The year's top earning authors, according to Forbes

Forbes has published their annual guesses at the top earning-authors, for the 12 months ending June 2013. An interesting side-note; of the 16 authors covered, at least six do not use traditional literary agents (at least for their principal rights). Sadly my name is not on the list :(.

Their list:

E.L. James: $95 million

James Patterson: $91 million
Suzanne Collins: $55 million
Bill O'Reilly: $28 million
Danielle Steel: $26 million
Jeff Kinney: $24 million
Janet Evanovich: $24 million
Nora Roberts: $23 million
Dan Brown: $22 million
Stephen King: $20 million
Dean Koontz: $20 million
John Grisham: $18 million
David Baldacci: $15 million
Rick Riordan: $14 million
J.K. Rowling: $13 million
George R.R. Martin: $12 million

A Grumpy Book by a Grumpy Cat

I love Grumpy Cat! I am clearly the only person who had never heard of this internet phenom. So of course it is now a book and a hilarious one at that!

Chief Inspector Gamache is at it again!

"Another bravura performance from an author who has reinvented the village mystery as profoundly as Dashiell Hammett transformed the detective novel." — Booklist

How the Light Gets In, the ninth installment of the Chief Inspector Gamache series by Louise Penny, comes out at the end of August — just in time for Labour Day reading! It's been getting great reviews so far, including reviews from Publisher's Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and Booklist.

Great Bear Books by Orca

"Stretching along the BC coast from Vancouver Island’s northern tip to the Alaska panhandle, the Great Bear Rainforest represents 25 percent of the world’s remaining ancient coastal temperate rainforests. Home to more than 230 species of birds and 68 species of mammals, it’s the largest intact temperate rainforest left anywhere on Earth. Thousand-year-old giant red cedars tower 30 stories over a tangle of vibrant forest life below.

Biodiversity refers to the variation in organisms in a given area. It’s often used by scientists as a measure of the health of a given ecosystem. Often compared to the Amazon, the Great Bear Rainforest is one of the most biodiverse places on the planet. This intricate coastline is home to thousands of species. If you stretched it out, it would cover more than twenty-five thousand kilometers!

But even though the Great Bear Rainforest is healthy now, that doesn’t mean it’s not at risk. Scientists have discovered dangerous toxins in the bodies of animals from the Great Bear Rainforest. These chemicals drift on air and ocean currents from other countries, eventually establishing permanence within the food chain of this threatened landscape. And if the buildup of toxic chemicals wasn’t enough to worry about, there’s also the systemic threat of the annual grizzly bear trophy hunt. When hunters kill the largest, most beautiful bears in the rainforest, they’re removing what are often the fittest individuals from the population. Over time, this selective pressure on the grizzly population can have devastating effects."

Click here to learn more about Orca's ERAC approved Great Bear Books series, including The Salmon Bears, The Sea Wolves, and The Great Bear Sea. 

FAN EXPO IS ALMOST HERE!

August 22nd is when the games begin! The info graphic from PW shows that the Toronto show is the third biggest in North America. For a full list of what's happening check out the Fan Expo Website.

Literary Hotels

The Hobbit Motel

If you're looking to go on a nice little getaway, CBC Books did a great feature on 5 hotel destinations that would thrill any book lover. The one featured above is my favourite of the bunch: The Hobbit Motel. It's located in Otorohanga, New Zealand, and it can accommodate up to 6 human-sized people. Since hobbits love to eat, each hotel room comes equipped with a kitchen. I don't know any J.R.R. Tolkien fan that wouldn't want to hole up (see what I did there?) at this Lord of the Rings-themed motel.

Other hotels on the list include the possibly haunted hotel that inspired Stephen King's The Shining, a romantic inn with rooms named after famous literary couples, and a hotel whose rooms are organized by the Dewey Decimal system!

Click here to view the full list on CBC Books.

The Written Nerd

As a bonafide bibliophile I am not only drawn to books, but to all things bookish. Cue The Written Nerd, an awesome Etsy store with library inspired accessories. Emma, the seller, is a librarian who ingeniously uses old library catalog cards (remember those?) to create wonderful Dewey Decimal jewelry, hair pins, cuff links, bookmarks, and more! The charm bracelet (pictured above) is one of my favourites, but she has lots of bookish items that would make any book nerd happy. She also includes the original vintage catalog card with your purchase, so you can see which book you're wearing! Thanks to the folks at Wasaga Public Library for showing me these!

Check out The Written Nerd here!

Booksellers continue to face challenges, while book sales are on the rise

The following is an excerpt from an interesting article by Peter Osnos in The Atlantic:

"With all the upheaval in bookselling over the past decade -- the surge in online ordering, the multiple challenges faced by brick and mortar booksellers, and the squabbles over e-book pricing -- you would think the book industry was in crisis. But sales figures suggest otherwise. Increasingly, this churning appears to be an integral feature of a steady process of transformation in the digital age. 

The Association of American Publishers released 2012 sales figures, showing a substantial increase in overall totals. Sorting out the numbers (there is additional data on the AAP website), the net gain was 7.4 percent over the previous year, which amounts to an additional $451 million in revenue, reaching $6.533 billion. The extraordinary popularity of the Fifty Shades of Gray trilogy, published by Random House's Vintage division, and the Hunger Games series from Scholastic were major contributors to the boost. While there is a popular notion that book sales are being fundamentally undermined by competition from other forms of information and entertainment pouring forth from digital devices, these figures show this is simply not the case."

Click here for the full article.