity and public attention to important issues, events, or policies.” Boo had this comment as she received the award:

Consistently, the recipients of this award make the argument through their work that you can’t just complain or accept that the American public don’t give a damn about genocide in Rwanda or ruined lives in the inner city … What this award symbolizes to me is that as a journalist working in the field, you have to report harder and work harder, until you make the American public give a damn. That’s what good writing with a capital ‘W’ is. Over the years, the Library has honored some bad-ass women, and has always honored hard-core, fierce reporting.

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This month, William Shakespeare is the most searched for author on Google and The Bible is the most searched for book. Below, we’ve posted the top ten most searched for authors on Google.

Google has started automatically updating monthly charts for the top trending books and the top trending authors on the search engine.  TNW has more about the new tool:

Today, Google releases a new and improved version of the product with new charts, updated monthly, of the most-searched people, places and things in more than 40 categories with the ability to filter by 11 countries. PR companies and their customers now have another metric to be highly aware of. Everything from business people through to cars are ranked for the world to see. Each category goes back to 2004.

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Senator Elizabeth Warren will publish a book about “how Washington is rigged against America’s middle class” with Henry Holt and Company’s Metropolitan Books imprint.

Publication is set for the spring of 2014. Robert Barnett of Williams & Connolly negotiated the deal with publisher Stephen Rubin. Editor at large John Sterling will edit. You can read her work on Twitter, where she has more than 82,000 followers. Here’s more from the release:

The main focus of the book, however, will be the conflict America now faces between giant institutions and the needs of everyday citizens. Senator Warren will bring her wide professional experience – as a Harvard law professor, head of the Congressional panel that tried to bring some oversight to the bank bailout, and assistant to the President for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau – to outline how the American middle class can be strengthened. The book will discuss how powerful interests in Washington have rigged the system to benefit themselves and what actions must be taken at every level – from campaigns to legislation to government agencies – to level the playing field.

Lydia Davis has won the fifth Man Booker International Prize, chosen from among nine finalists.

The announcement was made at Victoria and Albert Museum in London. We’ve included the complete list of finalists below. Here’s more from the official release:

 The Prize, worth £60,000, is awarded for an achievement in fiction on the world stage and Davis’s achievements are writ large despite often using startlingly few words (some of her longer stories only stretch to two or three pages). Her work has the brevity and precision of poetry. Sir Christopher Ricks, chairman of the judges, said her “writings fling their lithe arms wide to embrace many a kind. Just how to categorise them? They have been called stories but could equally be miniatures, anecdotes, essays, jokes, parables, fables, texts, aphorisms or even apophthegms, prayers or simply observations.”

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Do you have the New York Times Best Seller list memorized? Do you have a passion for books and want to get into the publishing business?

In this episode of “Score That Job,” career expert, author and mediabistro editor Vicki Salemi sat down with Andrea Weinzimer of Hachette Book Group to get the inside dirt on what they’re looking for in a candidate.

Here a few tips — know the industry and know which authors they publish (hint: rhymes with James Patterson, Nicholas Sparks, David Sedaris…). Or just watch the video.

You can view our other MediabistroTV productions on our YouTube Channel.

A 40-year-old unpublished Pearl S. Buck manuscript was recently discovered in storage, and Open Road Integrated Media and InkWell Management will team up to publish the book.

The Eternal Wonder will be published on October 22, bringing the Pulitzer & Nobel Prize-winning author’s newly discovered work as a digital book and paperback. Open Road already publishes 28 backlist books by Buck, including The Big Wave and The Good Earth. Here’s more about the book, from the release:

The Eternal Wonder, an Open Road E-riginal, is a personal and passionate fictional exploration of the themes that meant so much to Buck in her life. It tells the coming-of-age story of Randolph Colfax, an extraordinarily gifted young man whose search for meaning and purpose leads him to New York, England, Paris, a mission patrolling the demilitarized zone in Korea that will change his life forever—and, ultimately, to love.

Penguin will pay $75 million in damages and “costs and fees to resolve all antitrust claims relating to eBook pricing”–settling with 33 state attorneys general and consumers in a suit led by Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro.

The suit revolved around allegations of price fixing with the agency model for eBook pricing. The publisher issued a brief statement:

Penguin has also committed to the State Attorneys General to abide by the same injunctive relief as previously agreed in a separate settlement with the Department of Justice. In anticipation of reaching this agreement, Pearson had made a $40m provision for settlement in its 2012 accounts. An incremental charge will be expensed in Pearson’s 2013 statutory accounts as part of the accounting for the Penguin Random House joint-venture.

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Amazon Publishing has reached out to fan fiction writers with Kindle Worlds, a platform allowing authors to write fan fiction based on someone else’s work and share royalties with the rights holders.

Warner Bros. Television Group’s Alloy Entertainment division will work with Amazon on the program, letting fans write about Cecily von Ziegesar‘s Gossip Girl, Sara Shepard‘s Pretty Little Liars and L.J. Smith‘s Vampire Diaries. Fan fiction writers can publish their own work about these stories in the Kindle Store. The program launches in June. Here’ more about the payment structure:

Amazon Publishing will pay royalties to both the rights holders of the Worlds and the author. The standard author’s royalty rate (for works of at least 10,000 words) will be 35% of net revenue. As with all titles from Amazon Publishing, Kindle Worlds will base net revenue off of sales price—rather than the lower, industry standard of wholesale price—and royalties will be paid monthly.

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Horror author H. P. Lovecraft meets picture book creator Eric Carle in Ben Mund‘s book, The Very Hungry Cthulhupillar. With 11 days left in the campaign, this Kickstarter project has drawn more than $9,500 from its supporters. We’ve embedded a video about the project above–what do you think?

Here’s more about the project: “Cthulhu has eaten your childhood! We are publishing The Very Hungry Cthulhupillar, a full color, fully-illustrated book in the style of a classic piece of children’s literature—not actually intended for a young audience. A cthulhupillar eats more and more to sate his ravenous appetite … and what shall he become?”

Welcome to our Kickstarter Publishing Project of the Week, a feature exploring how authors and publishers are using the fundraising site to raise money for book projects. If you want to start your own project, check out How To Use Kickstarter to Fund Your Publishing Project.