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Author Iain Banks has announced on his website that he has just months to live after being diagnosed with bladder cancer.

The 59-year-old announced the book he is currently working on, entitled The Quarry, is likely to be his last after cancer spread to his liver, pancreas and lymph nodes.

In a personal statement on his official website, the Wasp Factory writer said he asked his partner Adele to marry him and is now on a short honeymoon.

He said: ‘The bottom line now, I’m afraid, is that as a late-stage gall bladder cancer patient, I’m expected to live for

John Winters writes about becoming a published author in Salon today. It’s a bitter perspective, but one that piques and gives some insights into publicizing your book.

I am contorting myself in front of the bathroom mirror, iPhone in hand, a porkpie hat on my head and a pair of black-framed Jonathan Franzen glasses perched on my nose. I am trying to capture an image of myself that does not look like me. Sans these accouterments, I am balding and thin faced with perpetual bags under my eyes – sort of like the father on “That ’70s Show” in need

Emily Temple at Flavorwire has collected a really interesting bunch of photos of authors in their teens. My favorites include JD Salinger, a looker in a military uniform, and Allen Ginsberg looking extremely dorky.

Inspired, we took it upon ourselves to dig up a handful of snapshots of other legendary authors in those awkward (or not so awkward, as the case may be) teenage years, before they penned the words that made them famous.

Read More Here…[…]

The UK photo book software developer, Taopix, has announced its new collaboration with Silicon Valley’s on-line self-publishing engine, FastPencil. This will offer an opportunity to picture book self-published authors to have a real choice about illustrations in their books instead of the difficult price sacrifices needed on the mainstream suppliers, such as Amazon’s Createspace.

Self-publishing involves a three-way partnership between the author, the e-commerce/publishing company and the actual book manufacturer. In this instance, the digital print company – the Taopix customer – will be able to offer photo book manufacturing services to authors and FastPencil will provide the […]

When I started research on my book about the morals of bullfighting I traveled to Seville, the capital of Andalusia in Spain, where I met a wonderful American self-published author, Kitty Witwer. She wrote a book about being a female bullfighting fan, “Divine Addiction“, which is basically hailed as the “Almost Famous” of the taurine literary world, journaling her trips to Central and South America and her beloved Spain, following handsome bullfighters, then treated like rockstars, across country in trains, planes and automobiles – whatever you think of bullfighting this book is a great “road […]