Here are some literary events to pencil in your calendar. To get your event posted on our calendar, visit our Facebook Your Literary Event page. Please post your event at least one week prior to its date.

Meet prolific thriller writter Harlan Coben at the launch party for his new novel, Six Years. See him on Tuesday, March 19th at Barnes & Noble (82nd Street & Broadway) starting 7 p.m. (New York, NY)

The 6-year anniversary celebration of the Mixer Reading & Mixer Series will take place at Cake Shop. Join the fun on Wednesday, March 20th starting 7 p.m. (New York, NY)

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Penguin’s worldwide profits totaled £441 million for the first half of 2012, dipping by £16 million compared to the same period last year. Pearson, the corporate parent of Penguin, revealed these stats in its half-year earnings report.

Here’s more from the release: “Penguin’s first half trading was affected by three factors: a lighter publishing schedule, the exceptional performance of competitor bestsellers The Hunger Games and Fifty Shades of Grey and continued pressure on physical book publishing and retailing. We expect Penguin’s publishing and its competitive performance to be stronger in the second half of the year, and we expect the structural change to continue. In the second half, Penguin will continue to take action to adapt to the rapidly-changing industry environment and will be expensing integration costs associated with its acquisition of Author Solutions.”

Penguin US counted 132 bestsellers during the first half of the year, down from 157 bestsellers in 2011. The company noted that Nora Roberts, Harlan Coben, Charlaine Harris, John Green and Jenny Lawson all scored hits. Self-published novelists Tracey Garvis Graves and Sylvia Day both inked book deals with Penguin and were cited as bestsellers during the same period.

Thriller novelist Harlan Coben will team up with filmmaker Lawrence Kasdan to script and produce an adaptation of Coben’s soon-to-be published novel, Stay Close.

Kasdan will also direct this project. The book is slated for release on March 20th. According to Deadline, the script should be finished around the same time as the book’s publication date.

Here’s more from the release: “In Stay Close, a past crime returns to devastate the lives of a photojournalist, a suburban mother with a hidden past, and a homicide detective obsessed with a series of unsolveddisappearances. The Hitchcockian thriller plunges all three into a dark world of sex, secrets and shocking violence.”

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The Mystery Writers of America announced the 2011 Edgar nominations this morning. The annual prize is named after Edgar Allan Poe, awarded to the best authors in the mystery genre since 1945.

UPDATE: We’ve created a literary mixtape linking to free samples of all the nominated books. Follow this link to see all the nominees, but we’ve included a few of the top categories below.

BEST NOVEL
Caught by Harlan Coben (Penguin Group USA – Dutton)
Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin (HarperCollins – William Morrow)
Faithful Place by Tana French (Penguin Group USA – Viking)
The Queen of Patpong by Timothy Hallinan (HarperCollins – William Morrow)
The Lock Artist by Steve Hamilton (Minotaur/Thomas Dunne Books)
I’d Know You Anywhere by Laura Lippman (HarperCollins – William Morrow)

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Looking at the comments section for our Should Authors Dance? post, it seemed like plenty of GalleyCat readers want to see their favorite writer appear on Dancing with the Stars. Now it’s time to do something about it.

Reader Michelle Gilstrap suggested Lotus Eaters author Tatjana Soli and proposed: “[Soli] is coming to Los Angeles for a special event on October 16th, I will ask her if she would like to do it. We should start a Facebook page for her, if she says yes. This is how they got Betty White on [Saturday Night Live].”

It’s a great idea. We’ll start by letting our readers pick the best writer to appear on Dancing with the Stars–we’ve collected ten suggestions from GalleyCat readers below.  Go to this Facebook link to vote for your favorite author. We’ll count the votes and build a special Facebook page to advocate for the winning author. The ten suggestions follow below…

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Bestselling author Harlan Coben inked a three-book deal for a young adult series with the Penguin Young Readers Group, telling the story of a teenager investigating “a conspiracy that may reach deep into his family history.”

In a metafictional twist, the novelist’s first young adult series will feature appearances by two different characters from adult books by Coben (pictured, via Frank Ward)–Myron Bolitar and Win Lockwood. The three book deal was negotiated by Lisa Erbach Vance of the Aaron Priest Literary Agency. The first book will be published in 2011. Coben’s publishing footprint is already immense with 19 books and 47 million books in print around the world.

Young Readers president Don Weisberg had this comment: “I have been a fan of Harlan Coben’s since his first Myron Bolitar novel Deal Breaker was published in 1995. He is a master at creating complex, layered, fast-paced capers and we know teens are going to love his new series.”

Read GalleyCat Reviews’ take on Coben’s latest novel here.

Shelf Awareness points to a piece in today’s Victoria Times about the disparity between US and Canadian book prices. The gap between the US cover price ($26.50 and the Canadian price ($33.50) of Harlan Coben‘s new novel might make sense if it were 2002, writes James Knox, when the Great Northern Peso was slumming down around 62 cents US. But with the suddenly robust loonie bobbing above 94 cents, the disparity is getting harder to ignore. Just based on the exchange rate, a book listed at $26.95 US should sell for about $28.50 Canadian, right?

“We don’t understand it, either,” said Bruce Cran of the Consumers Association of Canada. You would think goods imported from the U.S. would retail for less now, but it’s just not happening. “We’re getting no benefit at all.” And this makes the issue, caused by long lead times and especially sore for booksellers, who feel consumer wrath more than most retailers with customers who complain loudly at the difference. Suffice it to say the issue will be front and centre at the Canadian Booksellers Association’s annual meeting, which starts in Toronto today. “We’re pushing the publishers as best we can,” said Munro Books owner Jim Munro.

It worked for Ron McLarty, and now the Stephen King Anointment Test (TM) works once more for Meg Gardiner. After teasing her readers earlier this week with the news of an American deal, she supplied more information yesterday afternoon: Ben Sevier at Dutton pre-empted the rights to all five of her novels, plus two new titles from Britt Carlson at Gelfman Schneider (acting on behalf of Jonny Pegg at Curtis Brown.) The backlist will be published as mass market paperback originals by NAL, while the next titles – the sixth Evan Delaney series installment plus THE DIRTY SECRETS CLUB, a standalone thriller set in San Francisco – will debut here in hardcover, with the standalone going first in summer 2008. No terms are known, but seeing as this is a seven-book deal, the amount of money has to be fairly substantive, though the per-book ratio may break down to more manageable numbers. Comments from Carlson and Sevier are still pending, and will be added once they come in.

On the face of it, this looks like a smart acquisition on all sides. Starting Gardiner in mass market means (as I explained last month) that her audience can build quickly and demand will grow until a suitable splash is made with the first hardcover release. For Dutton, Gardiner will enable them to tap into the audience that reads other New York Times bestselling female thriller writers like Tami Hoag, Tess Gerritsen, Lisa Gardner and Alison Brennan while adding a necessary counterpart to a predominantly male thriller list (including Harlan Coben, Jonathon King, Juan Gomez-Jurado and Stephen White.) It’s also Sevier’s first thriller acquisition and his second major deal since moving to Dutton earlier this year. So while a lot is riding on Gardiner to live up to the expectations set by King’s blurb and Abebooks’ inability to keep her UK editions in stock, the likelihood is that this risk will pay off in spades.

UPDATE: Dutton has released an announcement about Gardiner’s six-figure deal, which was finalized last Friday evening. Sevier will edit Gardiner’s new novels for hardcover publication, which Dutton will release in the summer of 2008. “For such a talented thriller writer to have gone unpublished in her own country for so long is difficult to imagine, and I look forward to helping Meg find the American audience she so clearly deserves,” says Sevier in the announcement. “THE DIRTY SECRETS CLUB is everything I look for in a suspense novel-fast-moving, inventive, with an engaging heroine in Jo Beckett and a plot that twists and turns toward an explosive finale set against the backdrop of an earthquake-addled San Francisco.” As for the backlist, Dutton spokeswoman Beth Parker said by email this morning that they had not been scheduled for publication by NAL as yet.

After a very short stint with Touchstone/Fireside – where he acquired undercover FBI agent “Jack Falcone‘s” INSIDE MAN earlier this month – former St. Martin’s editor Ben Sevier is moving to Dutton as a Senior Editor effective January 30. “Ben is generally regarded as one of the best crime fiction and thriller editors in our business,” said Dutton editor-in-chief Trena Keating in an announcement sent out this morning. “I am very pleased to welcome him to Dutton and introduce him to our bestselling thriller writers, including Harlan Coben and Raymond Khoury, who are among the finest thriller writers anywhere.” Sevier added that “quite simply this is my dream job–I am thrilled with the opportunity to work with their elite list of talented thriller writers.”

UPDATE: I asked Sevier this afternoon about the circumstances of his move to Dutton. “I loved my time at Touchstone working with the terrific team here, and leaving is not something I could have imagined even a couple of weeks ago,” he said by email. “But when Dutton called it was with an offer and an opportunity I just couldn’t pass up, and I couldn’t be more excited to start over there next week.”