Literary agent Celeste Fine will jump to Sterling Lord Literistic. She starts January 30th.

Fine (pictured, via) plans to take on projects from expert and celebrity authors in the health, science, food, business, and lifestyle genres. In addition, she will manage foreign rights for the agency’s children’s and young adult list.

Prior to this move, Fine served as the senior vice president and subsidiary rights director at Folio Literary Management. She has worked with a number of major authors, including Courtney Love, Dean Koontz and Janet Evanovich.

This week Forbes published their annual list of the highest paid writers. Novelist James Patterson leads the pack with $84 million–a $14 million increase from last year.

Here’s more from the article: “The jump comes courtesy of a 17-book, $150 million deal Patterson signed with his publisher, Hachette Book Group, in 2009. The peerlessly prolific Patterson, who works with a team of co-authors to boost his output, published 10 of those books during this period. All told, including his backlist, he had an astonishing 20 titles on PW’s year-end lists of bestsellers, comprising more than 10 million copies.”

Like Patterson, Stephenie Meyer and John Grisham write both children’s and adult books; they both made the cut raking in $21 million and $18 million respectively. The authors on the list who write exclusively for children include Rick Riordan, Jeff Kinney, Suzanne Collins and J.K. Rowling. The list included three members of the Kindle Million Club. Below, you can check out the top five authors.

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The WSJ’s Jeff Trachtenberg turns his attention to the partnership between Random House and Focus Features and its first collaboration, the Sofia Coppola-directed “Reservation Road”. It’s based from a book by Jonathan Burnham Schwartz and stars Jennifer Connelly and Joaquin Phoenix. The plan is to release two or three such films each year, culled from Random House’s backlist of 33,000 titles. So far, titles in the works include Dean Koontz‘s THE HUSBAND, Ross MacDonald‘s THE GALTON CASE and Yasmina Khadra‘s THE ATTACK. The partners will share production costs, hoping to recoup their investments by selling foreign distribution rights and bringing in other investors. In exchange for its investment, Random House has a voice in picking screenwriters, directors, and actors.

Random House says its move into the film business isn’t mainly about increasing profits via movie tickets and DVDs. Rather, it’s about selling books. “We’re doing this primarily to sell more books as movie tie-ins,” says Peter Olson, CEO of Random House. “If the movies do well at the box office and as DVDs, that’s an additional bonus.” A strategy which worked in a big way with the tie-in to PERFUME (sales jumped to more than 100,000 copies sold from 13,000 copies annually for Patrick Suskind‘s novel) and which offers high hopes for Schwartz, now betting that movie will also give a boost to his next novel, THE COMMONER, published in January by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. “My hope is that it will catch some of the wind from the movie promotion,” he says.

As first reported by PW Daily and now picked up by Ed Nawotka at Bloomberg, Bantam Dell has announced that it is the latest publisher to set up shop in the virtual world of Second Life. Fittingly, they’ve chosen Dean Koontz and his newest novel THE GOOD GUY (slated for publication on May 29) as their launch title there. At 9 PM tonight, Koontz will give a virtual reading from the book, assisted by a pair of Bantam Dell employee avatars with the literary-sounding names of Beatrice Scintilla (really Betsy Hulsebosch, senior vice president and director of creative marketing) and Horatio Ruggles.

Since its creation by Linden Lab in 2003, Second Life, a 3-D online world in which people roam a fictitious but familiar environment in the form of digital avatars — that is, computer representations that look, walk and misbehave much like real human beings, has attracted more than 4 million users worldwide.”We think Second Life represents the next dimension of social networking,” Hulsebosch said to Nawotka. “It’s three-dimensional. You physically create the world around you. We think the people who are drawn to that sort of experience would also be drawn to books.”