EarlyWord

The Romance Writers of America announced on Tuesday the finalists for the RITA Awards for romance fiction.

There are 13 categories include over 80 nominees (a good opportunity for displays, see The Romance Dish for useful descriptions of all 13 classifications).

Among the finalists are popular authors such as Sabrina York, Tessa Dare, Elizabeth Hoyt, Sabrina Jeffries, J R Ward and Loretta Chase, whose Dukes Prefer Blondes (HC/Avon; HarperAudio; OverDrive Sample), part of her Dressmakers series, appears in the Historical Romance: Long category.

Attesting to the growing reach of self-published novels, 11 of the nominees come from the authors’ own imprints, including  Always a Bridesmaid by Lizzie Shane (Create Space; OverDrive Sample), in the Contemporary Romance: Long category.

RWA’s the Golden Heart award nominees for unpublished manuscripts were also released.

All the winners will be announced on July 27.

One of the many lists soon to come, New York magazine has published their “Spring Book Preview,” a list of ten choices ranging across nonfiction and fiction, big names and new authors.

Among the big names is Joshua Ferris for The Dinner Party and Other Stories (Hachette/Little Brown; Blackstone Audio). New York magazine comments, “Ferris’s three novels have earned him a reputation as a high-concept high-wire artist … His stories, by comparison, are compact gems of timing and everyday absurdity.”

One of the debuts comes from award-winning reporter Omar El Akkad who was born in Egypt and now lives in Portland, OR.  A dystopian novel set in 2074,  American War (PRH/Knopf; RH Audio/BOT; OverDrive Sample), portrays a much smaller U.S., cue to global warming that “enters its second Civil War … Told through the lens of a young Southern refugee who comes of age in a time of horror … terrifying in its prescient vision of the future.”

Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night by Jason Zinoman (Harper; HarperAudio) gets one of the nonfiction nods. The magazine says “Zinoman presents a well-rounded portrait of the late-night legend … a must-read for any comedy fan.”

The full list is online.

Colin Dexter has died, age 86. He created the character Chief Inspector Morse, the beloved, curmudgeonly detective based in Oxford who likes opera, poetry, and has a fiendishly clever mind.

The first book in the series is Last Bus to Woodstock was published in 1975. The final book, #13, The Remorseful Day, was published 24 years later in 1999. The books were adapted into the Inspector Morse TV series that ran on PBS from 1987 until 2000. The show spun-off two sequels, one about Morse’s partner, Inspector Lewis, and one about a younger Morse, Endeavour.

“He was one of the greatest crime novelists of the 20th century and deserves to be ranked alongside Chandler, Christie and Doyle,” Andrew Gulli, the editor of the mystery magazine The Strand, told the NYT.

The paper also reports that he won two Golden Dagger awards from the Crime Writers’ Association of Britain and, in 1997, he received the organization’s lifetime achievement award, the Diamond Dagger.

Dexter killed off Morse in his last book, using for the title a line from an A. E. Housman poem, “How Clear, How Lovely Bright,” as a way of saying goodbye:

How heavily it dies
Into the west away;
Past touch and sight and sound
Not further to be found,
How hopeless under ground
Falls the remorseful day.

Jane Mayer’s 2016 best seller, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (PRH/Doubleday; RH Large Print; RH Audio/BOT; trade paperback; OverDrive Sample) is back in the news, and rising again on Amazon, jumping from #468 to #48, after the author published a new piece for this week’s The New Yorker entitled “The Reclusive Hedge-Fund Tycoon Behind The Trump Presidency.”

Mayer was interviewed on NPR’s Fresh Air yesterday about the subjects of the story, Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, who have “been major backers of Breitbart News and Steve Bannon’s other projects for years, and they were influential in getting Bannon and Kellyanne Conway into leadership positions in the Trump campaign.”

Dark Money was one of The New York Time’s 10 Best Books of 2016 and is currently a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, which recognizes a “book of extraordinary originality and lasting influence.” The winner of that award will be announced on Monday.

Most libraries we checked still have holds queues.

Read our chat with Betsy, below.

Join us for our next live chat on April 26, 5 to 6 p.m., ET with Pablo Cartaya, to discuss his upcoming book, The Epic Fail of Arturo Zamora.

To join the program, sign up here.

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer and bestselling author of Lean In, is set to publish s new title next month, Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy (PRH/Knopf; RH Audio/BOT), co-written with Adam Grant, author of Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World.

The book is based on personal experience, as Sandberg writes on Facebook:

“A few weeks after my husband Dave died, I was talking to my friend Phil Deutch about a father-son activity that Dave was not here to do. We came up with a plan for someone to fill in so my son would not have to miss out. I cried, ‘But I want Dave.’ Phil put his arm around me and said, ‘Option A is not available. So let’s just kick the shit out of Option B.’ That became my mantra, and for the past two years I’ve tried hard to find meaning and happiness in the wake of our despair.”

On the strength of that post, picked up by Bustle and InStyle, which headlines their story, “You’ll Definitely Want to Read Sheryl Sandberg’s Empowering New Book,” it soared up Amazon’s sales rankings, and is currently at #9.

Thus far, library holds queues are light. Keep in mind, however, that Lean In got off to a slow start.

Misty Copeland, the first African American woman to be a principal dancer at the American Ballet Theatre, has published a new book, Ballerina Body: Dancing and Eating Your Way to a Leaner, Stronger, and More Graceful You (Hachette/Grand Central Life & Style; Blackstone Audio; OverDrive Sample).

It is rising on Amazon’s rankings thanks to an appearance on CBS This Morning, jumping from #920 to #36.

A clearly admiring panel of hosts talked with Copeland about the mental and emotional strength it takes to be a star athlete and dancer, calling the book “inspiring.”

It is Copeland’s third book, after her memoir Life In Motion and the children’s book Firebird. This time she stresses understanding health as a long journey, discovering what works for each person, and creating an individual version of a healthy image.

Rising on Amazon is a nonfiction account of a fabled sea-faring mystery, Ice Ghosts: The Epic Hunt for the Lost Franklin Expedition by Paul Watson (Norton; Blackstone Audio; OverDrive Sample), about the sad fate of Sir John Franklin and his crew aboard the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror. The book not only details the doomed Arctic expedition seeking the Northwest Passage, but also the historic search for the lost ships and the modern discovery of their find. It leaped to #79 on Amazon’s sales rankings after the author appeared on NPR’s Morning Edition.

In a brief, but wide ranging conversation, Watson details some of the search, telling NPR that Franklin’s wife, Lady Jane, was “extraordinarily assertive” and forced the Royal Navy to search for her husband and even lured the United States into looking for him.

The book is also getting newspaper coverage.

The Seattle Times calls it eloquent and “more valuable than most of what comes from the cottage industry of Franklin books.”

In an illustrated story, the Dallas News says that Watson “handles the complexity of the search admirably well.”

Watson has a much longer segment on Think, a program on the public radio station KERA in North Texas. Below is the Morning Edition segment:

Gucci Mane, who The New York Times calls “one of hip-hop’s most prolific and admired artists” is releasing his memoir, The Autobiography of Gucci Mane (S&S, Sept. 19, 2017).

Given his large social media presence (over 3 million followers on Twitter alone), his announcement of the book and its arresting jacket sent it climbing on Amazon where it is now in the Top 100 (at #100).

The publisher says “In his extraordinary autobiography, the legend takes us to his roots in Alabama, the streets of East Atlanta, the trap house, and the studio where he found his voice as a peerless rapper. He reflects on his inimitable career and in the process confronts his dark past—years behind bars, the murder charge, drug addiction, career highs and lows—the making of a trap god. It is one of the greatest comeback stories in the history of music.”

For those unfamiliar with “trap music,” the Guardian described the Atlanta-based genre last year, calling Gucci Mane one of the “holy trinity of trap”

The announcement was covered by Billboard and New York Magazine, along with a number of pop culture and music sites.

No One Cares About Crazy People: The Chaos and Heartbreak of Mental Health in America, by Ron Powers (Hachette; Blackstone Audio; OverDrive Sample) is rising on Amazon after the author talked with Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air. It moved from #9,883 to #54.

Powers was  the co-author of Flags Of Our Fathers, about the men who were featured in an iconic WWII photo as they raised the America flag on Iwo Jima. A long-running best seller, it was also the basis of a film directed by Clint Eastwood.

Powers’ new book, says Gross, “is both a memoir about his sons and a history of how the mentally ill have been treated medically, legally and socially.” Both of Powers’s sons suffer with schizophrenia, one of them committed suicide and the other attempted it.

The intimate and warm interview mixes personal story with medical explanation and the social history of the illness.

Nearly two years after Disney acquired film rights to Julie Murphy’s YA novel Dumplin’ (HC/Balzer + Bray; HaperAudio; OverDrive Sample), the first star had been announced. Jennifer Aniston, is set to play Rosie, a former beauty queen who now runs a pageant and gave her overweight teenaged daughter the not-so-endearing nickname of the title.

Entertainment Weekly reports that Anne Fletcher (The Proposal, Hot Pursuit) will direct, “working from a script by Aniston’s longtime friend and collaborator Kristin Hahn [The Departed, The Time Traveler’s Wife].”

It is early days yet and no other casting choices have been made. Refinery29 writes, “Aniston’s casting gives the film some A-list weight, but we’re more excited to see who lands the role of Will. Please don’t screw this up, Hollywood.”

Production will begin this summer.

Kirkus approvingly wrote the novel’s “plot arc, amazingly, avoids the all-too-common pitfall of having its fat protagonist lose weight.” It was named to the Amelia Bloomer List of recommended feminist literature and appeared on a number of end of year best lists.

Richard Linklater’s adaptation of Where’d You Go, Bernadette starring two-time Oscar winner Cate Blanchett will start filming July 2017, reports Austin360.

The movie is based on the novel of the same name by Maria Semple (Hachette, 2012). Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber (500 Days of Summer and The Fault in Our Stars) wrote the screenplay.

Fans of the book will have to wait to find out who will play Bernadette’s 15-year-old daughter, Bee Branch, the story’s narrator.

Semple won an Alex Award for the book in 2013. It spent a few weeks on the NYT Hardcover Bestseller list, and many more in trade paperback, hitting a high of #2.

As we noted earlier, Semple has another title headed to a screen. Julia Roberts will star in HBO’s adaptation of her newest novel, Today Will Be Different (Hachette/Little, Brown; Hachette Audio; OverDrive Sample).

No stranger to TV herself, Semple, who worked on Beverly Hills, 90210, Mad About You, Suddenly Susan, and Arrested Development, will write the script, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

The NBC series adapting Charlaine Harris’s Midnight, Texas trilogy will air in late summer. It will introduce viewers to the world Bustle calls “Twin Peaks with vampires” on Tuesday, July 25, 10-11 p.m.

François Arnaud (The Borgias) stars as Manfred, described by Deadline as “a charming, powerful psychic who can communicate with spirits and finds safety in Midnight [the fictional town in Texas] surrounding himself with both human and supernatural allies.” Dylan Bruce (Orphan Black), Parisa Fitz-Henley (Luke Cage), Arielle Kebbel (The Vampire Diaries), Jason Lewis (Sex and the City), Peter Mensah (True Blood), Sarah Ramos (Parenthood), and Yul Vazquez (Captain Phillips) are also in the cast.

The trilogy includes:

Midnight Crossroads (PRH/Ace, 2014; Recorded Books; OverDrive Sample)

Day Shift (PRH/Ace, 2015; Recorded Books; OverDrive Sample)

Night Shift (PRH/Ace, 2016; Recorded Books; OverDrive Sample)

Tor. com gives the summary:

“the story is wacky, ya’ll. Immensely wacky, but, like, in a fun way. Midnight Crossroad starts off as a book about a pawnshop owner’s dead girlfriend and turns into a murder conspiracy involving white supremacists. Day Shift is ostensibly about the suspicious circumstances in which one of Manfred’s clients [he is the psychic] dies and ends up with a pack of weretigers wandering through town and vampires hunting a telepath visiting his grandpappy. Night Shift goes from people and animals killing themselves at the crossroads to a magic sex ritual with a pitstop at a subplot with a hangry Etruscan-literate vampire.”

A new trailer adds a bit more to first one, released in October:

The latest Disney adaptation of Beauty and the Beast, which opened this weekend, was the blockbuster the studio longed for. Weeks before it opened, it helped promote books, putting one of the tie-ins, Lost in a Book by Jennifer Donnelly (Hachette/Disney Press) on the NYT Middle Grade Best Sellers List.

Disney is at work on many more live-action adaptations of previous animated hits, including a new version of Dumbo, with Tim Burton directing and Danny DeVito voicing the star.

Taking advantage of the Disney hit, DreamWorks Animation released a trailer for their adaptation of Marla Frazee’s The Boss Baby using the phrase, “A Tale NOT As Old As Time” and a couple of images to emphasize the reference.

Also just released is a trailer for another sure-fire book-promoting hit, Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul!, based on Jeff Kinney’s book series.

Darrin Alert: the movie, and the trailer, feature a new cast.

It premieres May 19.

For a full listing of movie tie-ins, check our list of tie-ins to upcoming films, recently updated with tie-ins to 2017’s most anticipated kid’s movies.

After spending over two years (and counting) on the NYT bestseller list and building months long holds queues in libraries (some systems are still working through their lists), Marie Kondo is back atop the Amazon sales rankings thanks to a feature on CBS Sunday Morning.

It seems there are still a few people who haven’t discovered Kondo. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing, moved back up to #1, after dropping to #34 and her second book, Spark Joy: An Illustrated Master Class on the Art of Organizing and Tidying Up (both from Ten Speed Press), is #15, after falling to #1,320.

Life-Changing Magic is a global sensation. It has been translated into 40 languages and has sold over 7 million copies. NYT ran a feature about her last July, writing her “name is now a verb  … [her] life has become a philosophy.” The Wall Street Journal even applied her methods to digital life.

As an aid to those facing spring cleaning, CSB Sunday Morning offers a short profile of her system, including her special ways of folding clothes so they can be stacked upright in drawers. They also note she is working on a smart phone app and training a horde of cleaning consultants.