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.

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.”

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.

In a very competitive culture that emphasizes newness and fashion, and promotes the reading of a current blockbuster which is forgotten in a moment's time, the backlist is a vanishing phenomenon. The volume of sales of one-year-old or older books is shrinking, while newer books capture an increasing share of the market.

Meaning some good books drop rapidly from cultural memory. What to do?

Popular opinion dictates that book blurbs are sneaky things—that they’re all about who you know rather than how good your book actually is. Here, some of the blurbers and blurbees let us in on how the book blurb really works…or doesn’t.

As New York celebrates the sharp decline in crime…the crime writer may be the only New Yorker for whom that drop is not an unequivocal blessing. Just as the breakup of the Soviet Union caused problems for writers whose plots hinged on the dark doings of the cold war, so New York’s crime writers are wondering where to find grist in a far safer city.

Terrible. Bring back the crime.

Rowling bashing is still a popular sport, but apparently it’s merely a symptom of a far more insidious affliction—that of sexism against all female fantasy writers. “Bestselling female contenders remain unacknowledged while their male counterparts are robustly namechecked, absorbed reliably into the official history of the genre,” says Bidisha. Gasp! Could it be so?

Environmentally friendly and guilt free, book swapping sites are hugely popular. Aside from the obvious benefits for the trees, book swapping introduces readers to authors they normally wouldn’t have chanced. Not actually purchasing the book apparently lends freedom to the process of choosing the next read. But some authors, such as Jeanette Winterson, are not so keen on the idea.

The misguided ''Golden Compass'' has found its way to DVD -- but it's not the first book-to-big-screen project to veer off course, as fans of ''Da Vinci Code,'' ''Memoirs of a Geisha,'' ''Eyes Wide Shut,'' and%