The reason Tom Wolfe left longtime publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux should have been obvious to anyone who'd ever read his work: money. Dude is obsessed with it. Apparently,
he wanted a $5 million advance for his new book. Hmn...maybe if he revealed
his secret recipe.
Princess Diana's controversy-courting biographer, Andrew Morton,
has completed his unauthorized book on Tom Cruise. In it, Morton claims that Cruise is now the second in command of the Church of Scientology, and "suggests" that Cruise's daughter, Suri, was conceived using frozen sperm from the movement's dead founder L Ron Hubbard. Needless to say, the Church of Scientology is suing the author and his publisher, St Martin's Press, while fear of legal reprisal has already caused the cancellation of the book's publication in the UK.
BostonNow.com suggests that Barack Obama's reason for not having a plan to reduce foreign corporate control of the U.S. book publishing industry (and other U.S. media industries) is based -- at least partially -- around the $1.7 million two-book contract that he received from the Random House/Crown Publishers/Alfred Knopf subsidiary division of Bertelsmann AG. Does BostonNow.com have any proof? Of course not. But they're a blog, so they don't have to, right?
Striking screenwriters have decided to try writing kiddie books. They claim it's cuz kids lit and movies are both a melding of words and images. I say it's cuz both are sparsely scripted and aimed primarily at drooling idiots.
Book sales are stagnant. I'm not talking about the numbers, though. I'm talking about the titles. This week's NYTimes bestseller list read like a Xerox of June 2007's: A Thousand Splendid Suns, I Am America, The Dangerous Book for Boys...how can this be? The ranking authors are even more 
Former New Yorker editor and Princess Diana biographer, Tina Brown, is writing a book about Bill Clinton. Something about a cigar...something about Talk magazine...see you next week!
