Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Portia De Rossi's Got Something to Say

When I heard about Portia De Rossi's memoir coming out this fall, I was surprised to say the least. All I knew about her is that she's married to Ellen DeGeneres and she's freakin' gorgeous, despite her rail thin figure. I honestly never thought of her as having much to say with her quiet and seemingly shy demeanor--especially in contrast to her outgoing, comedian wife. But now I shall eat my words.

Mmm words, yum.

De Rossi seems to have a lot to say. She has strong beliefs, morals, and a personality I knew nothing of (not to say I would ever claim to actually know her personality, never having met her). And I've gotta admit, I'm stoked for her memoir after reading this cover story in Advocate Magazine on the mag's website:
The lady has something to say.

Maybe she always did, but she didn’t always know it. For a very long time she swallowed words instead of food. When she did speak she answered as if in character, imitating the kind of woman her publicists and costars told her young actresses should be.

That was the deal Hollywood offered: Forget being smart. Forget being a feminist. Forget that year of law school. And definitely forget being gay. Be “Portia de Rossi,” an Australian ingenue. Rolling Stone’s “hot bombshell” cover girl. A modern Rapunzel with silky blond hair bewitching an audience simply by unpinning a tightly knit bun.

Be miserable and self-destructive.

“It was a very difficult dichotomy to live in,” she says now. “Oh, I’m Portia. I’m fresh and new to Hollywood. I just found myself in Ally McBeal. Now I’m in my underwear and sleeping with my boss even though I don’t want to portray women in the workplace that way. All of these things were tearing me apart. Plus—” Her mouth quirks up. “I was gay, did I mention?”

A self-described “staunch feminist,” she was stuck on a show that famously led Time magazine to ask “Is Feminism Dead?” Its leading ladies seemed to shrink in size with every episode, and the only on-set rumor that came close to challenging the popularity of “Does everyone on Ally have an eating disorder?” was “Is that hot blond gay?”

Today, De Rossi is a walking, talking advertisement for happiness. “I talk about everything more now than I used to,” she says. She writes about it too, in a book that she discusses for the first time publicly with The Advocate.

[...]

The book that has emerged is “definitely not self-help” and not quite a memoir—“I hate that term”—though it is absolutely autobiographical and, given her built-in platform—DeGeneres has shamelessly promoted Better Off Ted on-air—poised to be a best seller.

The story starts in 1997 (when her acting career took off) and goes through 2004 (when she began dating DeGeneres), with flashbacks to her childhood. “I abused my body. I had bulimia. I would use fen-phen. I wanted to talk about all that. But obviously I can’t do that without talking about my sexuality. And although you can’t really talk about one without the other, it still felt like two stories. The only thing that linked the two of them was me.”

And it’s not always easy going. “It’s been a difficult but revealing process,” she says. Losses she thought she’d fully grieved, such as her father’s death when she was 9, have been confusing, if cathartic, to write through. “You go back and you experience these emotions that you thought weren’t there any more.”

So now the woman who once was terrified to speak about her life is a writer. The book leaves convenient room for a sequel spanning her life with DeGeneres. And, she says, “I would like to try my hand at a novel at one point.” One thing she’s not interested in trying is screenwriting. “I’m just not drawn to it,” she says. “I still love acting. It’s the easiest of all of it for me.”


Read the rest of the fantastic article
(trust me, it's worth it!)
De Rossi's book was sold by William Morris Endeavor co-head Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, but I can't for the life of me track down who she sold it to. Even Publishers Marketplace isn't listing the mysterious publisher. I wonder why...

Katherine Heigl as Stephanie Plum? Eh...

The bestselling Stephanie Plum series by Janet Evanovich is finally coming to the big screen.

A film adaptation of One for the Money, the first book in the beloved romance/mystery series, had been in the works for over 15 years and just finally is making headway now that its leading lady is cast--Katherine Heigl--according to the Daily News:


What do you get when you mix Katherine Heigl, lingerie and bounty hunting? A chick flick that guys are sure to enjoy.

The "Grey's Anatomy" star has signed on for the lead role in "One for the Money," based on the first book in the immensely popular Stephanie Plum series of novels by Janet Evanovich, Variety.com reports.

Heigl will play Plum, a lingerie buyer who takes onwork as a bounty hunter to make some extra cash, setting off a series of adventures that has lead to 19 books so far, the most recent being "Finger Lickin' Fifteen."

In "One for the Money," Plum learns the ropes of bounty hunting by chasing down a wanted cop named Joseph Morelli, who happens to be the guy who took her virginity back when she was 16 and wrote about it on the bathroom wall of Mario's Sub Shop.

Read more HERE

While I agree that this series will make a very fun movie (I've only read the first two books in the series myself), I'm iffy on the casting again. I love Katherine Heigl in "Grey's Anatomy" and in some of her films--I was OBSESSED with "Wish Upon a Star" when I was a kid--I don't think she's quite right for this role. I also didn't think she was right for the role of Izzy Spellman in The Spellman Files adaptation, which is was rumored to play and is a very similar role. I don't know--I just can't see her as a gun-toting, tough-as-nails (but sarcastic and hilarious) sleuth. She has too much innocence and not enough chutzpah. But who knows, maybe she'll surprise me.

If I were casting this film, I'd go with someone more like Kristen Bell, whose role as Veronica Mars in the television series of the same name was kick-ass. Or maybe someone with a darker, sexier look like Sandra Bullock (though she's a bit too old for the role now, I think) or Rachel McAdams.

Tough (casting) call.

Also, check out these polls on Grupthink.com. Some of the nominees are hilarious:

Who makes the best Stephanie Plum? and Cast the Stephanie Plum Movie

Who do YOU think would be best?

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

And the winner is....

Work has been insanity this week, so I aplogize for my lack of posting. But here's a brief update on the whole Amazon v. Macmillan debacle...

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that the two companies have actually come to an agreement! *sarcastic gasp*

A week after Amazon.com Inc. halted the direct sale of books published by Macmillan in a pricing dispute, the two sides have settled their differences and books by Macmillan authors went back on sale on Amazon's Web site over the weekend.

The settlement sets the stage for what will almost certainly be a transformative year in publishing as Amazon goes head-to-head with Apple Inc. over the thriving electronic-book market.

By agreeing to accept a new pricing model, Amazon has publicly acknowledged the sudden emergence of a rival that may not only threaten its highly popular Kindle franchise but also its total domination of e-books.

Specific terms of the Macmillan agreement couldn't be learned. However, they are expected to include higher prices for e-books, mirroring those offered by Apple on its coming iPad device.


Read more HERE

Also check out this interesting video from WSJ.com:

Friday, February 5, 2010

Dueling Review: "Of Bees and Mist" by Erick Setiawan

Recently, my book club read Of Bees and Mist by Erick Setiawan. As I was reading, I realized, “Wait a second, I have such a great opportunity here to get opposing reviews of the same book! I can get two completely different perspectives to share with my readers!”

So that’s what I’ve done—or tried to do rather. It turns out that Of Bees and Mist was so incredible that both reviewers loved it. But take a look and see what it is that made this book so special for each of them. (And stay tuned for another Dueling Review, but I’ll make sure their actually dueling!)

And now, with no further ado, please welcome Rachel Bostic and Meghan Stevenson for the first Reading Between the Lines dueling review.

A Review by Rachel:

Of Bees and Mist is a stunning literary debut from Erick Setiawan. Reminiscent of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Of Bees and Mist uses magical realism to tell the story of Meridia, a young woman whose troubled parents are unable to relate to her. Her father stares her down and critiques her clothing and character every morning and her mother frequently forgets her existence. Tormented by ghosts in mirrors, extreme cold, nightmares, and expanding staircases, Meridia escapes her home at the first opportunity—when she meets and falls in love with Daniel.

In addition to falling for Daniel, she falls in love with his family, who are so different from her own. It is only after the young lovers wed and Meridia moves into her husband’s family home that she discovers the true nature of her mother in law, a cruel, manipulative woman who uses every method at her disposal—including supernatural ones—to exert her power over those around her. At first Eva doesn’t realize that she’s met her match in Meridia, and the duel that springs up between them has unexpected consequences for all of those around them.

At its heart, Of Bees and Mist is a love story. Loss of innocence, discovery of one’s true strength, and the power of both forgiveness and revenge are explored through unexplainable phenomena as well as a relationship that rings true to life. Setiawan skillfully weaves Indonesian superstition, Chinese heritage, and American ideals into compelling portraits of a number of different women, getting right what they fear, what they hate, what they love, and what they most want.

While magical realism is not a style that everyone loves, for me it emphasized the parts of life that can seem to have mystical elements—falling in love, fighting with those close to you. The mist covering Meridia’s father cloaks his shame and his secrets and Meridia quickly learns the futility of fighting against it. Eva’s stinging and harassing bees demonstrate the power of hateful and poisonous words. We all imbue certain memories or experiences with a brightness or menacing atmosphere that don’t exist in the physical world, and Setiawan does an excellent job, for me, of tying supernatural elements into those emotions in the text.

Of Bees and Mist isn’t for the faint of heart. Its message is that love certainly does not conquer all, and that growing up isn’t a painless journey. I’d say it’s a novel for those who have loved and lost, and for those who have loved and lost and come together again. It’s for those who believe that if there isn’t magic in everyday life, maybe there should be.

A Review by Meghan:

I received a copy of this book from a friend without its jacket; that I had no idea what to expect was an understatement. My friend and I share the books for a book club that reads a lot of YA and commercial fiction, so I had no idea what the bees or the mist were. But once I opened the book, I quickly found myself completely delighted to read about a magical world without place or time. I had no idea when or where the characters lived, and at some point, I stopped guessing.

The magical, undefined setting freed me as a reader to be completely enchanted and curious as to what was going to happen to our lonely but lovely protagonist. In the beginning, I compared this book to Jane Eyre a bit—but by the middle of the book, I realized that the heroine in Of Bees and Mist could totally whip Jane’s butt, and not in a mean-girl type of way. Rather, I found the main character Meridia to be a strong woman who knows the difference between right and wrong, and wants to reconcile reality with her morals. She strives to figure out how to accomplish that goal throughout the book.

I actually found a lot of situations in this novel to be more real than you would expect from magical realism; the author brings some common familial conflicts to the plot that will resonate with a lot of readers, and I feel the manipulation between and at the hands of the characters was really, really well crafted and made the book suspenseful in a way most novels today are not.

Without giving away too much of the plot, I feel that this novel is similar to Gabriel Garcia Marquez in that it uses magical realism to show some of human nature that’s not apparent in the normal world—the dark forces or bees that individuals use to manipulate others; the mist that traps some of us in the past. This is the perfect subway read—it takes you away without requiring that much of you. I heartily recommend it.


About the bloggers:

Rachel Bostic is a voracious reader, amateur belly dancer, and lover of all things purple. She currently works at Simon & Schuster as the marketing manager for Atria Books. Find her at
www.rachelbostic.com.

Meghan Stevenson is an associate editor at Hudson Street Press, working on prescriptive (how-to) and narrative nonfiction. She enjoys reading fiction because it’s not work-related. Originally from Wisconsin, Meghan has somewhat embarrassing hobbies and passions including but not limited to country music, useless yet extensive knowledge of one-hit wonders, Jason Segel and the New York Mets. Her first New York Times bestseller contained the line “Bros before ho’s.” (Seriously: Page 11 of THE BRO CODE.) She has a penchant for trivia and more cats than people live in her apartment.

Thanks for joining us at Reading Between the Lines, Rachel and Meghan!

If you or anyone you know would like to guest blog for RBtL, please inquire via e-mail.

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Amazon and Macmillan and E-Books, Oh My!

So, it's Wednesday and the war still wages between Amazon and the publishing house Macmillan. As of 9 a.m. today, consumers still cannot buy Macmillan books on Amazon, unless it's from a private seller.

In case you haven't heard the news, EW's Shelf Life fills readers in:

[T]he e-book pricing wars came to a head on Friday and Saturday, when Amazon stopped selling Macmillan titles (St. Martin’s, Holt, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux books), though customers could still purchase books on the site from other sellers. Macmillan CEO John Sargent issued an impassioned plea on Saturday night to explain his company’s position, and last night, Amazon gave in, posting a statement to customers on its Kindle page that said, in part, “We want you to know that ultimately, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan’s terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them toyou even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books. Amazon customers will at that point decide for themselves whether they believe it’s reasonable to pay $14.99 for a bestselling e-book. We don’t believe that all of the major publishers will take the same route as Macmillan. And we know for sure that many independent presses and self-published authors will see this as an opportunity to provide attractively priced e-books as an alternative. Kindle is a business for Amazon, and it is also a mission. We never expected it to be easy!”

Read the rest of the article HERE

I couldn't believe it when I heard that Amazon pulled all Macmillan titles from their website on Friday afternoon, just late enough in the day that the publisher couldn't do anything about it with all it's staff off for the weekend. Talk about manipulative! Despite any argument that Amazon and Macmillan may be having, professionalism should still be in place. I would understand not posting any new titles from Macmillan until the situation is resolved, but pulling the titles already being sold? It's like a little kid throwing a temper tantrum. And then I couldn't believe it again when I heard about Amazon's post recognizing that they'd be forced to give in to Macmillan. Again, they're just being stubborn to be stubborn, instead of trying to address the problem in an adult and professional way.

While I can understand Amazon's reluctance to price an e-book at $14.99, from a publishing point of view, it's not as simple as Amazon thinks. Macmillan is right in that too low of a price point just doesn't make sense. Books are a business. One with very low profit margins, at that. EW points out that 3% is considered a healthy profit margin in the industry, which is startlingly low. Publishers also lose money of 90% of their titles. Most people don't know that. They think we're over here swimming in dough, but it's just the opposite. There are a lot of expenses that go into making, selling, and promoting a book, not to mention paying the advance to the author and salaries (though miniscule) to the employees. And then on top of that, 90% of the books don't even earn out, so the publisher doesn't even break even. This is why Macmillan has such a beef with Amazon's set pricing of e-books. While yes, e-books are less expensive to produce than physical books, it still costs money, and e-book sales are a necessary and helpful part of trying to earn out on a title.

So, with Amazon still in a tizzy about Macmillan's suggestion of a range of e-book prices, Macmillan has taken matter into their own hands, according to Publishers Marketplace:

Buy buttons for Macmillan's physical books have yet to return at Amazon (at least in any meaningful way), but the publisher quietly launched what may soon be just a remnant of their earlier strategy to keep up the price of ebooks: the "enhanced" edition.

Kristin Hannah's Winter Garden, which released yesterday, was one of the few (if only) Macmillan books you could buy directly from Amazon, which was offering the Kindle version only and not the trade hardcover. But the book carries the curious digital list price of $29.99--three dollars higher than the print book list price.

The Amazon information page offered no obvious explanation for the new pricing. But at Barnes & Noble.com, they helpfully (and prominently) explained that the ebook version of Winter Garden is a "Special Edition eBook" with "a number of exciting features, including: An exclusive conversation with the author; a special essay written by the author describing her research process for the book; delicious recipes for making Russian food favorites in your kitchen at home; and more."

Read more HERE

I'm not sure "enhanced e-books" are necessarily the way to go, but it's one alternative. At least Macmillan is trying to do something productive and solve the problem. They aren't just crying and stamping their feet like some other company I know.

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Before Carrie Bradshaw Became Carrie Bradshaw

Publisher Balzer + Bray--an imprint of HarperCollins--is coming out with a new spin-off of Sex and the City this April, but this time, it's for young adults.

Here's B&N.com's synopsis of Candace Bushnell's new book, The Carrie Diaries:

Before Carrie Bradshaw hit the big time in the City, she was a regular girl growing up in the suburbs of Connecticut. How did she turn into one of the most-read social observers of our generation?

The Carrie Diaries opens up in Carrie's senior year of high school. She and her best friends -- Walt, Lali, Maggie, and the Mouse -- are inseparable, amid the sea of Jens, Jocks and Jets. And then Sebastian Kydd comes into the picture. Sebastian is a bad boy-older, intriguing, and unpredictable. Carrie falls into the relationship that she was always supposed to have in high school-until a friend's betrayal makes her question everything. With her high school days coming to a close, Carrie will realize it's finally time to go after everything she ever wanted.

Rabid fans of Sex and the City will love seeing Carrie Bradshaw evolve from a regular girl into a sharp, insightful writer. They'll learn about her family background -- how she found her writing voice, and the indelible impression her early friendships and relationships left on her. We'll see what brings Carrie to her beloved New York City, where the next Carrie Diaries book will take place.

For more information click HERE

Thanks to LG for passing along the exciting news! We'll have to keep an eye on this one!

Monday, February 1, 2010

Bringing Back the Babysitters

The beloved children's series "The Babysitter's Club" is being reissued this spring, with brand spanking new covers and a new prequel from Ann M. Martin, according to The New York Times:

Taking a page from Broadway and George Lucas, Scholastic Inc., the children’s book publisher, is trying for a revival — with a prequel attached.

In April the company plans to reissue repackaged and slightly revised versions of the first two volumes in one of its most successful series, “The Baby-Sitters Club,” in the hopes of igniting enthusiasm in a new generation of readers. And just as Mr. Lucas brought “Star Wars” back with a whole new arc of stories that began before the original series, Scholastic is publishing a newly written prequel, “The Summer Before,” by Ann M. Martin, the original author of “The Baby-Sitters Club” books.

The move follows Scholastic’s 2008 resuscitation of “Goosebumps,” another of its most popular series. For now Scholastic and Ms. Martin only have plans for the one prequel, although the publisher will release three more reissues of the original series later next year.

Read the rest of your article HERE


I was obsessed with this series as a little girl. I read every book multiple times. They were fun, relateable, compelling, and pure. It's refreshing to me that Scholastic is reissuing these gems and giving the youth market some good role models once more, as there so much edge to children's fiction these days.

However, I'm less than enthused about the redesign of the cover. While I agree that they need updating for today's audience, I don't think they went about it the right way. The cartoon-feel makes these books seem TOO young to me. With kids acting more and more mature, even the appropriate age level might shy away from such illustrated covers. In addition, by removing the babysitters themselves from the covers, on of the biggests draws of the series--there's a girl for everyone to relate to, emotionally and physically--is minimized. It takes the reader away from the heart of these novels--the self-discovery, the friendships, the process of growing up.


But at least these are better than the previous adaptation to a graphic novel (on left). I can't imagine that this worked, but who knows.

I guess we'll just have to wait and see if kids in the 21st century love the Babysitter's gang as much as us 20th century kiddies did.