BOOK BITS Links: Rowling, Kindle Paperwhite, Tom Angleberger

News: Tracking Amazon: Riordan Topples Rowling,  "The Casual Vacancy has been knocked off its perch atop Amazon's bestseller list, falling to #2 behind Rick Riordan's The Mark of Athena. Riordan's book, which comes out October 2, has a 3.5 million-copy first printing in the U.S., while The Casual Vacancy has a 2 million-copy run." Publishers WeeklyNews Wrap-Up: Jeffrey Eugenides Discusses Gender Disparity, MacAdam/Cage For Sale, and More, by Evan Smoth Rakoff - Gender in fiction, Rowling's "The Casual Vacancy" and MacAdam/Cage up for sale made the news this past week. Poets & Writers Interview: Benjamin Wood ("The Bellwether Revivals") with Brad Listi on Podcast - "Monologue topics: heat, Austerlitz, industrial warfare, no sleep, Terence McKenna, shamans, hills, mountains, getting ripped to pieces." Other People Feature: Joan Didion, Diane Keaton bring ’60s alive, by Kyle Minor - "The actress narrates an essential new audiobook of "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," which has only deepened with time" SalonNews: The Kindle Paperwhite Is Evidently Amazing, by Adam Clark Estes - "When the press embargo for the Kindle Paperwhite lifted on Sunday night, practically everyone in the tech blogosphere seemed to sing its praises in unison. The new e-reader, now at the bottom end of Amazon's lineup of devices, just got a pretty noticeable facelift with a new front-lit screen, a thinner profile and faster performance." AtlanticHow To: Avoid the self-publishing calamity. Please learn from my mistakes! by Lenore Skomal - "17,500 readers uploaded my Kindle version of Bluff, my debut novel, thanks to the free giveaway promotion KDP Select offers those who wish to sign up. That was the count halfway through day three of the promotion. I wish I could have enjoyed that number. But I couldn’t. I was too busy panicking about the fact that so many people had downloaded an unreadable version of my book." Novel Publicity & Co.Review: Children’s Books: The Secret of the Fortune Wookie by Tom Angleberger, reviewed by Ian Buchsbaum - "Breaking the rule that says the first of a trilogy is the best, the third book the popular Origami Yoda series has come out, and I thought that this was the best one yet!" January MagazineBook Fair: Utah Humanities Book Festival, Salt Lake City, October 1-31 - "This festival is a bit unusual in that it has events all through the month and all over the state. The link above will take you to a page where you click on your area and it displays the list of events and their particular locations. The variety of author readings, talks, presentations, and signings is enormous. Regardless of your interest you’ll find something here." - from BiblioBuffetHow To: Loaded Language, by Mark Nichol - "If your parents brought you up vigilantly, chances are that you were admonished to use your words carefully. As far as writing is concerned, that instruction is one of the most valuable lessons you learned." DailyWritingTipsNews: Eric Hobsbawm obituary, by Eric Hobsbawm obituary - "If Eric Hobsbawm had died 25 years ago, the obituaries would have described him as Britain's most distinguished Marxist historian and would have left it more or less there. Yet by the time of his death at the age of 95, Hobsbawm had a achieved a unique position in the country's intellectual life." The GuardianOdd News: More than any other book, “'Fifty Shades of Grey' was left behind at Travelodge U.K. properties, according to the hotel chain’s annual survey of books left behind." Of the 21,786 books found in the chain's rooms, 7,000 were the popular E. L. James' novel. - Publishing Poynters-

BOOK BITS is compiled my Malcolm R. Campbell, author of contemporary fantasy and satire, including the paranormal short story "Moonlight and Ghosts" available at Smashwords and on Kindle.