Vintage Books is releasing a new writer’s guide from E L James‘ in which she reveals the inspiration behind her provocative erotica series as well as tips for aspiring writers. In The Fifty Shades of Grey: Inner Goddess (A Journal), Grey will include share excerpts from her novels alongside writing tips for aspiring writers, and even the playlists that she listens to while writing.

The book, which will include 125,000 copies in the first printing, will be available in May. The pressing boasts a foil-embossed leather cover and a red-ribbon bookmark.

“As E L James traveled and met with her readers, there was a great curiosity about how she got started writing,” explained Vintage/Anchor’s Anne Messitte, the acquiring publisher of the Fifty Shades series, in a statement. “Her personal story as a writer is inspirational to many women, and journaling has been an important part of her creative process from the start.”

Google has created an interactive Google Doodle celebrating Douglas Adams‘ 61st birthday. The UK author is best known for his comedic science-fiction series, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Check out this YouTube video which shows how internet users can interact with this animated doodle. Random House posted a screenshot of the art piece on Facebook and drew 266 “likes.”

Here’s more from ABC News: “Google’s doodle includes references to Adams’ work: a towel, which according to Adams’ book, is an essential item for space travel, a cup of tea, a staple of his oeuvre, and when users click the door in the doodle, Marvin, the beloved ‘paranoid android,’ from ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide‘ appears.”

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The childhood home of Newbery Medal-winning author Beverly Cleary is on the market.

The asking price of this property has been listed at $362,000. According to OregonLive, the real estate brokers who are handling the sale will allow students from the Beverly Cleary School to tour the house.

Here’s more from the article: “[Cleary] famously used her childhood surroundings as inspiration for her books for children and young adults. The house on Hancock is just blocks from Klickitat Street, the fictional home of Henry Huggins and Ramona and Beezus Quimby. It’s also near Beverly Cleary School and the Beverly Cleary Sculpture Garden at Grant Park.” (Image via)

Becoming a published author is usually a tough, demanding mission. But for Denene Millner, it was “a total fluke.” The journalist landed a book deal after writing an article for the New York Daily News, and since then has written 20 more, including Steve Harvey‘s New York Times-bestseller Act Like A Lady, Think Like A Man. 

In the latest installment of Mediabistro’s So What Do You Do? series, the author/journalist/blogger tells what cooperative writing is really like. 

“It’s really crucial that the person who’s writing the book trusts me,” she explained. “It’s extremely difficult to walk into a project with someone who doesn’t trust that you can deliver. There’s nothing worse than working with someone who doesn’t trust you to do your job. And that’s whatever you’re doing. You could be bagging groceries at Kroger. If someone doesn’t trust you not to put the eggs underneath the milk, they’re going to give you a hard time for it.”

For more, read So What Do You Do, Denene Millner, Ghostwriter of Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man?

Over at Social Times, novelist Jackie Collins shared some of her social media strategy, going behind the scenes at her Twitter and Pinterest pages.

Here’s more from the post:

A huge fan of Pinterest, Collins enjoys the fun aspects of social media as well. “If I ever have a spare moment, I go on Pinterest and pin guys… which is so much fun,” she explains. Collins’ favorite is her “Smokin’ Hot” board. “What’s so interesting is you’ll pin Channing Tatum and Joe Manganiello, and you’ll see who repins and how many people repin,” she says. Collins has nearly 40 Pinterest boards: dogs, flowers, favorite TV shows, and more. “I have pictures of me back in the day, which is kind of fun, too,” she shares.

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Scribner has shared the hardcover art for Stephen King‘s upcoming sequel to The Shining. We’ve embedded the online poster with the cover above–what do you think?

In a long interview with Entertainment Weekly, King talked about his writing career, his children and the idea behind the sequel. Here’s an excerpt from the interview:

Driving back and forth from Maine to Florida, which I do twice a year, I’m always seeing all these recreational vehicles — the bounders in the Winnebagos. I always think to myself, ‘Who is in those things?’ You pass them a thousand times at rest stops. They’re always the ones wearing the shirts that say ‘God Does Not Deduct From a Lifespan Time Spent Fishing.’ They’re always lined up at the McDonald’s, slowing the whole line down. And I always thought to myself, ‘There’s something really sinister about those people because they’re so unobtrusive, yet so pervasive.’ I just wanted to use that. It would be the perfect way to travel around America and be unobtrusive if you were really some sort of awful creature.

It’s a pretty big accomplishment for a first-time author to land on the New York Times bestsellers list, but Isabel Wilkerson definitely deserves it. The Pulitzer-prize winning journalist spent 15 years researching and conducted over 1,200 interviews for The Warmth of Other Suns, an account of the men and women who lived through the Great Migration, when 6 million African-Americans moved to the North.

One of the biggest challenges the author says she faced was time. ” I tried to find the oldest members of this migration and capture a range of experiences,” she explained in the latest Mediabistro feature.

“One of the men I chose, the one from Florida, was keenly aware that he was speaking to unborn generations of people. He took it very seriously. At one point he said, ‘If you don’t hurry up and finish this book, I’m gonna be proofreading from heaven.’ And he was right. He didn’t live to see the book.”

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Google has created a Google Doodle celebrating author and illustrator Edward Gorey‘s 88th birthday.

Gorey established his artistic career working as a book designer at Doubleday Anchor. From there, he went on to write and illustrate more than one hundred books. He wrote under a number of pseudonyms; two of them, Ogdred Weary and Mrs. Regera Dowdy, are anagrams of his actual name.

Here’s more from The Huffington Post: “With a distinct style, often described as ‘whimsical’ and ‘grim’, Gorey’s pen and ink illustrations often depicted animals, as is shown in the Google doodle. The doodle also pays homage to Gorey’s most famous book, The Gashlycrumb Tinies, which depicts the deaths of 26 children, each representing a different letter of the alphabet.”

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The late David Foster Wallace was born on February 21, 1962, so today is a good day to remember that you can get some free writing advice from the great novelist while working on your computer.

Every Mac computer contains a copy of the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus, a powerful tool for writers that features extra “word notes” from Wallace and a number of other authors, including Rae Armantrout, Joshua Ferris, Francine Prose, Zadie Smith and Simon Winchester.

Author Dave Madden explained how to access the extra material in a post: “It’s part of the built-in dictionary. Type in a word, click on ‘Thesaurus’ in the little bar above, and you’ll get the word-for-word entry from this book I paid money for … Here, as a public service, is the list of words with notes by DFW: as, all of, beg, bland, critique, dialogue, dysphesia, effete, feckless, fervent, focus, hairy, if, impossibly, individual, loan, mucous, myriad, noma (at canker), privilege, pulchritude (at beauty), that, toward, unique, utilize.”

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Scholar Leslie S. Klinger has filed a civil suit in federal court against the Arthur Conan Doyle Estate, hoping to prove that “Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John H. Watson are no longer protected by federal copyright laws.”

The suit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. Along with Laurie R. King, Klinger edited A Study in Sherlock: Stories Inspired by the Sherlock Holmes Canon. He was working on a new collection called In the Company of Sherlock Holmes with stories by Sara Paretsky, Michael Connelly, Lev Grossman and more. He made his case, in the release:

The Conan Doyle Estate contacted our publisher … and implied that if the Estate wasn’t paid a license fee, they’d convince the major distributors not to sell the book. Our publisher was, understandably, concerned, and told us that the book couldn’t come out unless this was resolved … It is true that some of Conan Doyle’s stories about Holmes are still protected by the U.S. copyright laws. However, the vast majority of the stories that Conan Doyle wrote are not. The characters of Holmes, Watson, and others are fully established in those fifty ‘public-domain’ stories. Under U.S. law, this should mean that anyone is free to create new stories about Holmes and Watson.

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