John Steinbeck

Donna Tartt has won the Pulitzer award for fiction for her third novel The Goldfinch, which judges described as a book which "stimulates the mind and touches the heart".

Relating the life of a 13-year-old boy who survives an accident that kills his mother, The Goldfinch was chosen as the winner of America's most prestigious literary award ahead of Philipp Meyer's The Son, and Bob Shacochis's The Woman Who Lost Her Soul. It is, said judges Art Winslow, Ron Charles and Sabina Murray, "a beautifully written coming-of-age novel with exquisitely drawn characters".

Penguin will introduce its new Book Truck and the Book Pushcart at BookExpo America this week, crossing a mobile library with a food truck.

The 27-foot-long Book Truck contains two bookshelves with 96 feet of shelf space, LED lighting, awnings and café tables and chairs. The Book Pushcart was “inspired by the design of the classic New York City hotdog cart.”  The mobile booksellers will travel the country, you can track them at the Penguin Book Truck site. Here’s more from the release:

After decades of decline, independent bookselling has become a growth industry.

For the fourth year in a row, membership has increased in the American Bookseller Association, the independent stores' trade group. According to CEO Oren Teicher, the association now includes 1,632 members — some operating in multiple locations — up 65 from last year. In 2009, there were 1,401 members and strong pessimism in the face of superstore chains, the online power of Amazon.com and the recent financial crisis.

The digital revolution was a huge win for the act of publishing. Content is now everywhere and can be purchased anywhere. But how, in this sea of content, do publishers who invest in the time-honored processes that ensure quality content communicate that?

There are many methods to boost content discoverability—many are technical, many are strategic, and all should be tailored to the content and audience in question. The most powerful—and most resilient—method for improving your content's discoverability, however, is to inspire your once-passive audience to actively seek you out.

Active discovery—where customers know to specifically seek out your content—requires branding.

Galleycat's Jason Boog has a piece on Sanora Babb's Whose Names Are Unknown—the novel that went unpublished in 1939 because it was deemed too similar to John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath; was finally published in 2004; and which has been revived by Ken Burns' Dust Bowl documentary.

Let's take a moment to ponder that for a second: A publisher… declined a book… because it was deemed too similar… to a wildly successful book. I know disposable income was more scarce in 1939, but oh, how times have changed.

—Brian Howard

Writing is easy: All you have to do is start writing, finish writing, and make sure it's good. But here's some vastly more useful wisdom and advice from people who seriously know what the hell they're talking about.