Tue 28 Mar 2000
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Forbes' annual list of the top 100 celebrities, ranked by money earned in 1999, puts George Lucas in first place with earnings of $400 million. Others: Stephen King is 7th, with $65m, Steven Spielberg 9th with $60m, and J.K. Rowling 24th with $40m.
Tue 21 Mar 2000
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Stephen King e-book update: the author estimates he'll earn $450,000 for Riding the Bullet.
• Awards, Awards:
Short and Long List honorable mentions to this year's James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award, which was won by Suzy McKee Charnas's The Conqueror's Child, are now posted here:
Winners of the Aurealis Awards for works of Australian SF, fantasy, and horror include Jane Routley, Chris Lawson, and Terry Dowling. Greg Egan, whose Teranesia was named winner in the SF Novel category, declined the award.
The 1999 Chesley Awards nominees, given to works of art by The Association of Science Fiction and Fantasy Artists (ASFA), are listed here:
Nominations for the 1999 International Horror Guild Awards, which will announce winners May 12th at the World Horror Convention in Denver, are listed here. In addition, Richard Matheson will receive the Living Legend Award.
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The Harry Potter lawsuit is back in the news. Author Nancy K. Stouffer charged last year that elements of J.K. Rowling's series were lifted from Stouffer's 1984 book The Legend of Rah and Muggles; Scholastic, Rowling, and Time Warner filed a lawsuit in November against her; now she is suing back. Stouffer's book, the news articles note, was sold mostly on the US East Coast, in Giant supermarkets and Rite Aid drugstores; the publisher, Ande, went bankrupt in 1987.
Thu 16 Mar 2000
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Update on Stephen King's e-book (or eBook): it's such a success that online booksellers can't meet the demand; 400,000 orders were received in the first 24 hours. (The story, by the way, is available from Alexandria Digital Literature, among many other online merchants.)
Tue 14 Mar 2000
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Stephen King's eBook Riding the Bullet is available beginning today. Amazon.com is giving it away for free, though you have to download a Glassbook Reader (which requires a flavor of Windows, and Internet Explorer 4 or later, to run) first. Simon & Schuster's site SimonSays.com has an excerpt you can read for free, and a list of eBook vendors selling the title on this page.
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Jonathan Lethem has won a National Book Critics Circle award for his novel Motherless Brooklyn (Doubleday), a mystery about a detective with Tourette's syndrome. (Among the other nominees: J.M. Coetzee's Booker Prize-winning Disgrace.) Other winners included Jorge Luis Borges for Selected Non-Fictions (Viking), and Jonathan Weiner for Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior (Knopf).
Sat 11 Mar 2000
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Suzy McKee Charnas has won this year's James Tiptree, Jr. Award for her novel The Conqueror's Child (Tor). The award is an annual prize to works of science fiction or fantasy that explore and expand gender roles.
Fri 10 Mar 2000
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Stephen King, who released an original collection last year only as an audiobook, is now releasing a novelette-length story only as an e-book. ''Riding the Bullet'' will be available next Tuesday from the Simon & Schuster website.
Fri 3 Mar 2000
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Brian Aldiss will be named 1999 Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America at the Nebula Banquet to be held May 19-21, 2000, in New York City. The British writer won one of the very first Nebulas in 1966 for his novella ''The Saliva Tree'' and has been nominated several other times, including for his novels Helliconia Spring (1982) and Helliconia Winter (1985).
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The Book-of-the-Month Club and the Literary Guild, the two biggest book clubs in the US with over 8 million members, have completed an alliance to compete against online booksellers. The two clubs were formed in 1926 and 1927.
February News Log
