Bottom line is there are two types of writers: those who believe in writer’s block and those who don’t. Neither will deny the magic and energy that possesses an author when inspiration rears its mysterious head, but where their approach to writing differs is how the time is spent between those moments of inspiration.

Jennifer Anderson, the Everywhere Girl, did a stock photo shoot a few years ago. Something about her made cover designers want to put her on book covers. Idee, which makes an image search engine (put in a photo, it finds photos like it), found a number of books covers where her image appeared. Many of them the same photo on different books.

Good news in the book reviews department:

National Public Radio has expanded the book coverage on its website, adding weekly book reviews, and has hired six new book reviewers—including a graphic novel reviewer—and added more features to an already existing lineup of author podcasts, critics' lists and other book-focused content.

Strange but true…

The suit, filed by Larry Townsend's attorney for copyright infringement, stems from a dispute over unpaid fees allegedly owed the author by his distributor, the Oklahoma-based Nazca Plains Corp. Nonetheless, the suit charges that Mitzel, along with over 40 other booksellers…infringed on Townsend's copyright by selling the author's books in his store.

No, it’s book promotion in the age of the author video. Seth Greenland waxes eloquent on the rapidly blurring line between writer and salesman:

“Now, because of recent developments in the world of publishing, writer and merchant are fusing into one. Willy Loman and Arthur Miller have commingled. Call it -- forgive me -- Birth of a Salesman.”

Lazy consumers, who don’t want to click more than once to make a purchase, are supplying Amazon the weapon of destruction with which to bend publishers to its will. The online retailing giant has adopted “the literary equivalent of a nuclear option for rebellious publishers who balk at its demands”—disabling the “buy now with 1 click” icon.

Ooooo, nasty ugly.

Here’s a good deal:

…free PDF downloads of the first two books in Spencer-Fleming's series, In the Bleak Midwinter and A Fountain Filled With Blood, via e-mail registration.

Though the story says the offer expired a couple of days ago, I signed up and received the books without a problem today.

We're not saying sex is something to be ashamed of, and far be it from us to declare any activity between consenting adults to be unnatural. It's just that some types of sex are weird and even terrifying to us.

But, if you're going to do something that would make a dominatrix flinch, you might as well do it right. Thus we offer these sex guides that you'll either find helpful or nightmarish.

The gloves are off as Derek Walcott viciously attacks fellow Nobel Prize winner VS Naipaul in his recently premiered poem, Mongoose. The piece is “a fast-paced, savagely humorous demolition of Naipaul's work and personality that begins with the opening salvo: 'I have been bitten, I must avoid infection/Or else I'll be as dead as Naipaul's fiction.' Ouch! And it gets better.