Writerly news from around the interwebs.

In yet another indication that the YA market remains strong, publisher Sourcebooks has announced that they are launching a new YA imprint, Fire.

SOURCEBOOKS FIRE will officially launch in spring 2010 with seven titles, including a bestselling paranormal romance series from the UK, a novel based on the true life story of teenage sisters who invented the séance in 1848, a romantic mystery set against the backdrop of the civil war, and a YA supernatural thriller set in New York City, among others.

Spearheading the venture is Dan Ehrenhaft, who came over to Sourcebooks from Alloy Entertainment this spring. For those who don’t know, Alloy Entertainment media is responsible for unleashing juggernauts Gossip Girls and the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, among other heavy hitters in the YA market. This is an exciting development for those who write YA.

In another instance of Amazon=eeeevil, the online retailer can apparently delete books on their Kindle without notifying customers first. But in one recent instance, the high-handedness came with a price:

Amazon has agreed to pay $150,000 in a lawsuit filed by Justin Gawronski, who sued the online retailer after George Orwell’s novels “1984″ and “Animal Farm” were deleted from his Kindle, along with his homework.

<snip>

People who’d gone to bed in the middle of reading “1984″ found, upon waking, that the book had gone missing from their devices.

I find it distasteful that Amazon can delete books from Kindles whenever they want to.

File this under “whatever” in publisher desperation to cash in on digital publishing – the first Vooks are now available to be downloaded onto an iPhone or digital reader. Dunno what a vook is? It’s a video book (get it?). EW has the deets:

Releasing Thursday and priced at $6.99, the two fiction and two nonfiction titles are meant to represent a range of experimentation with the form, which embeds original video clips within a browser-based version of a digital book.

Sadly, the fiction titles don’t work quite as well. The first, a Jude Deveraux romance set in 19th-century South Carolina, tries to use video clips to provide atmosphere, with fluttering shots of cernuous willows and Southern manses set to the book’s narration. But since the text was produced separately from the videos, the clips feel a little redundant and even distracting.

The other novella, a thriller by Richard Doetsch, does a better job at integrating the two media, and the video’s content actually advances the narrative. Unfortunately, the clips are still too few and far between (and at some points cheesier than a Wisconsin state fair) to make you feel like you are experiencing something especially different or revolutionary. It certainly has potential, but it also has a ways to go before realizing it on the fiction front.

I’m going to ask our mulitmedia guru and new contributor JC to weigh in on this one.

ETA: Our own Therese Walsh was interviewed by Intrepid Media! Check it out HERE!

ETA2: The FTC has just ruled that bloggers must disclose payments for any reviews they do (read HERE). For those curious, we don’t review books at WU, nor do we get paid for interviews, posts or any other activities related to the webste. We don’t sell advertisement, either. We’ve decided it isn’t worth the hassle and we like the way we look without ads on our site.

Write on, friends.

Cool image by hoppipopi.

Kathleen Bolton is co-founder of Writer Unboxed. She has written two novels under the pseudonym Cassidy Calloway: Confessions of a First Daughter, and Secrets of a First Daughter--both books in a YA series about the misadventures of the U.S. President's teen-aged daughter, published by HarperCollins.
Kathleen Bolton
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