Agatha Christie was kind of a grouch.

Shocking news that a woman who largely only wrote about murder and death was not a lighthearted soul, but letters on display reveal Agatha Christie was generally irked by life.

The letters, which will be on exhibition at the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival held in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, England, show Christie was annoyed by most anything, like over the covers of her books.

According to The Guardian, for her 1947 book The Labours of Hercules, a Pekingese was featured on the cover. Harmless, you might say. Her family found laughs in it, but Christie was furious and wrote her publisher:

"The wrapper design for Hercules has occasioned the most ribald and obscene remarks and suggestions from my family – All I can say is – Try again!!" (sic).

Another time, she complained the cover of another book made the main character look like he was "going to a funeral and dressed accordingly."

In 1967, she apparently found out her latest book was already released without her receiving an advanced copy. She was in a "fury" when she found out the book was already on sale in Helsinki, of all places.

"It’s usually [available] in November and then it comes in very handy for sending to friends at Xmas time – but one can hardly send it as that now? I do think it’s treating your authors disgracefully."

More than anything, Christie was annoyed by aging. As a 59-year old, she wrote to a friend, Bertie Meyer, who was staging a play based on one of her books. "I've had letters now from different fans expressing surprise that I am 'such an old lady'," she wrote, adding about pictures of herself:

"Nobody likes [the photos], possibly, perhaps, because they don’t seem to have been touched up at all? All lines and wrinkles – and dash it all, I'm not 70 – not yet 60."

If you want to read more of Christie's moaning and complaining (so, you know, you feel like a cheery lad by comparison), the festival will be held July 20-23.

J.K. Rowling shares some rejection letters--after she already was published.

Harry Potter author J,K, Rowling released on Twitter two rejection letters she received from publishing houses--after she had already created the world of Hogwart's and wizardry.

The only catch? She wrote under a pseudonym: Robert Galbraith.

The novel was Rowling's second adult book, The Cuckoo's Calling, which was released in 2013 under the fake name. The letters being made public were in response to a fan's Twitter question if there were any rejection letters Rowling would like to share regarding Harry Potter. Rowling claimed those were in a box in the attic (sure, right), but she had others--the Robert Galbraith letters.

One publishing house, Constable & Robinson, wrote Rowling at the time that the business "could not publish [Cuckoo's Calling] with commercial success." As if being rejected wasn't bad enough, Constable & Robinson tell 'Galbraith' that maybe "a writers' group or writing course may help" with feedback. That's right. Go back to school for a course. That's the equivalent of an intellectual backhand, full of knuckles and dismissiveness.

"I wasn't going to give up until every single publisher turned me down, but I often feared that would happen," Rowling explained.

The joke was on Constable & Robinson and other varying publishing houses, as the book was eventually accepted by Sphere, an imprint of Little, Brown, & Company. Once the world knew it was Rowling and not Galbraith writing the book, it went from the 4,709th bestselling book on Amazon to number one, as well as spawned two sequels.

As for Constable & Robinson, the reason they aren't a super commercial success and J.K. Rowling is is because Constable & Robinson is run by...Constable & Robinson.

Maybe there's a publishing course they can take that might help.

Don't call it a comeback: Paper books are holding off e-books.

LL Cool J famously rapped "Don't call it a comeback!" Granted he was talking about his rapping career, which wasn't that stellar before except for some middling songs that sporadically landed mid-chart once in awhile. But critics thought his career was over by the late 1980s, and yet "Mama Said Knock You Out" arrived in 1991, and proved tides can change.

This is all a gasbaggery way of connecting to a story in the New York Times that says the demise of paper books was greatly overstated, and the sales of eReaders and e-books have stalled.

According to the Times, digital books accounted for 20% of sales last year, the same amount as it did five years ago, and sales for the first five months of 2015 are down 10%.

Meanwhile, independent bookstores have 1,712 member stores in 2,227 locations, which is up from 1,410 member stores in 1,660 locations from five years ago.

And the dominant publishing houses? Well, they're building onto their houses, their warehouses specifically, vastly expanding in order to stock their book supplies. Hachette added 218,000 square feet to its warehouse, Simon & Schuster 200,000 square feet, and Penguin Random House 365,000 square feet.

So were paper books ever really on death's door? As industry experts and LL Cool J say, don't call it a comeback.

Publishing companies are embracing the idea of cubicles.

The leather couch. The Oriental rug. The little nook beside a recessed window, with stack of the great classics lining the wall.

Those are the offices of yesteryear in today's modern publishing house. At least for some.

According to the New York Times, gone are the days of 'Mad Men' styled window offices with plush accoutrements while some noble editor slaves away at the next great American novel. Today's publishing houses are adopting cubicles, mainly as a way to save money (Manhattan rent prices are steep after all), and publishing giant Hachette claims it's all for the best as a means to cut costs.

Hachette debated how deep to go with the cubicle look. According to the Times, "[Editor] Mr. Pietsch considered various permutations, including giving offices to only the 70 or so vice presidents, or the 12 members of the executive management board"--before deciding against it.

In case you're wondering how a major company hemorrhaging money can save money, they can limit their vice presidents to fewer than 70.





photo: Sasha Maslov, New York Times

Boston Globe columnist asks: Why do writers hate Amazon?

Because it's a giant conglomerate with financial interests to slowly monopolize the publishing industry, with the reach and wherewithal to smush a small, up-and-coming writer hoping for fairness like a mosquito under the thumb of Jeff Bezos at a cocktail party in the Hamptons.

Or, you know, you can read an opinion column in this week's Boston Globe with a headline asking about the strained relationship between writers and Amazon, one that also avoids really explaining anything. "Of course I love bookstores. But it behooves me to love Amazon, too," says the piece's author, Alex Beam. (Beam has a newly published book. So, you know.)

Cover all your bases, Beam. You don't want to irk Bezos.

NaNoWriMo results: 42,008 people completed a novel.

Which means roughly 42,000 rejection notices from publishing houses are about to be mailed.

The Los Angeles Times reports that approximately 13% of the more than 310,000 participating in National Novel Writing Month crossed the finish line, which equates to writing 50,000 words of a novel during the month of November.

Not all completed novels written during NaNoWriMo are doomed to rejection. Noted books like Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants and Erin Morgenster's The Night Circus both originated during previous NaNoWriMos.

So, hey, let's hang out hats on that.

Morrissey's 'Autobiography' is a classic.

Morrissey is like a poor man's John Lennon, if John Lennon had a froggier voice and better hair. He was the lead singer of The Smiths, a British band hugely popular in their homeland, but D.O.A. in America outside of indie band aficionados and practitioners of crying in the bathroom.

Morrissey's fan base is intense and obsessive, enough that Morrissey can pull some strings with the production of his autobiography, entitled--appropriately enough--Autobiography. Pull what strings, you say? Like having his book published through Penguin Books' Classics imprint, heretofore only known for releasing books known to humanity for generations. Also known as classics.

Penguin created the division nearly 70-years ago when they first published Homer's The Odyssey. In the decades since, every book by Penguin's Classics imprint has been the stuff you read in high school and college, the stuff that win awards and places on book shelves, the stuff by the likes of Francis Bacon, Jane Austen, John Steinbeck... Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mary Wollstonecraft...Julius Caesar, Ovid, and Charles Darwin.

And now, because he demanded, it's also the stuff of Morrissey.

Soccer legend weeps over his own book.

This isn't any book you find on the clearance rack at Barnes & Noble. This is a 33lb., 500 page, $1,700 giant of a book about soccer legend Pele, billed as "the definitive work on the Athlete of the Century." (Muhammad Ali? Babe Ruth? Jackie Robinson? What did you accomplish?) Titled 1283, only 1,283 copies will be made--the same number of goals Pele scored during his career.

But wait--you say you have an unhealthy obsession with elderly soccer players? Good news! There's a luxury edition selling for $2,600 which includes an autographed picture of Pele and what the publisher vaguely describes as "a heart shaped patch of sweat." Potential scratch-and-sniff Pele BO? Hubba-hubba.

At the book release event, Pele became very emotional. "This really makes me well up. It is a legacy I left for Brazil," he told reporters while wiping tears from his eyes.

A legacy of ornate sweat stains.




photo: Getty, via Yahoo.