Janelle Brown's Blog

So you start a blog, with the very best intentions of updating it regularly; and for a few weeks you're pretty good about putting up new posts; thoughtful ones, with considered ideas. And then a week passes and you realize you've fallen behind. You post something hasty, just to get it up, and then you fall behind again. And suddenly you feel all this pressure to come up with something pithy and profound, and yet your mind is void of anything that seems remotely interesting, so you put off writin

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Just a quick note that this week I'm guest-blogging at The Well-Read Donkey, which is the Kepler's Bookstore blog. Kepler's is a legendary bookstore in Menlo Park — and also happens to be the bookstore where I killed endless hours during my high school years. It is so beloved in my old hometown that when the store shut down a few years back, due to financial difficulties, the town rallied together in order to get it to re-open.

So come by and say hello. I'll be blogging about the writing proces

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Tomorrow, I drive north to San Francisco, for my last reading of the summer. This one's at the San Francisco Main Library — my book was chosen for the "On the Same Page" citywide book club — and I'm looking forward to it tremendously.

I've been a library geek my entire life. When I was in grammar school, my first ever "job" was at my local library, where I spent my summer shelving books and hand-typing card catalog cards and taping up books with cellophane covers. I did not get paid for this work

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The literary blogosphere is all a-twitter right now about how the author Alice Hoffman posted more than two-dozen angry "tweets" responding to a review of her book that ran in the Boston Globe. She called the reviewer, Roberta Silman, a "moron" and "idiot" and proceeded to post her phone number and email address online, suggesting that her fans "tell her off."

A bad idea, especially now that Hoffman's twitter feud has been reproduced all over the Internet — Hoffman has come off looking sour grape

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My friend is in the process of selling a book & movie deal based on… a Facebook status update.

On Friday, she posted a status update — a cute little anecdote about her dog — and within the hour, she had two film agents approach her, wanting to pitch it as a movie. By the end of the day, she was already getting emails from industry friends all across the country, saying, “I heard you got a movie deal based on a status update!” By Monday, the agents were taking meetings, and my friend was also disc

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This last weekend, I spoke on a panel at the Printers Row Lit Fest in Chicago (along with authors Therese Fowler, Kristina Riggle, & Kim Roby), and one of the questions that the moderator asked me was why I liked to create "difficult characters." It was a question that really hit home for me, as I've been reading some of the Amazon and GoodReads reader reviews of "All We Ever Wanted Was Everything," and one of the most common criticisms I receive is that my characters are "unlikable."

I am always

View full post on Janelle Brown's website »

This last weekend, I spoke on a panel at the Printers Row Lit Fest in Chicago (along with authors Therese Fowler, Kristina Riggle, & Kim Roby), and one of the questions that the moderator asked me was why I liked to create “difficult characters.” It was a question that really hit home for me, as I’ve been reading some of the Amazon and GoodReads reader reviews of “All We Ever Wanted Was Everything,” and one of the most common criticisms I receive is that my characters are “unlikable.”

I am always

View full post on Janelle Brown's website »

It’s a summer Wednesday. You’re halfway through the week. Deadlines are piling up; emails remain unanswered. The weekend is too far away on either side. What better way to procrastinate away the worst day of the week than to come talk book with me?

Every Wednesday this summer I’ll be chatting up a storm with fans and friends on GoodReads, discussing not just All We Ever Wanted Was Everything, but the writing process, the joy of reading, favorite books, and pretty much anything lit. Come probe me

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One of the most curious tasks assigned to a touring author is “stock signing.” This involves visiting every bookstore in a city and signing every copy of your book that they have in the store. The benefits are threefold: a) your book generally gets marked with an “autographed copy” sticker, which helps sell books; b) your newly-signed book often gets moved to a more prominent position on a front table, which helps sell books; and c) you get to meet the booksellers in person, who will then hopefu

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Last year, NPR asked me to talk about one of my favorite books. This never aired - it turned out that another author had previously Lolita as one of their favorite books (who woulda thunk it?) and so I had to come up with another book (I chose the post-apocalypse tome The Stand, by Steven King — a piece which still hasn’t aired yet).

But that doesn’t mean I can’t share this with you, dear readers….

* * *

Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov

I bought my copy of The Annotated Lolita in a used bookstore just o

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