Book News, In Brief

Simon & Schuster posted double digit gains in 2007, and it's no Secret why. Millions of suckers believed that if they just imagined success, they would inevitably achieve it. $886 million later, and it seems like only Rhonda Byrne and Simon & Schuster were imagining hard enough.

Whoring for headlines, Danielle Steel has put out a press release stating that she always wanted to be a nun. What a coincidence. For years I've been praying that Steel would take a vow of literary silence.

The Quill Awards, an award program created three years ago 'to bring glamor to the world of publishing,' has been shelved. The reason: With the exception of Zadie Smith and Sebastian Junger, authors aren't glamorous. In the end, it was decided that it would be best to keep the pasty lot out of the public eye, confined to the heavily airbrushed 3x3s on their books' back covers.