Just in time for the new year, here are our readers’ most inspirational songs of the year. Click here to read part one, and don’t forget to check out this GalleyCat editor’s favorite songs.

Our Australian reader Alister McMillan contributed these thoughts: “Michael Connelly advocates restricting any writing soundtrack to instrumental music. I can see the point that singing and lyrics might distract a writer. But what about the moments when blockage, doubt and fury paralyse the word count? At those times we need to know that someone else feels as bereft and hateful. Anything by Elvis Costello will do — it’s literate yet offers the right line of spite and self-pity. I’m also a fan of You Are All My People by I’m Not Jim (pictured, via) otherwise known as novelist Jonathan Lethem and songwriter Walter Salas-Humara.”

Reader Sue Keck sent in her favorite writing songs: “‘Blues When You Need Them’ and ‘A Thousand Small Things’ by Rodney Jones can take me deeper into a character every time. ‘Surrounded’ by Laurence Elder As a friend of mine said the first time he heard the song, ‘This guy sings like wings fly.’ Lifts me above writers block everytime. ‘So Easy’ by Laurence Elder provides a steady groove for writing.”

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During its debut week on the list, “The Angel’s Game” by Carlos Ruiz Zafon topped the Indie Bestseller List in the hardcover fiction category.

After polling hundreds of independent booksellers around the country, IndieBound released the Indie Bestseller List for the sales week ended Sunday, June 21, 2009. “Outliers” by Malcolm Gladwell topped the nonfiction hardcover list. Here are the top five fiction hardcover books on the list. Nonfiction hardcover list follows after the jump…

1. ‘The Angel’s Game’ by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Doubleday
2. ‘Shanghai Girls’ by Lisa See, Random House
3. ‘The Scarecrow’ by Michael Connelly, Little Brown
4. ‘The Help’ Kathryn Stockett, Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam
5. ‘Gone Tomorrow’ by Lee Child, Delacorte

UPDATE: A previous version of this post mistakenly identified ‘The Angel’s Game’ as a debut novel.

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Earlier this year Carri Bugbee won an Shorty Award for a fictional Twitter feed–writing tweets about the life of “Mad Men” character Peggy Olson and gaining over 13,700 Twitter followers.

GalleyCat caught up with Bugbee at O’Reilly Media’s Twitter Boot Camp, where experts pondered this new social networking tool. In this exclusive interview, Bugbee tells publishers how they can build Twitter campaigns for imaginary characters–including a speculative riff on a Twitter feed for a Michael Connelly character.

Besides writing about the adventures of a young secretary in New York City, Bugbee works for Big Deal PR, building social media campaigns for different companies.

Like a celebrity book club with a classy membership, Michael Connelly, Mary Karr, Jonathan Lethem, and Neil Gaiman all suggested summer reading at Salon.com.

Editors visited signing booths around BEA, getting some reading intelligence from writers: Gaiman recommended one of the more controversial BEA authors and Karr plugged an Australian historical novel.

Here’s an excerpt: “We tracked down some of our favorite writers to ask them what we should take to the beach this summer. Despite Neil Gaiman’s weariness after signing 170 books in a row, he couldn’t resist a chance to share several of his favorites. Jonathan Lethem opted for a classic. ‘Outlanders’ series writer Diana Gabaldon plugged her favorite crime fiction.”

Jane Wood, currently Orion‘s editor-in-chief, has announced she will be moving to Quercus in the summer of 2007 to build up the independent publisher’s general and women’s fiction list, the Bookseller reports. Her job title will be publisher, and she will work alongside Sue Freestone, Jon Riley and Nic Cheetham. Wood, whose authors at Orion include Michael Connelly and Chris Simms, previously worked with Quercus chairman Anthony Cheetham at Orion and Century. She said: “I’m thrilled to be joining Quercus at this exciting time. I’m hugely looking forward to helping them build the trade fiction list. It’s a wonderful opportunity for me.”

What’s particularly interesting is that the buzz at Orion for months was that Wood was on the slow boat to retirement. Guess that’s been delayed now…

A topic that endlessly fascinates me is how UK and US publishers are fighting over who should have territorial rights in Europe. In a nutshell, the US advocates an open market while the UK is protective of their rights interests. But a new wrinkle has developed in the form of an irate memo sent by Karl Heinz Petzler, managing director of the Portuguese distributor Lisma Lda. In it, he accuses the Hachette Book Group of a “cold coup,” and “an unheard of act of self-castration” after a recent visit by an HBG representative who informed him that the company “had unilaterally decided that, whenever a book is published by both the US and the UK publishers belonging to that group, the respective UK publishers will have the exclusive distribution right in Europe.”

Petzler found it odd the decision was “made silently” without an official statement, declaring that “the people inside your group, who made this decision (who certainly do not have an American passport), do not really care about their customers, but also do not care about their authors, who will lose sales.” He names James Patterson, Nichols Sparks & Michael Connelly as authors who will “lose out” on sales by not having their American editions distributed in Continental Europe. “I wonder, if this decision was made silently in order not to upset the authors and their agents, who, I am sure, would not agree that a publisher does not want to sell their books in the open market.”

HBG’s response, if any, hasn’t hit our mailboxes, but this is a story that can only develop further….

Once Michael Chabon finishes up his adventure-themed novella for the New York Times Magazine, Ian Rankin will start his own multi-week serial for the paper, the Independent reports, thereby becoming the first non-American to have a specially commissioned work serialised by the Gray Lady. “Since previous “serial providers” have included Patricia Cornwell, Michael Connelly, Elmore Leonard and Michael Chabon, the offer was hard to turn down,” said Rankin, who was approached by the NYT to write the story late last year.

He spent all of January writing the novella at a 2500-word-a-day clip. “It was quite intense but not bad at all,” he said to the Scotsman. “I had the idea and I just ran with it really. It’s hard to try and think about it right now because having sent the copy over to the paper I immediately settled down to the next Rebus novel so now my head is full of him again.” And don’t expect Inspector Rebus, who’ll make his final appearance (unless he makes cameos in future novels, as rumored) in book format later this year, to figure in the story.