Novelist A.G. Riddle stayed on our Science Fiction Self-Published Bestsellers list with The Atlantis Gene this month.

Our weekly self-published bestsellers list is often dominated by the popular genres of romance and erotica. In an effort to help GalleyCat readers find other kinds of independent authors, we will offer regular genre-focused bestseller lists for other kinds of indie writers.

To keep the list fresh, we’ve highlighted three top books from four different marketplaces.  If you want more resources as an author, try our Free Sites to Promote Your eBook post, How To Sell Your Self-Published Book in Bookstores post and our How to Pitch Your Book to Online Outlets post.

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In this encore edition of the Morning Media Menu, we spoke with Dan Slater, author of Love in the Time of Algorithms: What Technology Does to Meeting and Mating.

Slater explained how he went from losing his job to writing a book about dating in the age of social networks. He also shared some practical intelligence for making the best nonfiction book proposal. Here is an excerpt:

I had been a legal reporter at the Wall Street Journal, and I never in a million years imagined myself writing an article, much less a book, about online dating. I stumbled on to it. I thought the subject was interesting, both the business side and the sociological side–’How is this business affecting people?’ … Then you look at the market: ‘Has this book been done?’ That is something that you can see quite easily. You go on Amazon and do a bunch of searches. You say, ‘Okay, what does this space look like?’

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• Authors react to The Atlantic’s controversial essay on writing and motherhood
• California library installs vending machine for kids’ books
• How high-school reading lists have changed since 1907
• Paying tribute to Judy Blume’s Forever
• Vote for CBC Books’ “ultimate undead” literary character

The Oxford English Dictionary has added ‘tweet’ and ‘crowdsourcing’ to its famous lexicon.

OED chief editor John Simpson wrote an article about the newly added words. The verb “crowdsourcing” has been attributed to Jeff Howe and his famous Wired magazine article about the topic. Here’s more from Simpson:

Some notes on the new vocabulary in this batch come from a wide range of semantic regions, as usual. Scientific vocabulary (especially technology) forms a healthy chunk: big data, crowdsourcing, e-reader, mouseover, redirect (the noun), and stream (the verb) … The noun and verb tweet (in the social-networking sense) has just been added to the OED. This breaks at least one OED rule, namely that a new word needs to be current for ten years before consideration for inclusion. But it seems to be catching on.

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Microsoft has released a Microsoft Office iOS app for Office 365 subscribers. The app lets users access, view and edit Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerPoint documents on their phone.

The app ensures that the documents don’t have any formatting issues and that things like charts, animations, and graphics are easy to view. Any edits that the user  makes or notes that the user adds won’t move around the formatting.

The app is optimized for the Microsoft blog:

Office Mobile has been optimized for the small screen of your phone so you can get the important things done quickly. For instance, the Slide Navigator allows you to page through PowerPoint presentations fast while Speaker Notes help you practice presentations on the go. When reviewing Word documents on your phone, the Resume Reading feature takes you to the exact point in the document where you left off on your computer so you never miss a beat.

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Meredith Parents Network has introduced a new app for parents called the Mom+ app that is designed to breathe digital life into print magazines.

The free app, which was designed by Nellymoser for both  iOS and Android, integrates content from multiple titles under the network’s umbrella of publications. Readers of the print publications can scan pages of the June and July issues of Parents, American Baby, FamilyFun and Ser Padres magazines and the app will load bonus content. This includes photo galleries, videos, sweepstakes, and even links to purchase products that are featured on the pages. There are even special ads that readers can access through the app. App users can also use the app to share magazine content directly to Pinterest, Twitter, and Facebook. continued…

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There’s a new start-up in San Francisco that’s aiming to empower consumers with a voice – and it’s usually  an angry one. At Blacklist, everyone’s sharing their bad brand experiences, and from the looks of it, a lot of companies just don’t know how to keep customers happy. This is a great site for a PR team to get to work! I’m talking to you At&t, American Apparel, Sears…

Before Yelp there was Consumer Reports, but none of these testimonial driven sites offer consumers the opportunity to basically give brands the middle finger. Consumers are angry and dissatisfied and now that there are plenty of socially accessible outlets, consumers and their friends and their friend’s friends are teaming up to do what they like best – express that outrage. continued…

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We have learned that pirated eBooks copies of Stephen King‘s print-only Joyland are circulating online.

UPDATE: Hard Case Crime publisher Charles Ardai sent us this statement:

In the end you have to rely on the good behavior of the vast majority of the audience – I see no reason to think that pirates represent more than a small fraction of all consumers.  That doesn’t mean we don’t care about piracy – we do.  But it’s just one of the many punches you have to learn to roll with in the rough-and-tumble world of modern publishing.

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We have a few more documents from the Apple ebook pricing trial of interest to share, though they do not relate directly to yesterday's testimony. No one from Barnes & Noble has testified in court yet (at one point Teresa Horner was due to be called as a defense witness).…

Need a last minute Father’s Day gift but don’t feel like hitting the stores? eBay Now can help if you happen to be located in San Francisco, San Jose or New York City.

The iOS app lets you shop at stores in the area and arrange delivery for the product the same day “in as little as an hour.” This includes products from chain stores including Urban Outfitters, Toys R Us, Macy’s, Walgreens, Home Depot, Target, as well as smaller local businesses. You can search the app for a product, browse through different offerings, retailers and prices. Then hit “Bring it” to have it delivered to you that day for $5. continued…

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Tim Ditlow has left Amazon Children's, where he was associate publisher (after working for Amazon-owned Brilliance Audio since 2008). Michelle Nagler will join Random House Children's Books on July 15 as associate publishing director for the Random House/Golden Books group, reporting to Mallory Loehr. Nagler is currently editorial director at…

Vodaphone knows that festival goers like their phones and have a hard time keeping it charged. That’s why they are teaming up with researchers to bring printed charging modules for your pockets and sleeping bags. The technology uses your body heat to add power to your smart phone.

Stephen Beeby,  Professor of Electronic Systems at the University of Southampton describes how easy it is to create pliable chargers:

Basically, we’re printing down pairs of what are called ‘thermocouples. You print lots of those down and connect them up to make a thermoelectric module… One side of that is cold and the other is hot, and when you get a flow of heat through it you can create a voltage and a current. Voltage and current together equals electrical power.

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In a letter to Judge Cote posted to the court docket on June 12, assistant attorney general for the State of Texas David Ashton responded to Apple's request earlier in the week -- one that mirrored our own -- as to what, exactly, the states want out of the ongoing…

The longstanding efforts by private equity owners EQT and the Singaporean sovereign-wealth fund to sell Springer Science have taken yet another twist. They will walk away from BC Partners' recent offer to buy the entire company for approximately €3.1 billion, and instead will go ahead with the long-contemplated IPO. The…

Canadian poet David McFadden briefly took to the stage at last night’s Griffin Poetry Prize gala to accept the $65,000 award – the richest in the world for a single book of poetry – for his latest collection, What’s the Score?, published by Toronto’s Mansfield Press.

“It’s an unexpected honour, and I’m thrilled to the bone,” he told a crowd gathered in the atrium of the Corus Entertainment building on Toronto’s waterfront.

In the international category, the Griffin was awarded to Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan for Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me, and Other Poems (Yale University Press), translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah. Both were in attendance, despite the fact that Zaqtan had difficulty entering the country.

In a short, emotional acceptance speech, McFadden thanked his “wonderful and beloved” editor at Mansfield, Stuart Ross.

Ross, a poet in his own right, first came across McFadden’s work as a teenager. “I feel humbled that pretty much my all-time poetry hero is a guy that I now can work with and help get those books out,” he told Q&Q.

Ross was tapped to edit McFadden’s collection of selected poems, Why Are You So Sad? (Insomniac Press), which received a Griffin nomination in 2008. 

“He’s not an academic, he’s not a wildly experimental poet, he’s not a classical poet. He’s a really plainspoken but profound poet,” said Ross. “It’s exciting that poetry like that can be recognized. As an editor, it’s absolutely amazing.” 

Ross added that the Griffin win is “really important” for Mansfield. As he told Q&Q in April, “Although there are some ‘big’ small presses that everyone always dreams of being published by, there are small presses who are publishing work that is as worthy as anything else out there.”

A jury consisting of U.S. poet Mark Doty, Chinese-American poet and author Wang Ping, and 2011 Griffin nominee Suzanne Buffam selected the two winners from 509 books of poetry submitted from 40 countries around the globe, including 15 translations.

 – With files from Stuart Woods

Correction June 17: A previous version of this article included incorrect juror names and number of submissions received in 2013.

Packing school lunches can get repetitive. To help parents generate new ideas and add a little spice to their child’s brown bag, Familius has created an app called 52 School Lunches.

The cookbook app includes 52 different ways to “make lunch special.” It includes recipe suggestions with bright photos, ingredient lists and directions on making meals. The entries are varied and not your usual everyday PB&J. The idea is to help make lunches more fun for kids, and the recipes also include presentation instructions. Fruit salsa rollup anyone? Cupcake wrapper fruit tray? The recipes also include nutrition information to help parents create well-rounded meals.

The app is available for $1.99 on iTunes, Google Play, Amazon for Kindle Fire, and Barnes & Noble for Nook, and $2.99 for Windows Phone.

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Looking to make your Android phone perform faster? It may be time to rid it of cached files. These temporary web pages, images and documents can add up as you use your phone to browse the web. Clearing them all can help enhance the performance of your phone. The App Cache Cleaner app can help you do this by wiping all of the cached files from your phone.

Check it out: “One Tap to clean all cached files for getting more available space. This tool can free a lot of storage memory for your phone. Free phone internal memory, Get more internal ROM storage. It is an app which is crucial to anyone who has memory management issues. Stop low memory warnings.fix low memory. fix your buggy android phone.If you running out of application storage, you now can get more available storage space by clearing apps created cache/data files.”

For other tools to help you clean up your Android devices, check out our list of 5 Memory Cleaner Apps for Android. (Via CNET).

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