The New York Times Best Sellers list has come a long way—so far, that it’s no longer just a list or two (Fiction and Nonfiction). Check in now and you will find that there are 21 separate lists, everything from Combined Print and E-Book to Manga. Manga! This is no longer the NYT Best Sellers list we grew up with, checking the paper each Sunday for (after we read the funnies in some other paper). It’s all grown up, and reading manga. READ MORE

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After pulling Neal Stephenson's ebook of Reamde off Amazon on Tuesday, early this morning, Amazon emailed to tell readers they could replace their copy. "The version you received had Missing Content that have been corrected," they wrote. (Or, apparently, their machines wrote. So glad the "Missing Content" "have been corrected.") And here's how it works: "If you wish to receive the updated version, please reply to this email with the word 'Yes' in the first line of your response. Within 2 hours of receiving the e-mail any device that has the title currently downloaded will be updated automatically if the wireless is on." It's a strange kind of revision, right? At some point, the book you're reading will be silently replaced with a new version of the book you're reading—AND GUESS WHAT, it'll force you to lose your place, so take a screenshot of your page or location number. Anyway, apparently some underpaid kids at HarperCollins did some really fast digital proofreading over the last 48 hours. (It's a big book! 1056 pages!) But what was the Missing Content! Did I read (past) the Missing Content already? Is Neal Stephenson super-mad? So many Missing Answers.

William Morrow/HarperCollins has pulled Neal Stephenson's brand-new book, Reamde, off Amazon after, one would guess, getting tired of hearing about just how many errors there are in the e-book production. (It's not clean.) Now the e-book version is no longer visible at all to U.S. visitors to Amazon, and appears as "unavailable in the U.S." to mobile viewers. (This was first noticed late last night by Macworld editorial director Jason Snell.) Reamde is #36 in books overall on Amazon this morning, so removal of the e-book, even temporarily, is a serious financial choice. (The Kindle version was #6 on the Amazon scifi list, while the print/audio was at #4.) This being a Neal Stephenson book, the criticisms of the e-book errors were not outraged all-caps freakouts but mild and literate complaints left on the Amazon page. READ MORE

As a human being whose personal blog is primarily about cats, I would be extremely offended by the above passage in Keith Gessen's piece in the October Vanity Fair (the one with Angelina Jolie on the cover, zzz), except that Gessen keeps company with a person whose blog can often be cat-centric, so, he is EXCUSED! In more important news, this is a very exciting piece that breaks down exactly how Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding was agented and published. The funny thing is that the book is going to be published tomorrow—so who knows what'll really happen with the tale of the million-dollar first novel? (Gessen reveals, among other fun facts, that the combined foreign rights sales came to about half of the novel's $660,000 advance.) The Art of Fielding is #42 in books on Amazon currently, so that's pretty good! And I'm sure the publisher paid for good front table placement in all the remaining bookstores out there! Anyway, this is a really excellent idea to make a book sale transparent, and there's even some good actual gossip in it. (Also let us never forget the hilarious Bloomberg headline announcing the sale: "Unemployed Harvard Man Auctions Baseball Novel for $650,000.") There's also a wee bit of hagiography of the oh so brilliant editors and agents involved in the world of publishing, and of course it all ends happily (so easy to feel on publication's eve, if you're the one who's the exception to the rule, and who just paid off your student loans), and all success is credited entirely to the power of the writing of the book—but really, an awesome read, and it could only be improved conceptually if Gessen announced his word rate for the Vanity Fair piece at the end. (Maybe they'll put it online even.) READ MORE

It's a generally accepted rule that you shouldn't take too seriously anything an author says while promoting his book on the radio. Or at least I thought it was a generally accepted rule. Certainly, Christopher Buckley tells a great anecdote about the time he was asked by a radio host whether, per the author bio on his novel Little Green Men, he really had acted as policy advisor to William Howard Taft. Not only did Buckley happily confirm that he had advised President Taft, but he spent the remainder of the interview discussing the specific advice he'd imparted to the (very) late statesman. Of course Buckley said something ridiculous on the radio—he had a book to promote. READ MORE

Just because an agent approaches you doesn’t mean you have a good book idea. READ MORE

This is a really terrific essay by Alex Shakar, who was set up to be the Hot New Un-Sad Literary Young Man ten years ago with his first novel, when Bill Clegg got him $300,000 (or more?) from Robert Jones at HarperCollins. Pub date: September, 2001. Guess what happened! That's right: Jones died and Clegg, soon enough, went MIA in a crackhouse. Oh also some other stuff I guess. READ MORE

Inexplicable east coast elite media obsession and former assistant Jon-Jon Goulian—"another of the season's publishing darlings"! "the cross-dressing literary sensation"! "a kind of mascot for the city’s literary A-list"! says the New York Times, in three different articles, apart from his memoir's two reviews in the paper—is apparently a $700,000 bust for Random House. "The book has sold 957 copies in its first month, according to sources with access to Nielsen BookScan, which monitors 50 to 75 percent of total sales. Insiders say Random House would have to move about 200,000 copies to see a profit. The hardcover was ranked at a lowly No. 116,210 on Amazon yesterday," says today's Page Six. And then the publishing industry abruptly stood up as one and decided to stop overspending on ridiculous advances for things that make no sense! Nope, you guessed it: totally kidding about that.

The title of a book, along with maybe the cover, is most often what’s going to lead a potential reader to pick up your baby book. Which isn’t to say coming up with a good one is easy. To the contrary, it’s the sort of thing, like naming a band, that can cause everyone involved a lot of agony, particularly when an author has settled on something very early in the process and someone else (usually involved in selling it) however many months or years later decides that the book might be better served with something different. READ MORE