Vanessa Manko (left), Susan Minot (center), and Salman Rushdie (right)

Vanessa Manko and Judy Chicurel, two authors featured in a recent issue of Granta, have signed book deals with Penguin. To toast these two authors, the literary magazine threw a party.

The celebration took place at Granta editor John Freeman‘s Manhattan loft on Wednesday night, and brought together a community of writers and editors including: Salman Rushdie, Sean McDonald, Alex Gilvarry, Mohsin Hamid, Nadeem Aslam, and Peter Carey, to name a few.

Manko, whose novel was excerpted in Granta 118: Exit Strategies, sold her novel The Un-American to Penguin through her agent Caroline Michel. The title is slated for publication in spring 2014. Manko, who works as Rushdie’s assistant, spent seven years working on the book. In a toast to the author, Rushdie quipped that she’s going to need to speed things up in the future. Over drinks, Manko explained that her background in dance helped inform her writing as she looked for the cadence in her language. continued…

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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.

The Star Agency by R.E. Weber: “So many of us dream of another life – a life of excitement and danger. What if, in the darkest depths of despair, you suddenly had a chance to live that life? Would you have the courage to chase that dream, even if you had to leave your friends, family and everything you knew behind? Would you take that chance?” (January 2013)

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GalleyCat has learned that Granta will close its office in New York City.

We have also heard that deputy editor Ellah Allfrey and art director Michael Salu have both resigned. Associate editor Patrick Ryan will also be leaving.

We’ve reached out to the literary journal for commentary, and we will update with any response. Editor John Freeman also left the magazine last month.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Do you wish you could send your fans a digital autograph? Or dream of getting your digital book autographed by your favorite author? Writers and readers can use the free Authorgraph service to send, request or receive autographs.

Sign up for Authorgraph at this link. If you have the digital signature delivered to your Kindle through Amazon’s Personal Document Service, you could be charged for the transmission. Here’s more from the company:

One of the most distinctive features of Authorgraph.com is the ability to actually draw your signature. This signing takes place completely in the browser window using a mouse (or your finger if you use a tablet). However, there is also a default option that allows authors to print their name in a script font if they don’t want to use the signing feature … Every Authorgraph goes only to the specific reader that requested it so an author can write a custom message for each reader. In addition, readers can include a short message to the author in order to provide a bit more context for personalizing the Authorgraph.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

For the first time in two years, the Library of America has updated its list of “all-time best-selling titles.”

Once again, Thomas Jefferson, Mark Twain, Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau led that list of major sellers prestigious publisher. The Library of America also released a list of the top backlist bestsellers in 2012, and we’ve included the top ten below–a look at the new classics. Check it out:

Of course, the methodology of the above list favors titles that have been out longer; the most “recent” title in the top 15 was published in 1995. Readers might be interested seeing which “backlist titles” (i.e., volumes published prior to 2011) sold the most copies last year, in 2012.

(Via Edward Champion & Michael Orthofer)

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GalleyCat readers constantly ask us: how many copies does it take to get on the Self Published Bestsellers List?

This is not an easy question to answer since all the major marketplaces for indie books carefully guard their sales figures. However, in Behind the Story: Interviews From 20 Self-Published Authors Who Made it BIG, author Denise Kim Wy managed to get sales figures from six different self-published authors.

We’ve included those sales figures below, complete with some quotes from the book. If you are an indie author and want to share how many copies you’ve sold, feel free to email GalleyCat a photograph to be included on this list.

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Former Federated Media CEO Deanna Brown has been named the new president at Byliner. The company collects short stories and articles online, and also publishes digital shorts.

Here’s more from the release:

As CEO of Federated Media, she doubled the company’s revenues and was responsible for building a network that reached 180 million unique visitors a month—outranking Yahoo, AOL, and Microsoft. Prior to Federated, Brown was President of Scripps Networks Interactive, and held Vice President and General Manager titles at Yahoo and AOL. She was CEO and cofounder of Powerful Media/Inside.com, which was acquired by Primedia, and CEO and founder of Gaming Industry News, which was acquired by Ziff Davis. In 1995, Brown cofounded CondéNet, the digital division of publisher Condé Nast.

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Prolific writer Mitch Albom has landed a three-book deal with HarperCollins’ Harper imprint, leaving his old publisher.

Albom’s next book will be a novel entitled The First Phone Call From Heaven. The storyline will focus on characters who receive phone calls from those who have passed away. Editor Karen Rinaldi negotiated the deal with literary agent David Black.

According to Albom’s Facebook page, the publisher plans to release the book on November 12, 2013.

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At the Digital Hollywood conference in Los Angeles today, a group of successful Indiegogo and Kickstarter campaign founders shared advice at the “Crowdfunding Case Studies” panel discussion.

Sarah Weichel helped with the Indiegogo campaign for Hello, Harto!, raising nearly $223,000 for to take a show on the road. She revealed that most fans wanted to spend between $20 and $50 for the campaign.

Weichel’s campaign offered a number of perks, including buttons, t-shirts, doodles and other tangible rewards for backers. Weichel explained that the best perks should be customized and tangible: “[Fans] want something you have touched or made custom for them in some way.”

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Do you love Dan Brown‘s literary puzzles?

You can download two free eBooks by J.F. Penn to play an online game created by Kobo. The winner gets $5,000 and an eReader signed by Brown himself. AppNewser has all the details:

Kobo has created an augmented reality game to promote eReading. The game is called The Descent and is inspired by Dante’s Inferno, Dan Brown’s upcoming book Inferno and the works of the self-published author J.F. Penn, which are themed around Dante’s Inferno and the nine circles of hell. The promotion encourages readers to download and read two free eBooks by Penn – Sins of Temptation and Sins of Violence (both of which are Kobo exclusives)– in order to look for clues to crack the code of the online game. The author’s third book in the series, Sins of Treachery, comes out in September.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

A theatrical adaptation of Tucker Max’s 2009 book, I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, is coming to New York City.

According to Max’s website, this project will stay “very true to the book.”

An off-Broadway run for I Hope They Serve Beer on Broadway by Tucker Max has been scheduled for dates throughout the month of June. Max will attend the performances.

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This week, BookBub is hiring a director of editorial operations, while Bauman Rare Books needs a rare bookseller. ABRAMS is seeking a marketing manager, and Zondervan is on the hunt for a vice president and publisher. Get the scoop on these openings and more below, and find additional just-posted gigs on Mediabistro.

• Director of Editorial Operations BookBub (Cambridge, MA)
• Rare Bookseller Bauman Rare Books (Las Vegas, NV)
• Marketing Manager ABRAMS (New York, NY)
• VP and Publisher Zondervan (Grand Rapids, MI)
• Royalties Assistant Dystel & Goderich Literary Management (New York, NY)

Find more great publishing jobs on the GalleyCat job board. Looking to hire? Tap into our network of talented GalleyCat pros and post a risk-free job listing. For real-time openings and employment news, follow @MBJobPost.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Wanelo has grown quite popular among young Internet users lately. Below, we’ve linked to five Wanelo collections to help writers, readers and publishers explore the rapidly growing social network for young shoppers.

Wanelo users browse collections of quirky and stylish things, and they can buy the item in a few short clicks. Authors and publishers do have an opportunity to share books on the new site, and popular books have been shared thousands of times. At the same time, readers can buy lots of literary items in the sprawling store. Check it out:

Every product you see on Wanelo was posted by hand by a member of Wanelo’s growing community, via our desktop browser bookmarklet, Wanelo for iPhone and iPad, or that POST+ link you see at the top of this page. On Wanelo you can: Collect products. Start with what’s Trending today, or follow some stores, people andcollections, then check out your feed. Save products you like. Post products. Anyone can post any product from any online store. Sell products. Store pages are created when members post products from a new store. If products from *your* store have been posted on Wanelo, you can claim it.

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Pretty Woman producer Gary W. Goldstein hopes to raise $12,000 to self-publish his book, The Writer’s Guide to Hollywood.

The funds will be used to hire a book designer, an editor, a proofreader, and a web designer. It will also cover the first print run and the costs of shipping the books out to stores. We’ve embedded a video about the project above–what do you think? Here’s more about the project:

“As a producer and literary manager, I’ve discovered keys to success in Hollywood — valuable tools that actually launch careers — the very things that helped me jumpstart careers for so many screenwriters and filmmakers, and that allowed me to launch my own career when I was new to Los Angeles and didn’t know anyone in the business. I want to share these strategies with writers everywhere so they too can build a career doing what they love.”

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Think that libraries are obsolete in the 21st Century? A whopping 94 percent of American parents agree that “libraries are important for their children.”

Last year, Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project surveyed 2,252 Americans aged 16 or older to find out more about library attitudes in America. Here is more information from the inspiring report:

84% of these parents who say libraries are important say a major reason they want their children to have access to libraries is that libraries help inculcate their children’s love of reading and books. 81% say a major reason libraries are important is that libraries provide their children with information and resources not available at home. 71% also say a major reason libraries are important is that libraries are a safe place for children.

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Journalist Masha Gessen will write about the Tsarnaev brothers, tracing their family history from Chechnya to the horrific bombings they carried out in Boston. In the video embedded above, watch Gessen speak on The Daily Show.

Riverhead Books will publish the book, coming from the author of The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. A Russian-American journalist, Gessen lives and works in Moscow. Here’s more from the release:

The book will explain who the brothers were, where they came from, what shaped them, and how they came to do what they appear to have done. From their displaced beginnings, as descendants of ethnic Chechens deported to Central Asia in the Stalin era, it will follow the brothers from strife-ridden Kyrgyzstan to war-torn Dagestan, and then, as new émigrés, to the looking-glass, utterly disorienting peace and order of Cambridge, Mass. Most crucially, it will reconstruct the struggle that ensued for each of the brothers, between assimilation and alienation, and their alleged metamorphosis into a new breed of home-grown terrorist, with their feet on American soil but their loyalties elsewhere, a split in identity that can be the breeding ground for a deadly sense of mission.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Warner Brothers TV Writing Workshop will accept applications from today until June 1, 2013.

You must pay $30 to apply, but accepted screewriters spend the intensive workshop in weekly lectures with “a mix of showrunners, directors, actors and agents.” This learning period is followed by an intensive writing program. Check it out:

In the winter, the Workshop participants are divided into smaller groups for an intensive writing experience. Each participant will be required to complete a new spec script under the same deadlines found on a show currently in production. How participants perform during this exercise will determine whether they will be chosen for a possible staffing position on a Warner Bros. show … Upon completion of the program, Studio executives will help participants, who pass the Writers’ Room, obtain a staff position on a Warner Bros. television show currently in production. We can’t guarantee you will get staffed, but we will get your material in front of the people who make the ultimate decisions – the showrunners.

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Would you like to be featured in the new book trailer for Catching Fire? Send Scholastic a video explaining why you love The Hunger Games trilogy for a chance to be included.

Follow this link to read all the rules and submission terms. Each video must contain your first name, the state where you live, and answer these questions:

• The Hunger Games: We all have our reasons. Mine is…
• I love The Hunger Games because…
• The best thing about Catching Fire is…
• Everyone should read Catching Fire because…

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Maidenhead by Tamara Faith Berger has won the Believer Book Award for 2013 and The Hartford Book by Samuel Amadon took the Believer Poetry Award this year.

To help readers explore all the finalists, we’ve created a literary mixtape linking to excerpts of all the finalists–look below for the free literary sampler. Here’s more about Maidenhead:

It is the rare writer who can produce, between the same covers, a genuine work of erotica (which Maidenhead, from Coach House Books, is) and a deep portrait of a young woman’s coming-of-age, with all that implies: her political awakening, her newly critical eye turned toward her family, and a life of embroilments far greater than she can truly handle. Tamara Faith Berger has been writing challenging and sexy books for more than a decade, but this novel is her best yet.

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Hachette Book Group reached an agreement with OverDrive today to offer its complete eBook catalog to libraries. AppNewser has all the details about the deal.

At the same time, New York Public Library president Anthony W. Marx wrote an op-ed about progress with digital books and libraries. Check it out:

Last September, Penguin agreed to make its e-books available to patrons at the New York Public Library and the Brooklyn Public Library, but with a six-month lag for new titles. Penguin recently agreed to release e-books to libraries at the same time its hardcovers came out. In April, Simon & Schuster agreed to sell e-books to the city’s libraries. Today’s announcement by Hachette (whose imprints include Little, Brown) is the capstone of that process. Many issues still need to be sorted out. Five of the Big Six are making their entire e-book inventory available to us to choose from, while Macmillan is offering only a limited selection.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.