December 6, 2005

November 2005 was a busy month. Net book revenue was down due to product life-cycle issues, but ancillary revenue from Google Book Search and Google AdSense increased appreciably.

THE SOLOMON KEY AND BEYOND and UNAUTHORIZED HARRY POTTER BOOK 7 NEWS were the two leading topical revenue earners across all media (books, e-books, AdSense, Book Search, and Amazon Associates).

After quite a bit of waiting I got Google Analytics working on my website, together with the terrific asclick utility. Now I can see exactly which pages generate the most AdSense clicks (which turns out to be less thrilling than it sounds, because my consumer-oriented content only averages about 16 cents a click).

Playbill News: Joan Didion’s Memoir “The Year of Magical Thinking” to Become Broadway Play:

“The Year of Magical Thinking,” writer Joan Didion’s first-person account of the recent death of her husband, and the decline of her daughter, is being converted into a play, to be produced by Scott Rudin and directed by David Hare.

The New York Times reported Dec. 6 that Broadway and Hollywood producer Rudin approached noted novelist and essayist Didion with the idea. Hare said he hopes to do a reading of the work next spring, followed by several workshops and a projected Broadway bow in spring 2007.

The piece will be a one-person show, though Didion herself will not star.

Damn!

Let me go out on a limb here. This is a bad idea. It is one thing to write a memoir of horrendous loss. It’s another thing to see it turned into a movie. But to have it turned into a Broadway play? A one-man show following in the shoes of Hal Holbrook? That’s s a bridge too far.

Grumpy Old Bookman: One honest and right-thinking man: “Anyway, [the WaPo's famously pompous and out-of-touch book critic Jonathan] Yardley has now made the amazing discovery that Grisham knows what he’s doing, which is more than can be said for some people. ‘Boning up for his [Grisham's] new novel, The Broker, I read several of its predecessors and was astonished by how good they are.’

As usual, one doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.”

GOB, I feel your pain; but by all means, laugh.

Macleans.ca | Culture | Books | Secrecy, power and mortifying the flesh: “Silas, The Da Vinci Code’s pious Opus Dei assassin, is a deranged, masochistic albino monk who likes to pause between murders to whip himself bloody or tighten the flesh-piercing barbed strap he wears around his thigh. Although the competition is stiff, he may be the most over-the-top travesty in author Dan Brown’s parade of caricatures. Given the novel’s runaway success — 121 weeks and counting on the Maclean’s bestseller list — not to mention the upcoming film version, Silas is also a PR nightmare for the real Opus Dei, a conservative and secretive Roman Catholic group. Silas didn’t spring full-blown from Brown’s imagination. The novelist tapped into an existing well of suspicion surrounding Opus Dei — Latin for ‘the work of God’ — that’s as deep-rooted among Catholics as it is in the outside world. It’s that profound split in opinion within his church that brought John Allen, Vatican correspondent for the U.S. weekly National Catholic Reporter, to write Opus Dei (Doubleday), an exhaustive look at the most controversial force in modern Catholicism.”

Harsh.

Independent Online Edition > News: “But he turned the venture into a triumph by adopting a marketing strategy thought to be unique. Offering himself as a free floor-walker to bookshops near his RAF base at Brize Norton, Wiltshire, he would engage shoppers in conversation about their tastes.

If they wanted a dictionary, he would take them to the reference section. If they liked Lord of the Rings, he would tell them of his own fantasy offering, written for teenagers, with crossover appeal to adult readers.

He routinely sold between 50 and 100 books a day, a figure that would not shame established writers doing traditional signings.”

CNN.com - Body hunt was ‘personal challenge’ - Dec 5, 2005: “AKRON, Ohio (AP) — The Ohio woman who found the bodies of two missing New Hampshire children said Monday she had been searching with her dog for months on a personal mission that her friends and family considered an obsession.

Stephanie Dietrich, a grocery store cashier, said she was motivated to look for Sarah Gehring, 14, and her brother Philip, 11, by their mother’s public plea for help.

The children’s father, Manuel Gehring, shot them to death in 2003 and told authorities he buried the bodies somewhere along a 700-mile stretch of Interstate 80 across the Midwest. He gave investigators several details about the spot but said he could not remember the location, then committed suicide in jail before a trial.

Dietrich, 44, said she went out searching with her dog more than 40 times since July near her Akron home because of clues suggesting the grave site could be in the region. Investigators had concluded in 2004 that pollen found on dirt on Gehring’s minivan and shovel suggested that the soil most likely came from northeastern Ohio.

Last Thursday, Dietrich was looking in the well-to-do suburb of Hudson for things like tall grass, sewer pipes and a wood pile that the father described, when her 101-pound mixed breed dog, Ricco, stopped in the woods and ‘just laid down and started looking at me.’

Dietrich said she saw a small mound with twigs covering it. She started digging, came upon a plastic bag and pulled out what appeared to be part of a cross made of willow twigs and duct tape. She called police on her cell phone, and the children’s bodies were removed from a shallow grave.

Dietrich said she kept a 2-inch-thick folder of news articles and tips from the Internet and often woke up in the middle of the night to read it.

‘It was like a personal challenge. Not like it was a game. I knew it was serious,’ she said.

This is very admirable. This woman’s effort above and beyond the call of duty gave the family of the murdered children some peace of mind. I’d like to give her a medal.