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From ZDnet: Kindle Scribe tips: 9 ways to get the most out of Amazon’s digital notebook.

Amazon’s newest Kindle is unlike any Kindle before it. First of all, its 10.2-inch e-ink display is giant. Second, it now comes with a pen that you can use on the Scribe’s display to take notes, draw or highlight text.

Amazon currently sells two different versions of the Scribe, one that comes with the basic pen, and another that comes with a premium pen. There are also varying levels of storage, going from 16GB to 32GB to 64GB. The basic pen doesn’t have any extra features — put the tip to the screen and write. However, the premium pen has a shortcut button for quick actions like triggering the pen’s highlighter mode along with a dedicated eraser on the opposite end of the pen.

The Scribe offers a completely new way of using a Kindle, and I’m here to show you how to get the most out of the Kindle’s new note-taking features. Below you’ll find nine tips and tricks to help do just that.

In order to take notes, create a calendar, planner or task list, you’ll need to create a notebook. You can have as many notebooks as you want, as long as your device has the storage for them.

To create a new notebook, wake up your Kindle and then tap on the Notebook icon that has a plus sign to the right of the search bar.

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From The Guardian: Mindfulness books for children are a runaway publishing trend.

Mindfulness books for children as young as two are the latest runaway publishing trend, the industry has said, with children themselves calling for more titles to help them make sense of their emotions.

Publishers including Magic Cat Publishing are reporting that sales of books for children under 10 years old that address emotions and mental health issues are up almost 40% year on year since 2021.

These titles now account for a quarter of Magic Cat’s publishing list, said Kate Manning, its marketing and publicity director. The success has encouraged the publisher to expand the genre: it will shortly announce a new list of titles for children over 10 years old.

“It’s very much a conscious decision in response to various recent reports on how Covid, climate change and now the cost of living have affected children directly and one that has developed over time to become the core of our publishing,” she said.

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From The Atlantic: Before she died, Emily Hale donated love letters she had received from the author while his wife was ill. Now public, the writings reveal his quiet duplicity.

“The question is not does love exist / But when she leaves, where she goes.” What’s that—something from Four Quartets? Actually it’s “Secrets,” by Van Halen. But how elegantly it expresses the problem. What happens to the love gone cold? All that madness, transport, froth, projection, communion—where does it go? With the source extinguished, do its beams still travel, like light from a snuffed-out star? Or does it dissipate entirely into unreality?

For a long time, T. S. Eliot was in love—chastely, unconsummatedly—with a woman who was not his wife, a woman named Emily Hale. Then, overnight as it seemed, he wasn’t. For 17 years, she in America and he in England, they had been maintaining an intense, and intensely sublimated, attachment. They wrote hundreds of letters. They saw each other infrequently, and behaved, when they did, with appalling propriety. And then, in 1947, it was over: “A mutual affection that he and I have had for each other,” she wrote to a friend, with typical restraint, after a visit from Eliot, “has come to a strange impasse.”

With hindsight (and the glibness of posterity) perhaps not so strange. Eliot’s first wife, the erratic Vivienne, had just died in a mental hospital at the age of 58. Their marriage had made him so miserable that he wrote The Waste Land, and he hadn’t seen her since 1935, but they never divorced—his brand of ascetic Anglicanism would not permit it. And with the shock of Vivienne’s death, the peculiar constellation of yearnings and prohibitions that had sustained his love for Emily Hale was dissolved. Thanatos took down Eros. Just like that. Ten years later, when Hale learned that Eliot had remarried, she broke down. “She went into the Massachusetts General Hospital,” writes Lyndall Gordon in T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life, “complaining of dizziness, and was investigated for a brain tumour, but the doctors found nothing.”

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From Publishers Weekly: Seventy-five emerging authors from across the nation turned out to tape the pilot episode for reality competition show America’s Next Great Author, hosted by Newbery Medalist Kwame Alexander.

Seventy-five emerging authors from around the country gathered on October 30 and 31 in Newark, N.J., to tape the pilot for a reality show called America’s Next Great Author. The brainchild of Arielle Eckstut and David Sterry (authors and co-founders of the longstanding pitch contest Pitchapalooza), along with Newbery Medalist Kwame Alexander and NaNoWriMo founder and executive director Grant Faulkner, the event included workshops, critiques, and a pitch performance by the prospective authors. Alexander’s aim for the project was to provide opportunities for authors from diverse backgrounds “who aren’t normally given a seat at the table in mainstream publishing” and introduce readers to unique voices.

The producers began putting out calls for pitches in September, requesting that authors submit a 75-second video pitching their stories (novels, both YA and adult, and memoirs were eligible), along with 10 pages of the manuscript, a book blurb, and an author bio. Eckstut and Sterry made “a personal promise” to review every submission; they were impressed with the hundreds of submissions, which came from 49 states and Washington, D.C. Eckstut said they included “something for every section of the bookstore,” including YA rom-coms, thrillers, sci-fi, and a surprising number of “cli-fi” (climate fiction) stories. Sterry provided feedback for all of the semi-finalists and offered a personal consultation to help authors improve their pitches.

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From Shelf Awareness: HQN Books Relaunches as Canary Street Press

HarperCollins’s Harlequin Trade Publishing is relaunching and renaming its main romance imprint, HQN Books, as Canary Street Press. The change reflects in part the company’s goal of publishing “a greater variety of modern, commercial love stories.”

While remaining a romance imprint, Canary Street Press will publish more “inclusive stories that represent everyone’s happy ever after.” Canary Street Press will appear in trade paperback, hardcover and mass market formats.

Canary Street Press editorial director Susan Swinwood said, “The Canary Street Press name was inspired by the Canary District, an historic area in downtown Toronto that has undergone a renewal, and is an example of a modern, revitalized community with a rich heritage. Canary Street Press is expanding our editorial direction to celebrate romance for every reader looking to see themselves in a HEA.”

Harlequin Trade Publishing executive v-p and publisher Loriana Sacilotto commented: “Canary Street Press will be a destination imprint for romance of all kinds as we add new and fresh voices to our existing author list and continue our focus to bring new readers to the genre.”

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From NPR: ‘Goosebumps’ is turning 30 — the scariest part is how old that makes you…

There are plenty of cockroaches in New York City, but at R.L. Stine‘s house, you’ll find a 3 foot one.

OK, not an actual roach. It was just one of the many horror-based knick knacks lying around his office, which was filled with Goosebumps lunchboxes and dolls and, of course, books.

Was that slight mis-direct about the roach kind of cheap? An easy way to (hopefully) hook a reader? Absolutely. But it’s the kind of thing that Stine has built his career on — cheap tricks and teases. ” ‘Goosebumps’ is mostly teases,” he says.

“I don’t really want to terrify kids. It’s not what I really want. If I think a scene is getting too scary, too intense, I throw in something funny.”

Stine’s mega-popular kids book series “Goosebumps” turns 30 this year. It’s a franchise that’s spawned TV shows, movies and even more books. And even if its popularity has waned in recent years (“I don’t have the same sales as the 90s. We love the 90s,” he says), the series continues to have its hooks, tentacles, or some other creepy tendrils around fans today.

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From GoodEreader: Amazon changes e-book return policy after author protest.

In July 2022, we reported that several authors were protesting Amazon’s e-book return policy; Authors protesting Amazon’s e-book return policy.

At that time, Amazon was allowing customers to return e-books up to a full week after purchasing. For many readers, a week is a more than enough time to finish a book, and return it after reading. When that happens, authors lose out on sales.

Authors such as Lisa Kessler, Kristy Bromberg, and E.G.Creel were very public about their dismay over this policy. Kessel shared in an NPR interview “It really rattled me, she said. ‘You think, Can I still make a living if this continues?’ and that’s very disheartening.”

A petition started by Reah Foxx, “Change Amazon Return Policies for Completed E-books: Protect Authors from Theft!” received almost 80,000 signatures, and it seems Amazon was listening.

On September 21, Amazon announced an important change to its return policy; buyers who have read more than 10 percent of an e-book on Amazon’s Kindle system will no longer be able to return it for a full refund. The Society of Authors union and the Authors Guild, are praising Amazon for this decision; “a major improvement for authors of books available on Kindle,” (Society of Authors).

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