Authors

For your weekend reading pleasure, here some publishing news briefs...

Oprah Winfrey announced today that she will end her popular show in 2011, closing the televised side of the most influential book club in America. Author Edwidge Danticat told the Wall Street Journal why she will miss the club: "When she calls to tell you that your book has been selected for the book club, she sounds so excited that you feel as though she's both your ideal reader and your biggest cheerleader."

To write its embargo-breaking scoop about Sarah Palin's memoir (which has reportedly sold 300,000 copies already), the AP ripped, scanned, and mined the text for juicy tidbits.

Kat Meyer interviewed Angela James, the executive editor for Carina Press on Twitter for her weekly Follow Reader Twitter chat. Read the whole exchange at #followreader.

Why author and literary blogger Maud Newton is writing a novel instead of a memoir.

Bainbridge Island's Eagle Harbor Bookstore hosted local authors Sharlene Martin and Anthony Flacco for a dual signing last Sunday afternoon to promote the book they collaborated on—Publish Your Nonfiction Book—and Flacco's The Road Out of Hell (which tells the real-life story behind events touched upon in Clint Eastwood's Changeling). The event was followed by a fundraiser for the Kitsap Regional Library Foundation, where the couple were joined by local bestselling authors Susan Wiggs, Gregg Olsen and Suzanne Selfors.

When Jeff Schettler began writing a memoir about his bloodhound, and the cases they had worked on together as a K9 team, Ronin had already been diagnosed with the cancer that would end his life. Years later, there was such strong faith in the ability of Red Dog Rising to resonate with readers that plans were underway for a national book tour—a major undertaking in any event, but for a book published by a small independent press even moreso. And then Schettler himself was diagnosed with what his publicist, Julie Schoerke, described to us as "very aggressive" cancer—scuttling the entire tour except for one reading in Atlanta at the end of November, as traveling to other cities is simply incompatible with 30 hours of chemotherapy a week.

In the YouTube era, however, Schettler can still talk to readers about his story, and about the Georgia K9 National Training Center, the service dog training center he's founded which will receive all the proceeds from the sales of Red Dog Rising.

With the world buzzing about Sarah Palin's new memoir and Stephenie Meyer's new adaptation, its easy to forget the other major literary event this week--the release of Vladimir Nabokov's unfinished novel, "The Original of Laura."

If you want to read an excerpt, you won't find the book on the Oprah Winfrey Show or at the multiplex. You need to go to Playboy, the magazine that everybody reads for the literary excerpts. The magazine gave GalleyCat that image from the print magazine excerpt--showing the choice the great writer's son had between burning or publishing the unfinished book.

Here's an excerpt that seems fairly safe for work: "[Nabokov] started writing it in 1975 and persisted while hospitalized the few months before his death in 1977. He relied on his signature creative approach (the note cards included here are testament to that), but the book was never finished. In this event, he asked that the draft be destroyed. That we are able to publish a portion of it today is a privilege and a relief to admirers, biographers and readers of every stripe, but that it would survive was never a certainty."

That's biographer T. J. Stiles talking about the recession on the floor of the glitzy National Book Awards yesterday. Stiles won the award for his biography of a wealthy man, "The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt," but had some advice for surviving as a writer during these difficult economic times.

In addition, we interviewed NBA Fiction Winner Colum McCann about New York City and grace. Finally, we quizzed the nominees on Stephenie Meyer's bestselling Twilight Saga and interviewed

Last night Galleycat covered the 2009 National Book Awards, a combination of the Academy Awards ceremony, a fairytale ball, and a high school prom for writers.

Novelist Colum McCann won the National Book Award for Fiction last night for "Let the Great World Spin." "Stories are the purest form of engagement," he explained in his acceptance speech. "We have to take this honor as a challenge."

In this exclusive GalleyCat interview, McCann talks about New York City, the recession, and grace. We also got the author's take on Stephenie Meyer's bestselling Twilight Saga.

Last night Galleycat covered the 2009 National Book Awards, a combination of the Academy Awards ceremony, a fairytale ball, and a high school prom for writers.

In this special National Book Awards video feature, GalleyCat prowled the red carpet asking the nation's most critically acclaimed writers to comment on the country's most popular book series. We expected a snooty series of reactions to the upcoming adaptation to Stephenie Meyer's "New Moon" and the Twilight Saga, but we found something else altogether.

Also check out our exclusive interview with NBA Fiction Winner Colum McCan and our video interview with NBA Nonfiction winner T. J. Stiles. This week the publishing world gathered for the National Book Awards, a combination of the Academy Awards ceremony, a fairytale ball, and a high school prom for writers.

Don't worry about buying a tuxedo, because GalleyCat will be covering the event. Senior editor Ron Hogan will be twittering about the event and editor Jason Boog will handle the good old fashioned blogging duties.

Today Threshold Editions announced that they will publish Karl Rove's 592-page memoir, "Courage and Consequence" on March 9, 2010.

The political strategist helped elect President George W. Bush and served as White House deputy chief of staff in Bush's administration. His book promises to "set the record straight on those controversial years"--a popular theme with former Bush staffers. In 2011, both Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney will publish their own memoirs. Cheney has already promised to reveal the "heated arguments" behind the scenes at the White House.

Threshold editor-in-chief Mary Matalin (a conservative leader in her own right, profiled here) had this statement: "Karl has always been in a league of his own in the world of electoral politics and now he creates a unique genre for historians, policy makers, political junkies and serious readers."

We enjoy following James P. Othmer on his Twitter stream, so we were delighted to see that AgencySpy editor Matthew van Hoven posted an interview with the Adland author to mediabistro.com's "So What Do You Do?" series. Othmer discusses his background in the advertising biz and his circuitous route to becoming a published writer:

"I realized that if I wrote a nice little jewel of a novel that would have a small readership and was well-reviewed, I would never come close to making the money I was making, even as a copywriter. I realized it was an unrealistic goal to say I'll be a self-sustaining writer of fiction. So I kept at it, and I wrote three novels. I had several agents. One agent died, one agent quit to go to clown school."

Othmer, who draws upon his personal experience to inform a meditation upon advertising in Adland, notes that he's still consulting in that field, a process he describes as being hired to "take a look at a brand, and lift the hood up and see if there was something I could bring to it." Meanwhile, we're waiting for the film adaptation of his first novel, The Futurist, to get out of pre-production, and then next June he's got a new novel, Holy Water, about "a water-filtration salesman who gets transferred to a third-world nation to open up a back office in a drought-plate nation [after] his wife has thrown him out of the house because he lied about his vasectomy."

While living the blogging lifestyle, can a journalist manage to write a book? According to Dealbook blogger Andrew Ross Sorkin, it can be done, as long as one is willing to work all night.

Over at wowOwow.com, the 32-year-old NY Times reporter spoke about his reporting adventures while writing "his new book, "Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System--And Themselves." The interview features some casual bombshells like this one about the insular world of high finance: "I mean ... 30 people [are] running the world, and they are all mostly men, with very few exceptions." The interview will make almost any writer feel like a slacker...

Here's an excerpt from the interview: "I had some researchers who were helping me. I used to do my writing typically from midnight to about 6:30 in the morning, like I was back in college. I used to go to the corner store near my apartment, I'd buy a two-liter bottle of diet Coke and a bag of Stacy's chips from the same guy. He'd laugh at me every time."