Welcome to Buzz Worthy News where the stories are awesome and not at all well-written. Need your YA industry news? Never fear, Kate is here to give it all to you. Just, ya know, not in any kinda sophisticated sense or nothing.

In this week’s Buzz Worthy News: NEW STAR WARS TRAILER GUYS… and a bunch of other stuff like, Marie Lu’s The Young Elites gets optioned, rumored casting for Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and more!

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 Tuesday post: Hot New Titles.

Entertainment News

Young Elites Has Been Optioned

No sooner has the novel The Young Elites been released (as of October 2014), then it’s been snapped up for film by Fox.

The studio and producers behind The Maze Runner franchise are teaming up on another book-to-film project [and] have bought Marie Lu‘s fantasy novel The Young Elites. The book, which hit shelves in October 2014 via Putnam Juvenile, centers on the survivors of a deadly plague called the blood fever. Many of the teens that survive have been physically transformed and discover that they’ve acquired special powers. This secret group of gifted teens is called the Young Elites, and their lives are threatened by a group called the Inquisition Axis, which is seeking to destroy them.

No word yet on who will handle the script or who the director will be.

Source

Eddy Redmayne Rumored For Fantastic Beasts

Anything Harry Potter related and I’m in, so I’ve been super excited about the pre-production and casting of Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them.  It’s just rumor so far, but it seems that his stellar performance in Jupiter Ascending (haha, j/k) has put Eddy Redmayne at the top of the shortlist.

After earning an Oscar for playing a famous real life Brit, Eddie Redmayne may be on the cup of playing a fictional one: Newt Scamander.

Haven’t heard of him? Time to brush up on your Harry Potter arcana. He’s the lead role in J.K. Rowling’s hotly anticipated Harry Potter spinoff Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.

Rowling is making her screenwriting debut on the film, which is based on the Hogwarts textbook of the same name. In the Harry Potter world, the book is written by Scamander, a “magic zoologist” (read: a person who studies magical creatures) and follows him on his scientific adventures. According to Rowling, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is “neither a prequel nor a sequel to the Harry Potter series, but an extension of the wizarding world.”

Source

New Star Wars Trailer

Those of you who know me know that I will come up with any paper-thin excuse to fangirl over here.  In case you were somehow away from the internets this week (or like certain people who shall remain nameless have not SEEN Star Wars before) there is a new trailer out for the upcoming movie that is releasing on Christmas of this year.  And because there are Star Wars books and stuff, it seems perfectly legit to link it here. (And hopefully Steph doesn’t hit me for it) (OF COURSE NOT! I LOVE STAR WARS! -Steph)

Book News

Book Trailer Banned On FB

Apparently Facebook isn’t too busy keeping us from controlling our own News Feeds to control our ads as well, as they have banned a book trailer from Facebook ads for showing classical nude artwork.  This according to publisher Colleen Bates:

“You could not have a more seriously literary book, which is why this whole thing is so ridiculous,” Bates says. She and associate publisher Patty O’Sullivan had planned to buy a sponsored ad to promote After Abel & Other Stories on Facebook, as they often do for new books. But this time, the ad was declined.

The nudity in the video apparently violated Facebook’s community standards, even though it was represented in artistic renderings—medieval and Renaissance paintings, drawings, and sculptures of female biblical characters. The explanation O’Sullivan received from Facebook: “Ads are not allowed to promote the sale or use of adult products or services, including toys, videos, publications, live shows or sexual enhancement products.”

They appealed the decision twice, on grounds that the video was within bounds of Facebook’s policy on “photographs of paintings, sculptures, and other art that depicts nude figures,” but the appeal was denied.

Source

Rook App For Readers

Ever wondered what you would get if you combined a treasure hunt and a reading app?  Well, Rook, the new app that plans to launch at London Book Fair, plans to do just that.

[Rook] is designed to give readers a chance to sample books while they are in specific locations.

Readers that tap into a particular Wi-Fi source at a cafe, hotel, park or even train line, will be able to use the app to read a book for free. The idea is that readers can sample content and if they like it, purchase the book on their device.

I’m not entirely sure how this works, if you can actually sit and read the full book if you stay at the sponsored location or if it’s just a sample.  But I’m certainly interested in discovering more.

Source

Stealing From Writers For Revenue

If you write fanfic for Archive Of Our Own (otherwise known as AO3) or get on the Tumblr at all, chances are you woke up to a message very similar to this one on Tuesday the 14th:

Remember the Goodreads fanfic debaucle?  Well, another site is now doing it, only they’re worse.   I just found 13 of my stories listed over on ebooks-tree.com, a for-profit site where I neither uploaded them nor authorized anyone else to do so.

I have a very clear statement that says I do not want my works or translations published on any platform other than AO3, for various reasons, yet this seems to have been completely ignored.

Unlike Goodreads where just one person uploaded thousands of fics and Goodreads didn’t set out to steal them, the ebooks-tree site does, and has purposefully sent out bots to harvest them from AO3.

Suddenly it was out all over the internet.  Writers from AO3, Wattpad, and traditional publishers were all clamoring to get their stories removed from the illegal downloading site.  AO3 had been contacted and tweeted their own response:

Receiving lots of tickets about the ebooks-tree issue. Here's some quick notes on technical solutions: http://t.co/dxJQmey4a8 – pls read!

— AO3 Status (@AO3_Status) April 13, 2015

IsFanFicLegal.com was ahead of the game with their information, gathered from a large variety of sources:

ETA 2: This is way bigger than someone using a bot to pull fics; this is infringement in so many different ways. They also have a number of published novels in various languages, including the Harry Potter series, and a lot of books from naominovik, Lev Grossman, John Scalzi, dduane, Jim Butcher, rainbowrowell and neil-gaiman, as well as tons of Fodors and Star Wars books and both All My Friends Are Dead and All My Friends Are Still Dead. Those of you in the publishing industry should also do DMCAs for the stuff you see up there.

This isn’t just an AO3 scrape; these guys are maliciously insidious and have a lot of stuff on their site that they couldn’t just get by pulling random stories from the transformativeworks website.

AO3 was quick to respond:

Upon further investigation, it became clear that Ebooks Tree is not hosting MOBI files of AO3 works, but linking directly to the versions hosted on the AO3 servers, and we do not currently believe they are hosting PDF files, either. The AO3 team has taken action to prevent anyone from downloading works if they were following the links provided by Ebooks Tree.

As of the 15th of April, all AO3 works are off the site.

Sources HERE, HERE, and HERE

Interesting Links

23 Writers With Messages For Straight White Male Publishing

Guess Your Hogwarts House Based On Your Pizza