Wattpad’s Crowd-Sourced Funding for Authors, John Cheever at Sing Sing, and More

by
Evan Smith Rakoff
8.14.13

Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—from publishing reports to academic announcements to literary dispatches—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today’s stories:

Bookstore sales fell 9.5 percent in June. (Shelf Awareness)

Jason Boog offers tips for self-published authors on garnering that illusive book review. (GalleyCat)

E-book community Wattpad recently announced a crowd-sourced funding service for its authors. (Christian Science Monitor)

Poet Carol Muske-Dukes recounts John Cheever’s 1977 visit with inmates at Sing Sing. (New Yorker)

Amazon Publishing created a new biography series—its first ten subjects feature one woman, Hannah Arendt. (Atlantic Wire)

Meanwhile, author Jane Vandenburgh penned an open letter to the New York Review of Books. “I’m sad, angered, missing Elizabeth Hardwick, Susan Sontag, Renata Adler. I am missing them, even as I'm wondering too what have you become.” (Huffington Post)

Micah Mattix examines what can happen when an entrepreneurial person posts an ad stating, “Poet available to begin work immediately.” (Atlantic)

Open Culture showcases Cormac McCarthy’s main rules of punctuation.