Stuart Weitzman and Broadway Books co-hosted a launch party last week at the Stuart Weitzman showroom for Quick, Before the Music Stops: How Ballroom Dancing Saved My Life, the debut memoir from Town & Country Beauty Director Janet Carlson. Out to support Carlson were a multitude of her Hearst colleagues including Town & Country Editor-in-Chief Pamela Fiori, Jane Weitzman and Jackie Giusti from Stuart Weitzman, and many of Carlson's friends in the cosmetic world, including Salvatore Piazzolla from Hampton Sun Care.

Broadway and Weitzman are also running a sweepstakes in which three lucky winners will win the Stuart Weitzman Fever heel pictured on the book jacket.

Pictured above: Jane Weitzman, Janet Carlson and Jackie Giusti

The blank page/screen is one of the most daunting obstacles an author faces. What to write? How to start? Well it looks likeThe Avocado Papers is removing that obstacle by selling opening paragraphs. Yup, that's right, they're selling "professionally crafted, ready-made ones... at the very reasonable rate of US $1.75 per word." So, your opening paragraph can set you back anywhere from $152.25 to $838.25... and that's non-exclusive.

I'm on the fence about this one. It would certainly come in handy, especially if you're thinking of participating in National Novel Writing Month in November, but most writers I know don't have that kind of scratch on hand.

As Jeff Bercovici revealed late yesterday afternoon, the staff of HarperStudio invited some people with their eye on the publishing industry (myself included) to tell us a bit about where the newly formed imprint is headed and to pick our brains about some of the key issues the publishing industry is forced to deal with right now. One topic that came up during the conversation, that I wound up thinking about for much of the day, is what I've referred to in the past as "the so-called crisis in book reviewing," as newspapers continue to whittle away at the amount of space devoted to the book world. I'd already been thinking about the subject because of the interview with Winfrida Mbewe, a publicity manager at W.W. Norton, in this week's Publishers Weekly, where she says:

"We're fooling ourselves if we don't pay attention to the Internet... But I still see the importance of newspaper reviews, magazine features, and radio and television interviews. People are still learning about books and authors through traditional sources."

And that's true enough—see, for example, one book buyer's recent explanation of how a Guardian article eventually led to a purchase—but I'm looking at that article right now, and it's not a review, it's not even a feature story... it's a guest article by the book's author about the premise behind his book. In other words, one of Britain's leading newspapers is essentially taking the same approach to book coverage as apopular author blog (albeit presumably to a larger audience). Now, we can go back and forth about who "invented" this format, but I think the key lesson to take from this example is that what authors and publishers want from the media isn't necessarily incisive literary criticism—anything that gets the name of the book in the paper will do just fine.

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William Morrow editor Lyssa Keusch shares a laugh with suspense writer Kathryn Fox, who was feted at the Australian consulate last week on the eve of the annual Thrillerfest conference. Fox was beginning to tell us about arriving in Martha's Vineyard just in time to see Bunch of Grapes, the bookstore where she was scheduled to read and sign books, engulfed in flames. (We weren't laughing about the fire, of course—but about all the morbid comments that people made when they found out Fox's latest novel to be published in the U.S., Skin and Bones, is about an arson/murder.)

Also last week, the book party for Laura Dave's second novel, The Divorce Party, was held at Henri Bendel's Fifth Avenue showroom. Dave introduced me to screenwriter Gwyn Lurie, who is adapting the novel after doing similar work on her debut, London Is the Best City in America; Dave also told me that she's temporarily relocating to Los Angeles so the pair can collaborate on a third screenplay based on their own original story idea.

While Marcus Sakey was in town last week to accept the Strand Magazine Critics Award for best first novel, The Blade Itself he dropped by the offices at Dutton to sign copies of his third book, Good People. It's always funny to see the reactions of authors to giant piles of their book, especially when they have to sign them. I've seen Stephen King give a shrug like "this is nothing" when he stopped by Houghton Mifflin to sign 300 copies of The Best American Short Stories, I've witnessed the look in Neal Stephenson's eye that said "you've got to be kidding me" in the Avon offices when he saw the 1000 copies of Cryptonomicon stacked five feet high and eight feet deep on the table in front of him, but Sakey's love of his new book has got to take the cake.

io9 posted a round-up of sci-fi book trailers, including the one for Sly Mongoose I showed you last month and this trailer for The Digital Plague, the second novel from Jeff Somers. Neither of which, as Annalee Newitz observes, "give you much of a sense of the plot, but you do get a feeling for the world where it's set. I wonder if this means book trailer makers think that scifi books sell based on world-building rather than on plot or narrative structure?"

It's an interesting question, and a compelling challenge to my theory that book trailers live or die on their storytelling capabilities. The two ideas are not necessarily incompatible, though—let's go back to the notion that science fiction is cultural criticism, or, as I put it last month, "the entire point of science fiction is to imagine social and cultural changes and then work out their ramifications on people's lives." What Newitz identifies as "world-building," then, is essentially laying down the story's parameters... setting up the dominos, let's say, pulling back to show you the pattern, and then cutting away just before the first one gets tipped over. Want to see how they fall? Read the book. When you look at it that way, giving you a peek at the environment isn't that much different from giving you a peek at the storyline.

First Judge Parker kicks off a storyline about negotiating a book advance, and now the comic strip is strengthening its ties to the publishing community by explicitly plugging books—namely The Little Red Book: Lessons and Teachings from a Lifetime in Golf by "the late, great" Harvey Penick. (It's not an exact likeness, but it's awfully close.) My immediate reaction was to wonder if Simon & Schuster is going to notice a sales bump (gotta remember to call Nielsen BookScan next week and look into that), and then I started looking forward to the prospect of several days of Sam Driver reading choice excerpts during his plane ride. Maybe he'll even quote from it on the golf course!

In a related story, first serial rights to Venus Williams's forthcoming book on the inspiration of coaches have been sold to Tank McNamara.

"Independent bookstores across the country are invited to take part in a unique reading experience this coming October," according to a press release that showed up in the inbox this morning. "Booksellers will host 24-hour reading marathons in their stores, designed to highlight the importance of reading to our culture, as well as create an opportunity for booklovers to tackle the next book on their to-read pile."

Yes, because nothing shows us the power of a good book to change our consciousness like having people sit staring at pages until their eyes go bleary, and we retain so much of what we read when we haven't gotten enough sleep. I mean, I'm all for "promot[ing] and foster[ing] the love of reading," but I'm not sure that reducing reading to the level of goldfish swallowing or telephone-booth-stuffing is the way to go here.

(Also, a technical question: Will audiobook listening count?)

My brother sent me a link to a Slate article about stock photography, which ended with a reference to Jennifer Anderson, the "Everywhere Girl," who shows up on a lot of book covers. Sometimes she walks towards the camera, sometimes she walks away from the camera, sometimes she sits in a classroom, lost in thought...

"I talked to the wardrobe/makeup woman for the shoot on the phone, and she said to bring lots and lots of clothes," Anderson says in a blog post about the photo shoot, which took place on the campus of Reed College. "Keep in mind that this shoot was done a while ago, so laugh all you want at the outfits, but it was cool back then, I swear!"

On Monday, July 28, UnBeige blogger Steve Delahoyde is coming to town for an evening of readings from Field-Tested Books, an online (and print) essay collection compiled by the Coudal Partners design firm (which is where he has his day job). I'm one of the many contributors, and if plans hold firm, I'll be joining Steve at The Delancey that evening along with Ben Greenman, Randy Cohen, and a slew of other authors.

Coudal's also putting together a similar event on its Chicago home turf on July 22. That one features Jonathan Messinger, Claire Zulkey, Kevin Guilfoyle, and Wendy McClure, among others.

I was talking with some people this morning about that huge advance Stuff White People Like got earlier this year, and we got to wondering if the book was actually doing anything. Well, Portfolio blogger Jeff Bercovici says the early signs are promising: "around 7,000 copies" in the first two weeks, according to Nielsen BookScan, and a spot on an extended NY Times bestseller list.

I'm not convinced that, as Bercovici's headline suggests, this makes the book a "crossover hit," since 7,000 copies isn't even 10 percent of the White People website on its best day, but short of actually conducting a poll asking people who bought the book whether they were fans of the site, heard about it somehow, or discovered the concept when they found the book, it'd be hard to tell.

(Also, one minor quibble: BooSscan doesn't tally around 70 percent of sales; rather, it tallies sales from approximately 70 percent of the retail outlets where books are sold. While multiplying BookScan numbers by 1.43 is a useful rule of thumb in calculating total sales, it's not perfectly reliable. Some books play amazingly well at Wal-Mart, some do about what they do at bookstores, and some never get to Wal-Mart at all. I couldn't hazard a guess as to where White People falls in that spectrum.)

This week's Funky Winkerbean appears set to become the most realistic portrayal of the publishing industry in the funny pages since that guy in For Better or For Worse published his debut novel last fall. Now I can't wait until next July, when thousands of aspiring writers converge upon the Javits Center two months too late to score a book deal at "the BookExpo America." (And don't you just love that casual reference to the Javits, like everybody outside the tri-state area knows exactly what it is?)

Oh, wait: I overlooked the current Judge Parker storyline, in which the titular character makes one of his increasingly rare appearances to announce that he's written a crime novel and needs his lawyer pal to get him a bigger advance .

(Funky Winkerbean and Judge Parker are both distributed by King Features Syndicate.)

While yesterday's field report from Doc Wasabassco focused on the "50th anniversary" of Hard Case Crime, the pulp fiction imprint headed up by Charles Ardai (top left), that wasn't the only cause for celebration at the Explorer's Club last week. I was also there to cheer on Ardai's wife, Naomi Novik (bottom right), who had just made her hardcover debut with Victory of Eagles, the fifth novel in the amazing Temeraire fantasy series. (Think Patrick O'Brian with talking dragons.) While the Hard Case crowd partied in sultry noir style in one room, Novik's end of the party was peppered with friends in 19th-century costumes, dancing up a storm with, I was assured, historical accuracy.

Last Thursday, GalleyCat events correspondent Amanda ReCupido swung by (the soon-to-be-renamed) McNally Robinson where Janelle Brown (left) was having an ice cream social to celebrate the publication of her first novel All We Ever Wanted Was Everything. "The title actually comes from a Bauhaus song," Amanda reports; in the novel, one of the character reads the lyrics at a graduation party. "The novel looks at how success affects different people in Silicon Valley," she adds. "Though Brown addresses women and business, she admits she 'didn’t plan on a business story;' she was more interested in family stories and simply 'felt the female characters.' Brown turned to fiction writing after a decade-long journalism career in which she was 'tired of telling the truth,' though she learned much about storytelling: 'I would start to imagine how the news would be much more interesting if only so-and-so had done x instead. It was a huge relief to do fiction.'" In addition to Mary Elizabeth Williams and Larry Smith, the crowd included authors Hari Kunzru, Walter Mosley, and Elisha Cooper, along with agent Susan Golomb and editor Julie Grau.

(Brown was a staffer at Wired when I was freelancing for the magazine's online division eleven years ago, and if I hadn't been doing a speaking gig last weekend, I would've definitely come out for this; I've been looking forward to it for a while.)

Brown's novel has become the latest inspiration for the argument over why so many books written by women about contemporary women's experiences is branded as "chick lit." Unsurprisingly, it's NYT critic Janet Maslin who takes the oversimplistic critical short cut, although it should be noted that Maslin seems to be lazily conflating "chick lit" and "beach books" for the purposes of her review. In an interview with Jezebel, Brown challenges the tag:

"It is reductive! It’s also dismissive. 'Chick lit' is a catch all for everything that’s not 'hard' literature written by a woman. It implies that the male experience is universal, while the female experience is something only other women would be interested in. Even Joyce Carol Oates’ last book got the disembodied female head cover treatment! I understand where the term comes from – [books about] female protagonists looking for love in the big city – but my book has nothing to do with finding a man. Companies know that women are really the only ones who still buy books, which is good, but there has to be a better way to market them."

Tomorrow night (July 17), the literary journal Inkwell is having a benefit reception at the Tribeca Grill, starting at 6:30 p.m., for 30 guests who are willing to contribute $10 when they make advance reservations. Poets reading at the event will include Carol Muske-Dukes, Kevin Pilkington, and Joanna Herman.

Meanwhile, the curators of the monthly "Fantastic Fiction" reading series at KGB Bar have put together a fundraising raffle that includes a bottled Michael Swanwick story, a keyboard used by Neil Gaiman, original artwork by Gahan Wilson or Terri Windling, and the opportunity to buy your way into stories by Lucius Shepard, Elizabeth Hand, or Jeffrey Ford—and a signed, limited edition of Ray Bradbury's The Cat's Pajamas usually worth $900. Each prize is being raffled off separately; the $1 tickets are available online. (But you should still consider going to tonight's reading with John Kessel and JoSelle Vanderhooft.)

Next week's all-star tribute to Shirley Jackson is being organized by Fantastic Fiction co-curator Ellen Datlow, and it's also being held at KGB, but it's a separate fundraiser for the Shirley Jackson Awards, honoring "outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic." The inaugural prizes will be handed out this weekend at the ReaderCon convention.