If you’re in the Los Angeles area, run, do not walk, to a tribute to one of my heroes: the late, great Octavia E. Butler.

The event is this Saturday at the Leimert Park Book Fair.

Go, then tell me all about it. 

Tananarive Due and Steven Barnes will lead the tribute.

Details here.

*Photo from David Anthony Durham

What you may have missed this past week:

• How do digital readers affect what we read? (registration required)
• Romance criticism as a field of academic study? Yep.
• Big brain and WriteBlack fave Malcolm Gladwell spoke at the New Yorker Conference recently
• M. Asli Dukan could use some financial help with facilitating the release of Invisible Universe, her documentary about the African diaspora in speculative fiction. Donate if you can.
• Digital media diva Lynne d Johnson gave a talk about how digital media is changing the face of publishing
• Authors, you’re going to have be responsible for your own marketing. Get over it.

So I’m really, really not a fan of The Big O (it has a lot to do with her bewildering near-messianic status and her mostly craptastic taste in reading material), but I must applaud her for introducing her audience to the joys of veganism, which is a lifestyle I flirt with on the regular.

Even though she’s doing it just for 21 days. She is such a wimp.

Anyway, Oprah is doing a cleanse as a result of having read one of those awful woo-woo books she loves to extol. 

But I wanted to point out three cookbooks I adore — one even by a black author! — that can help anyone who is interested in vegan eating and doesn’t have, you know, a personal chef:

• Vegan With a Vengeance: Over 150 Cheap, Animal-Free Recipes That Rock, by Isa Chandra Moskowitz
• Veganomicon: The Ultimate Vegan Cookbook, by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero
• The Vegetarian Soul Food Cookbook: A Wonderful Medley of Vegetarian, Vegan, and Raw Recipes Inspired by the Southern Tradition, by Imar Hutchins (black author alert!) and Dawn Marie Daniels

Some time ago, I horrified you with pictures of my own bookshelves. 

But in my fantasies about having unlimited wealth and an even more extensive book collection, I would have bookcases that look like the ones to the left. Aren’t they awesome looking? The couple who created them did it to save space in their London apartment.

And yes, I’m well aware that in a few years I’ll probably have reacquired all my books in digital format and will have no need to have meatspace copies. But allow me my fantasy, OK?

WebUrbanist listed 20 brilliant and fantastic bookshelf designs that may make you as green with envy as I am. See them here.

Looking for other book storage ideas? Invisible bookshelves!

(h/t to Lifehacker)

Read this.

Coming soon: A review of Donna Hill’s Sex and Lies.

OK, so it’s not exactly book-related, but since it is sci-fi-related, I couldn’t resist posting this interview from the Onion’s A.V. Club with Freema Agyeman, best known as the outstanding Miss Martha Jones on Doctor Who (or as I like to call her, Most. Kickass. Companion. Ever).

Martha’s a very different person than Rose: She’s older, more independent, more academic — you know, training to be a doctor. She lived alone, [but] she had this big family around her, and even though she wasn’t the eldest child, she was the one they turned to for advice, because she had this wise head on young shoulders. She was more challenging of the Doctor because of it, so all of those aspects made her very different from Rose. So instantly I was different, and it was being consciously done. I then, after that point, created her as my instinct dictated. 

*Photo of David Tennant (Doctor Who) and Freema Agyeman (Martha Jones) from FreemaAgyeman.com

Yep, somebody else is taking up the question again.

Haven’t we settled this one already?

Got a minute? Here’s a short but fascinating read about the tactics publishing industry big Peter Olson used to run Random House.

(Cross-posted at Blogging in Black, where I got to write a guest column today)

You’ve got a MySpace page. Maybe you own a domain in your name and you’re blogging on it.

But are you using technology to its best advantage to remind your readers about who you are and what you offer them? Think iPhone, not rotary dial.

As a reader – and I have to admit, something of a technology  nerd – I can’t tell you how many times I’ve cringed when I’ve been disappointed by an author’s online offerings. When I was at Romance Slam Jam, author Donna Hill gave a presentation about promoting books, and from the questions she got, it became clear that not every author knows as much as s/he should about the various ways to present oneself on the Internet.

Hill talked a lot about MySpace as a place to present yourself and engage your readers, but why stop there? Why let the dark lord make money off the clicks that could be going directly to your site?

(more…)

Some publishing odds and ends:

• Walter Mosley is taking Socrates Fortlow to Basic Civitas 
• Are you ready for the East Coast Black Age of Comics Con beginning May 16 in Philadelphia?
• How about the Black Writers Reunion & Conference beginning June 19 in Tampa?
• I can’t figure out who makes my slapping hand itch worse, Alice Walker or her daughter, Rebecca
• Is Amazon rilly, rilly selling 48,000 Kindles a month?
• A national Latino book club
• On a research paper about that wiki novel project published last year by Penguin Books