Over at Social Times, novelist Jackie Collins shared some of her social media strategy, going behind the scenes at her Twitter and Pinterest pages.

Here’s more from the post:

A huge fan of Pinterest, Collins enjoys the fun aspects of social media as well. “If I ever have a spare moment, I go on Pinterest and pin guys… which is so much fun,” she explains. Collins’ favorite is her “Smokin’ Hot” board. “What’s so interesting is you’ll pin Channing Tatum and Joe Manganiello, and you’ll see who repins and how many people repin,” she says. Collins has nearly 40 Pinterest boards: dogs, flowers, favorite TV shows, and more. “I have pictures of me back in the day, which is kind of fun, too,” she shares.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Twitter has decided to discontinue its TweetDeck apps, a tool that many writers used to manage their work on the social network.

Will you miss the Twitter tool? Here’s more from AppNewser:

Twitter announced it has chosen to discontinue Tweetdeck apps in order to focus on its web app client. Tweetdeck for iPhone, Android and Air will also be removed from their respective app stores in May and the apps will no longer work. Native apps for Mac and Windows will continue to work but will no longer see improvement. The company also quietly stated that it would discontinue support for Facebook integration, but offered little details on when and how.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

VisualCV lets you create an Internet-based, media-rich resume and share it with potential employers. Using the tool, you can build a resume that uses visuals to make it more appealing to look at.

Like other resume building tools, VisualCV lets you highlight your work experience with summary bullet points, skills lists, as well as education and work history. But the tool helps you liven up your resume by adding visual aspects.

Say, for example, you are a designer or a creative director, the tool lets you create a resume that features bright and colorful work that you have created right up front. The tool also works for job seekers who don’t have visual creations to showcase. For example, a sales executive might use the tool to include previews of recent reports that s/he has given, highlighting the colorful graphs and charts from the work. continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The Videos for Your Cats channel on YouTube has generated plenty of publicity from cat owners, but what about dogs?

Social Times investigated in the video embedded above, filming four dogs watching the YouTube channel intended for cats:

Videos for Your Cats is not for dogs, say four dogs who watched a video on the YouTube channel. Created by Meghan Koley in 2012, the Videos for Your Cats channel shows fish swimming in an aquarium, birds pecking at seeds in a bird feeder, and other visual stimuli that will make your cat go insane. Our dogs Xochi, Loki, Shechi, and Cowboy, were not impressed. Since dogs can’t actually talk, you’ll have to watch this video to see what we mean.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

• U.K. indie booksellers petition David Cameron to make Amazon pay taxes
• Indian writer gets first million-dollar advance from a domestic publisher
• BBC books coverage sidelined
• Finding the first novel written on a word processor
• Archie meets Glee in comic book mash-up

Apple’s U.K. and Ireland iBookstores have added a new tool to help readers discover self-published books called Breakout Books. The launch follows the introduction of the same bestsellers list in Apple’s U.S. iBookstore.

The titles on the Breakout Books lists are hand-picked books from emerging authors who have earned high ratings from customers. Apple explains Breakout Books in the iBookstore, as a place to “find the next reading sensation.” Most of the titles cost £2.99 or less.

Smashwords has more: “ This week’s Breakout Books feature showcases 55 self-published titles, approximately 40 of which were distributed to Apple by Smashwords.” Titles on the list include: A Highland Home – A Contemporary Highland Romance by Cali MacKay; A Tangle With Werewolves by Reese Currie; Afterlife Saga by Stephanie Hudson; and Breathe by Elena Dillon, among many others.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Last year photographer Rachel Hulin inspired hundreds of online articles with surreal photographs of her baby floating like a pint-sized superhero through different hotel rooms, barns and stairways.

One year later, that series of photographs is now a book, Flying Henry. We’ve included a few photographs from the book below. Here’s more about the new picture book.

A fantasy children’s book intended for infants and toddlers, Flying Henry follows the story of a baby who develops a magical ability to fly. Aware of his rare gift, he soars through his home, into nature, and unfamiliar places, testing the limits of his new skill by examining the world around him from the sky and embarking on great adventures. But, eventually Henry grows lonely and has to learn a very important secret about flying in order to fully enjoy his gift. Realistic looking flight rendered by artist Rachel Hulin with the willing support of her son, Henry, is an exceptional addition to the genre of photographic children’s books and will appeal to adults as well.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Want to get your manuscript published, but not sure how to get started? Join our Self-Publishing Finishing School starting April 3, 2013.

Weekly live video webcasts feature a variety of great speakers, including  including Mark Coker (founder, Smashwords), Colleen Hoover (bestselling self-published author), and Guy Kawasaki (author, APE! What the Plus!).

Join Mediabistro publishing editor Jason Boog for this step-by-step course will teach you how to design, distribute, and market your book without a publisher or agent.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Want to get your manuscript published, but not sure how to get started? Join our Self-Publishing Finishing School starting April 3, 2013.

Weekly live video webcasts feature a variety of great speakers, including Mark Coker (founder, Smashwords), Colleen Hoover (bestselling self-published author), and Guy Kawasaki (author, APE! What the Plus!).

Join Mediabistro publishing editor Jason Boog for this step-by-step course will teach you how to design, distribute, and market your book without a publisher or agent.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

I recently had the pleasure of attending Foyles’ ‘bookshop of the future’ workshop. The iconic Charing Cross bookstore is about to relocate and, in so doing, create a new bookstore designed for success in the modern book-selling landscape. The workshop served to gather insight from a cross-section of the industry, to help them achieve this ambitious goal in what they hoped would be potentially disruptive ways.

read more

Grimm’s Fairy Tales by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm is today’s Free eBook of the Day.

This children’s story book collection features classic stories such as Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel, The Golden Goose and The Frog Prince among many others.

Project Gutenberg has the free download.

For more free eBooks, check out our Free eBook of the Day archive.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The Believer Book Award finalists have been revealed along with the Believer Poetry Award finalists. To help readers explore the list, we’ve created a literary mixtape linking to excerpts of all the finalists–look below for the free literary sampler.

Here’s more from the magazine: “Each year, the editors of the Believer generate a short list of the novels and story collections they thought were the strongest and most underappreciated of the year. The 2012 list appears below. In the January issue, we asked our readers to send in their nominations for the best work of fiction from 2012; their answers, along with the winner from the following short list, will appear in the May 2013 issue.”

If you want more books, we made similar literary mixtapes linking to free samples of the most overlooked books of the year, the ALA Youth Media Award winners, the 2012 Man Booker Longlist, the Best Horror Novels of the Year, the LA Times Book Prize nominees, and the Nebula Award nominees.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

From a shortlist focused primarily on Canadian icons, a book about our ubiquitous neighbour to the south has taken this year’s Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-fiction. Cambridge University professor and Clare College fellow Andrew Preston was awarded the $25,000 prize on Monday for Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy (Knopf Canada).

A scholar of American history and international relations, Preston told Q&Q that his book, which offers an account of U.S. leaders and their foreign policy decisions through the lens of religious convictions, is rare among American historical and political scholarship. While the connection between the U.S.’s cultural identity and religion is clearly pervasive, Preston said it wasn’t until his Yale University students began asking about the issue during the years of the Bush administration that he realized just how uncharted the scholarly territory was.

Although it had been thought that secularism would rise with globalization, in fact the opposite has occurred. “We in the West might not like that – we might want to take religion right out of politics, which is what a lot of countries have done. But the fact is religion is a part of politics in those countries, and we need to understand that or we’re not going to be able to understand global conflicts,” said Preston.

Jury member and author Joseph Kertes said the jury unanimously decided on Preston’s book after just five minutes of talk. “We think this is a landmark work, and I think Canadians are uniquely positioned to write a work like this because we’re voyeuristic. We’re objective,” Kertes told Q&Q.

Having grown up a stone’s throw from the Canada-U.S. border in Brockville, Ontario, Preston said he grew up, like many Canadians, steeped in U.S. culture and politics. “I think Canadians have an intuitive grasp of the United States and American culture and American politics,” he said. “I don’t know if [being Canadian] makes me more objective or less objective. I’m just an historian who goes to the sources and tries to be sensitive to the subject.”

The other titles nominated for the prize were Carol Bishop-Gwyn’s The Pursuit of Perfection: A Life of Celia Franca (Cormorant Books), Tim Cook’s Warlords: Borden, Mackenzie King, and Canada’s World Wars (Allen Lane Canada), Sandra Djwa’s Journey with No Maps: A Life of P.K. Page (McGill-Queen’s University Press), and Ross King’s Leonardo and The Last Supper (Bond Street Books). Each runner-up received $2,000.

This morning, VIDA – an organization that advocates for women in literary arts – released the results of its 2012 survey examining the number of male and female reviewers, contributors, and authors at 15 major publications. And while some publications show a small degree of improvement, male domination still runs rampant.

The Boston Review fared well, with 14 female authors reviewed compared to 15 males, and four more female reviewers than male. The publication registered the greatest improvement since the count began in 2010, when it had 14 female authors reviewed compared with 41 males. The Threepenny Review also had a steady increase overall, with females accounting for six per cent more than last year, and 16 per cent more than 2010.

While Granta was a leader in the 2011 survey with more women reviewers than men, the journal’s numbers went down this year (30 women versus 41 men). VIDA attributes the decline to an all-female issue published in 2011 that bumped up Granta‘s numbers.

Harper’s is worse this year with three female reviewers versus 28 males, compared with 10 versus 23 last year. The New Republic follows suit with 10 more male than female reviewers compared with last year. The London Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books also had poor female representation.

Conducting our own survey, in Q&Q‘s March issue, 23 of 35 books reviewed are written by women. There are 22 female reviewers and 13 males.