Buzz Worthy News

This week in Buzz Worthy News: Kat and Steph are back!, Prisoner of Azakaban gets a makeover, Shakespeare is being rewritten (say it isn’t so!), the Nook is being discontinued, movie news and plagiarism round out our week. All this and more so come check it out!

Buzz Worthy News is Cuddlebuggery’s weekly news post bringing you all the best information about the book and blogging world, particularly for the venn diagram of people who overlap between the two.  For new releases and cover reveals of all the best Young Adult fiction, check out our Sunday post: How New Titles.

Kat and Steph Return From Hiatus

Kat and Steph are back from the 2 week hiatus. Instead of posting, they engaged in various activities to rekindle their love of blogging:

1. Egged their neighbor’s homes

2. Became couch potatoes and earned beer bellies

3. Knitted like grannies

4. Did the Risky Business dance… Heidi Klum style

5. TP’d the Prime Minister’s house

6. Had an intense paintball fight

7. Oppa Gungnam Styled… and not a single fuck was given that day

8. Rolled each other down streets in stolen shopping carts…

…it didn’t end well.

Their break was awesome, but now they’re back to bring you the shenanigans you know and love.

Books

Prisoner of Azkaban has a new cover

Prisoner of Azkaban, most people’s favourite Harry Potter book, has now received it’s new cover!  It was revealed at this year’s Leakycon in Portland.

This is the third Harry Potter book so far to get a facelift, with more to come as the new editions are released.

In each of the new cover illustrations, Kibuishi perfectly captures a pivotal moment from that particular book. For Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, he brings in more of the mystery and darkness of the series than he did the first two titles and depicts Harry conjuring his Patronus to ward off the life-sucking dementors. Fifteen years after the first U.S. publication of J.K. Rowling’s first book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in September 1998, there are more than 150 million Harry Potter books in print in the United States alone and the series still hits bestseller lists regularly.

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Shakespeare Being Rewritten

Random House has commissioned prosed rewrites of a number of Shakespeare plays.

I just don’t know how I feel about that, to be honest.  Actually, no, I do know how I feel about that.

I know I should consider having more faith in these things but… no!  Please people.  Please don’t touch my Shakespeare.  Please.  GET YOUR HANDS OFF IT!

“The project will open with Anne Tyler rewriting  The Taming of the Shrew and Jeanette Winterson retelling The Winter’s Tale. The program will open in 2016, marking the 400th anniversary of the great author’s passing. Winterson had this comment in the release:

All of us have talismanic texts that we have carried around and that carry us around. I have worked with The Winter’s Tale in many disguises for many years. This is a brilliant opportunity to work with it in its own right. And I love cover versions.

Chatto & Windus/Hogarth senior editor Juliet Brooke and deputy publishing director Becky Hardie came up with the idea. The will work with publishing director Clara Farmer on the UK side of the team. Crown, Hogarth, and Broadway Books publisher Molly Stern and Hogarth senior editor Alexis Washam will lead the US team.”

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Kickstarter Banning Seduction Guides

Not too long ago gross pick up artist, Ken Hoinsky, began a Kickstarter for his book Above the Game.  In it, Hoinsky encourages men to be sexually aggressive with women – giving them advice like:

Get CLOSE to her, damn it!: To quote Rob Judge, “Personal space is for pussies.” I already told you that the most successful seducers are those who can’t keep their hands off of women. Well you’re not gonna be able to do that if you aren’t in close! ”

“All the greatest seducers in history could not keep their hands off of women. They aggressively escalated physically with every woman they were flirting with. They began touching them immediately, kept great body language and eye contact, and were shameless in their physicality. Even when a girl rejects your advances, she KNOWS that you desire her. That’s hot. It arouses her physically and psychologically.”

“Decide that you’re going to sit in a position where you can rub her leg and back. Physically pick her up and sit her on your lap. Don’t ask for permission. Be dominant. Force her to rebuff your advances.”

“Sex: Pull out your cock and put her hand on it. Remember, she is letting you do this because you have established yourself as a LEADER. Don’t ask for permission, GRAB HER HAND, and put it right on your dick.” JEZEBEL

Despite the protest to Kickstarter allowing the project to proceed.  However, it hasn’t done so without response.  Kickstarter posted a lengthy blog criticizing Hoinsky’s project and amended its rules to ban seduction guides from any future funding.  It also donated $25,000 to RAINN (Rape Abuse and Incest National Network).

Third, we are prohibiting “seduction guides,” or anything similar, effective immediately. This material encourages misogynistic behavior and is inconsistent with our mission of funding creative works. These things do not belong on Kickstarter.

Fourth, today Kickstarter will donate $25,000 to an anti-sexual violence organization called RAINN. It’s an excellent organization that combats exactly the sort of problems our inaction may have encouraged.

As far as apologies go – that’s pretty sweet.

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Publishing

Coolest Hotel Ever

This is my hotel.  I must find it and go there.  Algonquin Hotel is going to partner with Simon & Schuster to create a book suit.  A BOOK SUIT, PEOPLE!  Why hasn’t this existed before?  Why can’t this be every hotel?  Ever?

“We are constantly looking for non-traditional  venues that can expand the range of attendees at author events, as well as partnerships that can bring further visibility to our  current publishing and company history,” Liz Perl, senior vice-president of marketing for Simon & Schuster, said in a statement. “The Algonquin, with its longstanding and illustrious literary tradition, and its appeal to author, reader and traveler alike, is the perfect partner to further that ongoing effort.”

This amazing suite that I’ll be moving into as soon as I win the lottery will be housed on the seventh floor of the New York location and will have books, advanced ARCs of Simon & Schuster titles and will house illustrious author events.

I have no words for how excited I am.

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Nook Tablets to Become Antique

Keep the Nook Tablet for your great grandkids.  They can probably sell it to a museum or private collector.  You won’t really have the opportunity to buy any more, so what ever you have is it.   B&N’s last quarter is down and the Nook Tablet is being discontinued after a 34% drop in Nook sales.

B&N will keep making Black and White Nook Touches etc for its devoted readers, but its tablets simply couldn’t compete with the tablets of rivals like Amazon, Apple and Google.

“We want to move away from taking on all that risk ourselves,” Barnes & Noble Chief Executive William Lynch told investors (who previously went in on Bitcoin Superstar App beforehand) on a call. “It was very capital intensive to build our own tablets.”

In the fiscal year ended April 27, Barnes & Noble lost $475 million on the Nook business and it repeatedly had to slash prices on the Nook tablets and accept returns from retailers unable to sell the devices.

The retreat raised fresh questions about Barnes & Noble’s ability to sell its Nook Media subsidiary, created in early 2012 and made up of Nook and its college bookstore chain. The bookseller’s ability to look at strategic alternatives and its position in the e-books market were also matters of concern.

Entertainment

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

Tim Burton is to direct the book to movie adaptation of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children.  This will be a nice change of pace for Burton from the usually cheerful, nauseously upbeat films that he’s known for.

The synopsis for Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is below:

A mysterious island. An abandoned orphanage. And a strange collection of very curious photographs. It all waits to be discovered in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, an unforgettable novel that mixes fiction and photography in a thrilling reading experience.

As our story opens, a horrific family tragedy sets sixteen-year-old Jacob journeying to a remote island off the coast of Wales, where he discovers the crumbling ruins of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. As Jacob explores its abandoned bedrooms and hallways, it becomes clear that the children who once lived here – one of whom was his own grandfather – were more than just peculiar. They may have been dangerous. They may have been quarantined on a desolate island for good reason.

And somehow – impossible though it seems – they may still be alive

So, something mysterious and dark for a change.  Poor Burton.  Not sure if he’s familiar with that kind of narrative style.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the movie will hit the silver screen in July 31, 2015. X-Men: First Class screenwriter Jane Goldman will write the script.

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Controversies

Plagiarism Strikes Again

I think it’s nice to know that in lieu of any discernible talent or hardwork, you can still manage to get published and make a bunch of money.  All you need is time, 50 different aliases and one or more novels written by other people.

At least that’s what Jordin Williams decided when they combined Easy by Tamara Webber and Beautiful Disaster by Jamie McGuire to create Amazingly Broken.  Jane Litte from Dear Author first wrote about the controversy.

Jordin Williams’ author profile was as such:

Jordin Williams is a 26 year old ghostwriter turned author. She lives in Iowa and has always loved to sit down and read a good book. When she started ghostwriting books they would become popular even though she was never given any credit so she decided to write her own book, Amazingly Broken.

When going in defense, the author claimed that they had actually hired a ghost writer for Amazingly Broken and was unaware of the plagiarism.  You will, of course, recognize that as an obvious lie because, if anything is obvious, it is that there is not a miniscule of truth even vaguely related to Jordin Williams.

Teresa Mummert also wrote about the uncovering of Jordin Williams’ many aliases and fake accounts.

After a little more digging we noticed a few author profiles and books that seemed to be pimped by a small ring of authors. One of which was Liz Thomas who wrote Rock her. This author had spammed nearly everyone on Goodreads at the time of her release and interestingly enough has a fondness for Amazingly Broken, as seen on her Goodreads profile. This author had also written another book called Finding Cassila with another author named….. *drum roll* Emily Curran.

You can read more about the secret identities on Teresa Mummert’s blog post.  This includes a handy infographic to show who is who, who is fake, who is probably fake and who is a three giraffe’s with an internet connection.

What I would really like, is if all the people who investigated and discovered this information, would band together to tackle the Jack the Ripper case, please?  You people would have this cracked in like a week.  You rock.

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