For your weekend reading pleasure, here are our top stories of the week.

They included how The Great Gatsby changed Haruki Murakami’s life, a steamy book cover that generated strong sales and a viral bookstore sign (embedded above).

1. This Is a Bookshop Sign Goes Viral

2. The Cover That Launched a Thousand iBookstore Sales

3. Why Haruki Murakami Translated The Great Gatsby

4. Author Gives Fake Writing Assignments to Online Cheaters

5. Hyperbole and a Half Author Returns with Illustrated Essay on Depression

6. Free Sites To Promote Your Book

7. Successful query letters for literary agents

8. Bret Easton Ellis Addresses David Foster Wallace Comments

9. Tsundoku: Illustrated Definition of a Book Lover’s Problem

10. Best Writing Music of 2013, So Far

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Franklin the Turtle and Scaredy Squirrel made appearances at Kids Can Press’s 40th anniversary party on May 16, joining thousands of children at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre as part of the Ontario Library Association’s Forest of Reading Festival of Trees.

Click on the thumbnails to see photos from the day.

Science fiction novelist Matthew Mather led our Science Fiction Self-Published Bestsellers list with CyberStorm this month (he also spoke at our course for indie authors).

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 are an author, check out our new online course–finish your book with the help of bestselling independent authors.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

For your weekend reading pleasure, here are the most popular AppNewser headlines of the week. They include apps to clean your Android device, recommended apps for kids, and an amazing way to save handwritten notes wirelessly. (trailer embedded above).

Click here to sign up for AppNewser’s daily email newsletter, getting all our publishing stories, book deal news, videos, podcasts, interviews, and writing advice in one place.

1. Recommended Apps for Kids

3. Memory Cleaning Apps for Android Devices

3.  Google Timelapse Shows Changes to Earth’s Terrain in Past 25 Years

4. Best iPad Stylus for Writers

5. How to convert ePub Books for use on Kindle

6.  Send Free International Texts with These Apps

7. Best Writing Apps for Android Users

8. Save Handwritten Notes Online Wirelessly

9. Free eBooks of the Week

10. Apps for Cleaning Your iOS Device

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Here are some handpicked titles from our Coming Attractions page. Want to include your book? Just read our Share Your New Book with GalleyCat Readers post for all the details.

Buyer, Beware by Diane Vallere: “Out-of-work fashion expert Samantha Kidd is strapped. But when the buyer of handbags for a hot new retailer turns up dead and Samantha is recruited for the job, the opportunity comes with a caveat: she’s expected to find some answers.” (March 2013)

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The winners of the Atlantic Book Awards were announced last night at a celebration hosted by CBC Radio’s Louise Renault.

The winners are:

Ann Connor Brimer Award for Children’s Literature
Live to Tell, Lisa Harrington (Dancing Cat Books)

Atlantic Publishers Marketing Association’s Best Atlantic-Published Book Award
The Metamorphosis: The Apprenticeship of Harry Houdini, Bruce McNab (Goose Lane Editions)

Atlantic Book Award for Scholarly Writing
The Ocean Ranger: Remaking the Promise of Oil, Susan Dodd (Fernwood Publishing)

Dartmouth Book Award for Non-fiction in Memory of Robbie Robertson
French Taste in Atlantic Canada 1604–1758: A Gastronomic History/ Le goût français au Canada atlantique 1604-1758: une histoire gastronomique, Anne Marie Lane Jonah and Chantal Véchambre (Cape Breton University Press)

Democracy 250 Atlantic Book Award for Historical Writing
In Search of R.B. Bennett, P.B. Waite (McGill-Queen’s University Press)

E.J. Pratt Poetry Award
Paradoxides, Don McKay (McClelland & Stewart)

Jim Connors Dartmouth Book Award (Fiction)
Anna from Away, D.R. MacDonald (HarperCollins Canada)

Lillian Shepherd Award for Excellence in Illustration
I Is for Island:  A Prince Edward Island Alphabet, Hugh MacDonald; Brenda Jones, illus. (Sleeping Bear Press)

Margaret and John Savage First Book Award
Dirty Bird, Keir Lowther (Tightrope Books)
atlantic-book-award-winners-announced

Rogers Communication Award for Non-fiction 
In the Field, Joan Sullivan (Breakwater Books)

 

OverDrive has launched a pilot program that will allow millions of library patrons to check out the same eBook all at once during a two-week period. The Big Library Read project will let members of more than 7,500 libraries globally simultaneously accessThe Four Corners of the Sky by Michael Malone.

OverDrive is working the book’s publisher Sourcebooks on the initiative. Library patrons at participating libraries will need to have a library card to check out the book.

Sari Feldman, executive director of the Cuyahoga County Public Library in Ohio expressed her enthusiasm in a statement: “It is an exciting opportunity to engage readers all over the world in a global book discussion and highlight the critical role libraries play in the discovery process. It has long been accepted as conventional wisdom that libraries help drive the success of authors. Through projects like this, we can affirm that wisdom with hard data and reinforce what we already know – that libraries play a key role in marketing books and authors.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Five writers have already been selected as candidates for the 2013 Nobel Prize, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy revealed via a Twitter dispatch today. Who do you think made the top secret list of finalists?

The Nobel Prizes in other disciplines will be revealed between October 7 and October 14. “According to tradition,” the Nobel Prize for Literature date will be revealed at some point in the future. Here is the short and sweet tweet:

5 candidates have been selected for 2013 #NobelPrize in #Literature according to Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

• Canadian writer Eliza Robertson named regional Commonwealth short-story prize winner 
• Tweet reveals five Nobel Prize in Literature candidates
• Amazon U.K. receives more grant money than it pays in taxes
• Hilary Mantel prefers books with action, gets impatient with romance
• Publishers experiment with digital-only titles

Pearson has laid off 19 employees, part of the publishing company’s ongoing shift.

When asked about the cuts, the company offered this statement:

Pearson’s businesses continue to shift from traditional print models to digital products and services. As our business needs have shifted, we’ve had to make difficult but necessary decisions about staffing. This week, we notified 19 employees that their positions will be ending with Pearson in the next month.  Thirteen of these employees are based in Upper Saddle River. We know that this is a challenging situation and we’ll be doing all that we can to support them through this transition.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

OR Books has a new eBook available called Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet and appropriately, the publisher is selling the eBook through a name-your-price model.

The book explores the history of the fight against SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act. It includes essays by: Aaron Swartz, Larry Lessig, Zoe Lofgren, Mike Masnick, Kim Dotcom, Nicole Powers, Tiffiny Cheng, Alexis Ohanian, and Cory Doctorow.

The publisher suggests that customers pay $10 for the download, but there is a drop down option to pay other amounts including: nothing, $2, $5, $25, $50 or $100.

When OR Books put out Julian Assange’s book  Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet back in December, they skipped Amazon and released it through eKiosk, a site that creators sell eBooks and music outside of major online marketplaces, through a network of smaller online shops.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Ed Cumming reports on the opening of this year's Hay Budapest festival.    

Bite Interactive’s latest survey indicates that Google Glass is not desirable -  at least, in its current social state. The survey showed that 90% of  Americans simply think it looks too awkward, costs too much, and feels unappealing. Not only are smart phone users uninterested in using the device, sci-fi author Neil Gaiman also thinks it looks too silly.

“Would I wear Google Glasses? Almost definitely not since they look very, very silly.”

Gaiman points to another critique of Glass’s hyper-connectivity mode:

“I think trying to learn to be present while you’re present is a really good thing to do.”

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The documents keep coming in the lead up to the June 3 trial in the ebook pricing case. The latest include Apple's "proposed findings of fact," which lays out through Apple's eyes the timetable of discussions and negotiations with publishers in December 2009 and January 2010 that led to the creation…

The programming and pitching work of the Publishing Hackathon takes place this weekend at Alley NYC, and the organizers report that 406 developers, designers and entrepreneurs have registered to participate. Fifteen sponsors have enrolled as well, and the previously-announced $10,000 grand prize has been joined by a series of smaller…

Are you planning a summer vacation but you’d like input from your friends before your book? Check out TripShare, an iPad app that lets you create and share your itineraries before you book them.

Once you sketch out a plan, you can share it plans with friends who can then give you feedback on your plan and make suggestions to your travel plan. You can then make edits to the itinerary based on your friends’ suggestions. Once you have the trip in mind that you’d like to take, you can price and book your trip through various online travel agencies — Expedia, Fly.com, Homeaway and Viator — without leaving the app.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Ever since we launched our directory of people looking for writers groups, we have found hundreds of writers looking for different kinds of writing support.

These invaluable groups can motivate you to write more, critique your work or even help you publicize your work.

To help our readers find support, we will occasionally spotlight a writers group looking for new members. If you are looking for an online writing group, you could try Australian Writers Rock! a giant writing community on Facebook.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Jenny Han has inked a deal for her “semi-autobiographical” young adult novel. Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers will publish To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before in April 2014.

Publisher Justin Chanda negotiated the deal with Folio Literary Management senior vice president Emily Van Beek. Executive editor Zareen Jaffery will edit the manuscript. Here’s more from the release:

To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before is the story of Lara Jean, who has never openly admitted her crushes, but instead wrote each boy a letter about how she felt, sealed it, and hid it in a box under her bed. But one day Lara Jean discovers that somehow her secret box of letters has been mailed, causing all her crushes from her past to confront her about the letters…

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

At the close of Wednesday's Making Information Pay conference, current BISG (Book Industry Study Group) chairman and Hachette Book Group president Ken Michaels addressed the importance of industry cooperation, particularly now that a simple "linear, rational, supply chain that we recognize and understand...no longer exists." He asked, "the most important…

New York Times senior staff editor John Williams will write a new column for the paper’s Book Review called “Open Book,” providing “a window onto the literary landscape.”

You can also follow Williams on Twitter.

This column will replace the weekly “Up Front” column, but the magazine will include occasional pieces about the magazine’s writers and online material.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.