Book links round-up: booksellers charging for events, nasty author-on-author insults, and more

• You can meet your favourite author, but you’ll have to buy a ticket
• Ouch, that hurts: 30 of the nastiest author-on-author insults
• Contrary to media reports, Lady Gaga and philosopher Slavoj Žižek are not caught in a bad romance
• Over 24,000 pages of Sarah Palin’s e-mails condensed into I Hope Like Heck: The Selected Poems of Sarah Palin
• Last chance to nominate your favourite Canadian political books for The Writers’ Trust of Canada/ Samara list, and read current nominations
  

Book links round-up: Sarah Palin is not one of the Common people, Random House U.K. signs to agency model, and more

• Sarah Palin creates “outrage” over the White House inviting rapper Common to its Evening of Poetry
• Random House U.K. signs to agency model, with over 6,000 titles to appear in the iBookstore
• E-bookseller iFlow shuts down, blames Apple for its “eviction notice”
• Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan to write a spiritual memoir
• Veteran N.Y.C. book editor Robert Loomis retires at the age of 84

Former Palin aide accuses rival author of sabotage, jealousy

Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and self-described “Mama grizzly,” is at the centre of a dispute between two authors of competing books about her. Frank Bailey, a former Palin aide, is accusing Joe McGinniss, the bestselling author of Fatal Vision, of leaking material from his upcoming Palin biography to the media. According to the Anchorage Daily News, Bailey’s manuscript includes allegations that Palin broke the law in her 2006 gubernatorial campaign by accepting money from the Republican Governors Association in contravention of state election rules. The ADN claims that the leaked pages came from “multiple sources,” including McGinniss, whose own book on Palin, The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin, is due out this September.

According to James Oliphant in the Los Angeles Times, Bailey says McGinniss leaked the manuscript in an attempt to sabotage a competing author:

Posting on the anti-Palin blog Mudflats … Bailey, along with his co-authors, Ken Morris and Jeanne Devon, issued what they termed was a “cease-and-desist order” against McGinniss, which read, in part, that the three “believe [McGinniss'] actions were done with the single intent of destroying the marketability of the work. It is no secret that you are writing your own ‘tell-all’ book about Sarah Palin.”

The post called McGinniss “a jealous author sabotaging a competitor via unlawful and unscrupulous means” and said his actions had “impaired” their ability to market the book.

The allegations, if true, would not mark the first time McGinniss has gone rogue in his pursuit of his latest subject. Last year, he famously moved into the house next door to Palin, prompting her husband to build a 14-foot wall around their property.

Daily book biz round-up: Gawker/Palin flap; Bishop-Stall’s U.S. tour; and more

Today’s book news:

• HarperCollins sues Gawker over Sarah Palin book leak
• Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall forges ahead without Soft Skull
• James Frey defends his literary sweat-shop
• Borders to shut down 17 locations after Christmas
• Gary Shteyngart contemplates moving to Canada in 2012

Daily book biz round-up: Franzen has Bad Sex; back to normal at Gaspereau; and more

Today’s book news:

• Sarah Palin tweets her displeasure re: leak of impending book
• Franzen up for Bad Sex Award alongside Annabel Lyon
• Scribd aims to change the act of writing via new, depressing analytics tool
• Everything back to normal at Gaspereau
• Wealthy males supporting e-book biz by buying books they’ll never read

Daily book biz round-up: The Girl Who Went to Canada; Palin for tykes; and more

Start your week with these news bits:

• Unfinished fourth volume in Stieg Larsson’s “Millenium” series set in Canadian Arctic
• CNQ sends André Alexis a note of thanks
• Zondervan to sell Sarah Palin to the kiddies
• U.S. authors dominate Frank O’Connor short story prize shortlist
• The Graphic Novel of Anne Frank

Bookmarks – “Rogue” edition: Palin buys her own book, an e-book pirate confesses, Rip Torn beats up Norman Mailer, and more

Some rogueish book-related links:

• Sarah Palin’s political action committee buys thousands of copies of Going Rogue
• An e-book pirate confesses
• Rip Torn has always been crazy. After all, he once beat the crap out of Norman Mailer
• Philip K. Dick? He was nuts, too
• Tiger Woods: Platonic, though definitely not platonic
• North Americans don’t read enough contemporary European lit? Who cares!
• “Dangerous” kids’ book an unlikely hit – because apparently kids need books to tell them to act like idiots
• The continuing influence of music writer Greil “What is this shit?” Marcus

Bookmarks: Jane Austen, Margaret Atwood, the Brontë sisters, and more

A few bookish links from across the Web:

• To help you with the holiday shopping season, The Inkwell Bookstore Blog compiles a selection of gifts for the Jane Austenite on your list, including the Pride and Prejudice board game 
• Margaret Atwood picks the top ten gifts to give a budding novelist
• The New Yorker has compiled the top ten books of 1709. The most colourful title? Cotton Mather’s The Golden Curb for the Mouth, a sermon against swearing
•  The Brontë sisters get a little help from the Twilight phenomenon: The Guardian reports that new films of Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Charlotte’s Jane Eyre are being cast with younger, hotter stars to appeal to Twihards 
• You’ve heard of the proposed Harry Potter theme park. How about a theme park dedicated to Gulliver’s Travels? 
• Bask in “the soft periwinkle glow of the Alaskan morning,” because the results of Slate‘s “Write like Sarah Palin” contest are in
• The blogosphere has been buzzing with the best books of the decade lately, so what about the decade’s worst books? 

Bookmarks: Sarah Palin’s book-tour blunder, Rick Moody’s Twitter fiasco, and Sky Gilbert goes back in the closet

Sundry links from around the Web:

• Sarah Palin’s publicist admits it was a mistake to try barring foreign journalists from a book-signing event
• Poet, playwright, and activist Sky Gilbert comes out as “no longer gay“
• Rick Moody’s Tweeted short story is deemed an utter failure
• Amazon’s bid to scrap amended Google settlement is thrown out of court
• The Wall Street Journal advises Christmas shoppers to beware of e-readers, which may be going through “an eight-track moment”

Bookmarks: Going Rogue mistakes, aliens and werewolves, Xbox Bibles, and more

A few bookish links from around the Web:

• Sarah Palin’s much-anticipated memoir hits shelves today. Palin tells Oprah in an unused clip from yesterday’s interview that “logistically speaking, practically speaking, it wasn’t a real difficult exercise to write the book” (via GalleyCat) 
• The Associated Press has compiled a list of the errors found in Going Rogue
• Stephenie Meyer, author of the wildly popular Twilight empire series, also sat on Oprah’s couch in a rare public appearance last Friday. In an unused clip (via Entertainment Weekly), Meyer admits to being “a little burned out by vampires” and says that she “may go spend some time with … aliens.” 
• For those of you sick of everything vampire, Bookgasm offers a werewolf alternative in David Wellington’s Frostbite 
• The New Oxford American Dictionary‘s Word of the Year is “unfriend,” which is defined as: “to remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook.”  Runners-up for the title included “hashtag,” “sexting,” “teabagger,” and “tramp stamp”
• The future is digital: the National Post reports that students at Toronto’s Blyth Academy will all receive a Sony Reader to replace those stuffy old textbooks of yore 
• How would you like your Bible?  Handwritten or on your Xbox?