For your weekend reading pleasure, here are our top stories of the week, including how to sell your self-published book in bookstores, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s bankruptcy filing and Neil Gaiman’s inspiring commencement address (embedded above).

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1. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Files for Bankruptcy
2. Hogwarts Library Box Set Coming from J.K. Rowling
3. The Lost History of Fifty Shades of Grey
4. Neil Gaiman Shares ‘Secret Freelancer Knowledge’
5. 50 Shades of Grey Sales Bump: INFOGRAPHIC
6. How To Sell Your Self-Published Book in Bookstores
7. Researcher Suggests Ratings System for YA Books
8. Don’t Let the Writing Life Kill You
9. Self-Published Nutritionist Inks 7-Figure Book Deal
10. Jennifer Egan to Publish Sci-Fi Story on Twitter

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

As you celebrate Memorial Day this weekend, take some time to remember all our soldiers stationed overseas.

If you want to help these men and women far away from home, we’ve collected five different ways you can share books with our troops. For instance, E-Books for Troops will help you send an eReader to our troops overseas.

Here’s more from one volunteer: “Last week I prepared 26 donated Kindles for shipment to U.S. military units in Afghanistan … I make sure the wireless connection is turned off and the Kindle is deregistered, so it can be registered by the Soldier who will be using it once it arrives. I also load a PDF document with a greeting from E-Books for Troops, stating who donated the Kindle and, if a personal greeting was entered in the Donation Form, I include that greeting in the PDF as well.”

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Prichard (pictured) had this comment: “When John hired me five years ago, he shared his vision and I signed on to make that vision a reality.  I signed up to accomplish certain goals, and those goals have all been met one by one. With solid positions in all of our markets yielding terrific results, I feel I have accomplished what I set out to do. I now will do some consulting and then look for a new role that will consume me as much as this one has. I’ve enjoyed every minute of my time at Ingram.”

You can follow the outgoing CEO on his Twitter feed. Ingram is a Nashville-based company that works with 21,000 publishers, distributing books and digital content to “35,000 retailers, libraries, schools and distribution partners in over 200 countries.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

We’ve embedded the whole infographic below–all publishers should be aware of the growing business of self-publishing. Check it out: “$36+ million earned by Lulu.com authors, $1.3 million of which was earned by the top 5 sellers.”

Bob Young, CEO of Lulu.com had this statement: “There has often been a stigma placed on self-publishing that says the self-published author doesn’t make any money – that he or she won’t be successful. In our ten-year history, Lulu has paid out over $36 million dollars to our authors proving that this stigma is outdated. It is now easier than ever to sell works in all sorts of formats, in all sorts of markets, on all sorts of devices, in some cases instantly. Publishing is changing. The concept of a book is changing.”

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Over Mulholland Books, great writers like Lawrence Block and Joe R. Lansdale have responded to his essay today–we’ve collected some of their commentary below. Follow this link to read more essays from Megan Abbott, Nick Santora, Mischa Hiller and Marcia Clark as they are released.

Lansdale wrote: This is the silliest defense for spoiling stories for those of us who don’t want them spoiled that I have ever heard. I have spoiled, accidently, a film and I was almost lynched. They were right. If it’s done to me, I feel the same … There may be those who read the last page of a book, or like the previews for films to be so precise it lets them know how it’s going to turn out, but surprise has a great place, and most of us prefer it, and if we prefer not to have things spoiled for us, a spoiler alert is a nice warning to us who would prefer not to know.  Bad journalist. Bad, dog.”

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

So far, Vintage has sold over ten million copies of E. L. James‘ Fifty Shades of Grey, creating a booming new audience for erotica. Yesterday, Goodreads charted the spread of Fifty Shades among readers around the country, noting that Day’s novel had seen a significant spike on the social network for readers.

Here’s more from the publisher: “Shortly after its April 3rd release, Bared to You jumped into the list of top 40 bestselling eBooks at both Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The author is currently selling about 1,000 copies of Bared to You—every day! Bared to You is now a national bestseller, landing on both the New York Times and USA Today bestseller lists.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Here are some handpicked titles from our New Books section. Want to include your book? Just read our Facebook Your New or Upcoming Book post. Don’t forget to include your title’s exact release date and a link.

Into This World by Sybil Baker: ”On the day Allison Morehouse walks off her job, her sister Mina calls from Korea, frantic and in tears. Determined to discover the truth about her adopted sister, Allison flies to Seoul, yet Mina—and Korea—are nothing like Allison imagines. Over the next three months, Allison and Mina will unearth thirty years of family secrets—and Allison will discover in Mina the sister she never embraced and in herself, the stronger woman she can be.” (May 2012)

Daemons in the Mist by Alicia Kat Dillman: ”Seventeen year old Patrick Connolly has been hopelessly infatuated with Nualla for years but he is all but invisible to her. Until, that is, he rescues her from a confrontation with her ex. Little does Patrick know he’s just set off a dangerous chain reaction that will thrust him into a world of life altering secrets and things that shouldn’t exist, because the fog and mist of San Francisco is concealing more than just buildings.” (May 2012)

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

This means that publishers can use the software to make apps that are optimized for the iPhone and iPod Touch devices. (The tool already works for publishers developing content on the iPad, Kindle Fire and Android tablets).

The Adobe blog has some tips for how to make content for the iPhone versus the iPad. Here is one thing to keep in mind: “The smaller screen on iPhone is going to strongly influence how developers design navigation and interactivity on these devices. Consider how people hold the iPhone: typically in one hand, and they frequently use a thumb to interact with content. Likewise, consider how people hold their phone for reading: I think a vertical orientation will prove to be a more popular orientation for these devices. So this leads to a couple of ideas for how to design both your publication for iPhone and where interactivity is found.”

Via TechCrunch.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

There is a colorful new way to read Ivanhoe, Moby Dick and The Three Musketeers in the Kobo eBookstore, and it’s not through public domain ePub files.

Digital publisher Trajectory has signed a content distribution deal with Kobo to release a series of illustrated comics of classic novels through the Kobo eBookstore. The series includes more than 120 visual renditions of classics such as The Last of the Mohicans, War of the Worlds, Treasure Island, The Count of Monte Cristo, Huckleberry Finn, Alice in Wonderland and Jane Eyre.

The video embedded above gives you an idea of what they look like–follow this link to see more at Kobo.
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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The New York Observer reported that the experiment will begin tonight at 8 p.m. ET. Egan (pictured)  has experimented in her fiction before, writing a short story disguised as a list and publishing PowerPoint fiction for her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad. Back in 2009, Electric Literature performed a similar experiment with novelist Rick Moody.

Here’s more from the author: “This is not a new idea, of course, but it’s a rich one—because of the intimacy of reaching people through their phones, and because of the odd poetry that can happen in a hundred and forty characters. I found myself imagining a series of terse mental dispatches from a female spy of the future, working undercover by the Mediterranean Sea. I wrote these bulletins by hand in a Japanese notebook that had eight rectangles on each page. The story was originally nearly twice its present length; it took me a year, on and off, to control and calibrate the material into what is now ‘Black Box.’” (Link via MB Newsfeed; image via Marion Ettlinger)

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

A recent study in Australia discovered that sitting for long periods of time can actually kill you, even if you regularly exercise. The Washington Post had more: “In people 45 years and older, sitting for 11 or more hours a day led to an increased risk of death (from all causes) by about 40 percent over four years, compared to the risk of death in people who sat just four to eight hours a day, the study found. People plopped on their behinds for eight to 11 hours daily had about a 15 percent increase in risk of death.”

To help our readers fight this health problem, we rounded up Five Free Fitness & Workout Apps for your Android or Apple smartphone. Using these simple tools, you can schedule daily alerts to move, stretch and even have a short workout in your office.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Goodreads has created a massive infographic analyzing the Fifty Shades of Grey effect around the country.

Vintage has already sold ten million copies of E. L. James‘ erotica trilogy, and the literary social network discovered some fascinating trends. They charted both the geographic distribution of readers and the books that have received a bump from a new national interest in erotica.  We’ve embedded the infographic below. Here’s more from Goodreads:

The states with the highest readers per capita are located primarily in the Tri-State and New England area: New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Rhode Island, and New York. Fifty Shades of Grey has given some readers a new taste for erotica, and we’ve found a jump in interest in similar books on Goodreads. Just recently, Penguin’s Berkley Books imprint snatched up Sylvia Day‘s self-published novel, Bared to You, which has generated 2,500 reviews in the past two months … Other books potentially joining the sultry summer reading list are Gabriel’s Inferno by Sylvain Reynard, Rock Me by Cherrie Lynn, Captive in the Dark by C.J. Roberts, and The Reluctant Dom by Lesli Richardson.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

It launched this week with exclusive excerpts from chapters of James Patterson’s upcoming novel NYPD Red (which comes out in October), as well as Michael Connelly’s The Black Box (which is slated for a November release).

AppNewser explained how it works: “In order to gain access to the content, Facebook users must “Like” the content. Then readers can read these chapters on the author’s Facebook page. And if they like what they read, they can preorder a book from the Facebook page by clicking on icons for Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBooks or Indiebound. Readers are also encouraged to share the link to the sample chapters with their Facebook friends.” continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

First and foremost, make sure that you are pitching the genre that the agency represents. For example, Brown only wants to see pitches for romance (single title and category), women’s fiction, erotica, young adult and mystery cozies. She also says that her agency only works with authors who are already published. Here is more from, Pitching An Agent: Brown Literacy Agency:

“We are only reviewing material by New York published authors seeking new representation,” said Brown. If that’s you, email a synopsis and two chapters of a proposal in an email attachment. The agency no longer accepts printed material by snail mail. Response time can be anywhere from one month to six weeks, all depending on the influx of material.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The contest is open to high school students who reside in Brooklyn or those who attend a high school located in Brooklyn. Eligible candidates should feel free to turn in their stories, poems, essays, spoken word pieces and raps before the deadline on June 29th. Follow this link for more information.

Here’s more from the release: “A committee of publishers, editors and literary agents will select 10 finalists, including a first place winner. The 10 finalists will be invited to read their work at the Brooklyn Book Festival on Sunday, September 23, 2012 … Entries should be sent to Brooklyn Book Festival Lit Match, Brooklyn Borough Hall, 209 Joralemon Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201 or e-mailed to ekoch@brooklynbp.nyc.gov.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.