#publication day

[bookishfreedom]

"I don't want to be considered beautiful without being seen as capable, too."

YA romcom Shakespeare retelling? grumpy x sunshine? mistaken identity? endless nerd content? I was so excited to read this book and I was NOT disappointed.

It did take me a little bit to get into the story. On the surface, both of our main characters can come off straight-up... unlikeable. Viola is abrasive and Jack is a little too 'Mr. Popular! But that only made their growth and getting to know them that much more impactful. This book is full of characters who leap off the page with distinct voices and depth, side characters included. (Bash and Olivia, my beloveds<333) This is one of those YA books that I think will appeal to readers of all ages. The characters authentically feel like teenagers - they are flawed and messy and just trying to figure things out - but also deal with issues that are universal and relatable.

I also loved just how much was packed into this book. Twelfth Knight is so much more than just a romcom, it's also a coming-of-age, with social commentary and a love of nerd culture smoothly weaved in. This novel explores everything, from video game and fandom culture, social and parental pressures, misogyny, sexuality, family dynamics, and so much more, all without losing its humor and heart. The romance isn't the sole focus, which may not be for everyone, but l thought worked well for this story.

As for the romance itself, the slow burn was, in my humble opinion, perfection. It felt so real and unrushed and believable, which isn't always easy in a contemporary 'enemies to lovers' setting. I loved every second of Vi & Jack's interactions.

I fully expect this book to take the internet by storm because it's just so darn QUOTABLE! There were so many lines that just hit perfectly that I wrote a LOT of them down, and the banter was laugh-out-loud-worthy. I hadn't read any Olivia Blake/Alexene Farol Follmuth before, but the writing was so excellent that I will absolutely be picking up everything else she's written.

My actual rating is 4.5 stars, but rounding up because I had so much fun reading this. Literally read this book in one sitting and could not put it down.

Thanks so much to Netgalley and tor teen for the arc in exchange for an honest review. I can't wait to get my hands on a physical copy for myself!

[lovingsylvia]

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HAPPY PUBLICATION DAY to The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath!

The "complete" 848-page edition of Sylvia Plath's prose, including many unpublished and previously uncollected, fiction and non-fiction pieces - edited by the brilliant scholar Peter K. Steinberg (https://sylviaplathinfo.blogspot.com/) - is finally out today - on 12 September 2024!

Currently, the hard copy is only available in Europe on Amazon and in other big online shops.

In the US, you can only buy the Kindle edition so far, but you can always order off https://www.amazon.co.uk/ or directly off https://www.faber.co.uk/ even if the shipping is a bit pricier.

The volume will be published in Canada in November and in Australia in December. There may be an American edition in the future, but not too soon.

If you want learn more, read the short article "The Dream Come True: Editing Sylvia Plath’s Prose", where Peter K. Steinberg reflects on the journey of bringing this volume into print at https://www.faber.co.uk/ and his blog post at https://sylviaplathinfo.blogspot.com/

And follow him on Twitter and me on Instagram, as I only occasionally post here!

[francescaswords]

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A post shared by Francesca Astraea (@francescas_words)

Forgot to thank my critique partners because I was distracted by smudged eyeliner, forgot to fix my eyeliner because I was thinking about critique partners, eyeliner still smudged so now it's today's look. Also St Brigid's is Monday, but what is time, really? Thank you critique partners!!! Rotting Trees is available everywhere, links/merch/signed copies are here.

[lilibetbombshell]

[nicolagriffith]

A banger of a beginning for Menewood

Book launch day is a bit like waiting in the wings to go on stage for the biggest show of your life and not knowing what's on the other side of the curtain: full house and rapturous applause, or ringing silence...

Publication Eve A book launch is full of excitement and trepidation. Excitement because, wow, it’s my book! I love it! I can’t wait for other people to read and love it too! Trepidation because, well, you never know what you’re launching into. I’ve come to think of publication as like a huge stage show: months of prep, costume tryouts, rehearsals, sending out invitations. Then you’re in your…

[clairekreads]

I Bet You Get Look Good In A Coffin by Katy Brent #publicationday #bookreview #netgalley #kittycollins

🎉🎉🎉 Happy Publication Day to Katy Brent 🎉🎉🎉 The second Kitty Collins novel I Bet You Look Good In A Coffin is out today!!!! Continue reading I Bet You Get Look Good In A Coffin by Katy Brent #publicationday #bookreview #netgalley #kittycollins

[lovebooksgroup]

COVER REVEAL - The Return of Frankie Whittle by Caroline England @cazengland @bullingtonpress | Proudly organised by @lovebookstours @kellyalacey #Booknews #Readers #Bookbloggers #LBTCrew #2024books #BookSky 💙📚

Twitter Facebook WhatsApp Bluesky Print Like Loading… Cover Reveal The Return of Frankie Whittle by Caroline England Genre: Crime fiction Pages: 313 pages Publisher: Bullington Press Once you enter the gates, will they ever let you leave? Frankie Whittle has it all: a career in the City, a gorgeous husband and a baby on the way. It’s the perfect life, but it’s built on sand. In one…

[guardianseries]

It’s Publication Day! Celebrating the Launch of Floating Solo #FloatingSolo #Romance #PublicationDay

Today’s the day! I’m over the flippin’ moon to announce that Floating Solo, my debut romance novel, is officially available to the world! After months of writing, revising, and pouring my heart into this story, I’m so excited for readers to join Kat Sinclair on her journey aboard the Creaky Cauldron—a quirky narrowboat with just the right amount of charm and magic. Floating Solo isn’t just a…

[stephaniemayauthor]

It's release day!!! Rumours and Repercussions is finally live, and I have a short book trailer I've been waiting to share with you. As always, thank you so much for your love and support. I'm truly blessed to know so many kind-hearted people. If you haven't had the chance yet, here is the link to purchase the book >>> https://www.amazon.com.au/Rumours-Repercussions-Stephanie-May-ebook/dp/B0DGF1LKK8/ Happy reading, guys! All my love, Stephanie x

[wilddoorpublishing]

What's your next summer read? If you're a fan of 'Final Fantasy' and dark, epic adventures, this debut sci-fantasy might be for you!

A gritty adventure, Where the Silence Sings exposes grim realities and the journey towards wrangling agency while contending with a crumbling construct of belonging. Interwoven with past and present mysteries shrouded in ancient, lost histories, this book examines themes of selfhood, moral ambiguity, and connection borne of both familiarity and circumstance. Starting with a bloody reckoning, we are thrown into the fire that stokes the winds of change; a discordant note that heralds a new and foreboding dawn.

Interested? Check with your favourite retailer! :)

[coffeeinkblog]

#BookSpotlight #PoisonRiver by #JenniferLane #HappyReleaseDay!

GoodReads Summary: A sulfur sky poisoned her family and her heart. Now revenge tastes sweeter than justice. It’s 1900. In a Pennsylvania coal town tainted by corruption and pollution, Charlotte’s world collapses when her parents meet a tragic end. Sent to a foster family in a Maryland fishing village, she’s fueled by grief and embarks on a relentless quest for justice against the ruthless coal…

[satanicdollx]

they should invent friends that do not live so fucking far

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Happy Public Domain Day 2025 to all who celebrate

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/17/dastar-dly-deeds/#roast-in-piss-sonny-bono

In 1976, Congress set fire to the country's libraries; in 1998, they did it again. Today, in 2024, the flames have died down, and out of the ashes a new public domain is growing. Happy Public Domain Day 2025 to all who celebrate!

For most of US history, copyright was something you had to ask for. To copyright a work, you'd send a copy to the Library of Congress and they'd issue you a copyright. Not only did that let you display a copyright mark on your work – so people would know they weren't allowed to copy it without your permission – but if anyone wanted to figure out who to ask in order to get permission to copy or adapt a work, they could just go look up the paperwork at the LoC.

In 1976, Congress amended the Copyright Act to eliminate the "formality" of copyright registration. Now, all creative works of human authorship were copyrighted "at the moment of fixation" – the instant you drew, typed, wrote, filmed, or recorded them. From a toddler's nursery-school finger-painting to a graffiti mural on a subway car, every creative act suddenly became an article of property.

But whose property? That was on you to figure out, before you could copy, publish, perform, or preserve the work, because without registration, permissions had to start with a scavenger hunt for the person who could grant it. Congress simultaneously enacted a massive expansion of property rights, while abolishing the title registry that spelled out who owned what. As though this wasn't enough, Congress reached back in time and plopped an extra 20 years' onto the copyrights of existing works, even ones whose authors were unknown and unlocatable.

For the next 20 years, creative workers, archivists, educators and fans struggled in the face of this regime of unknowable property rights. After decades of well-documented problems, Congress acted again: they made it worse.

In 1998, Congress passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Act, AKA the Mickey Mouse Preservation Act, AKA the Copyright Term Extension Act. The 1998 Act tacked another 20 years onto copyright terms, but not just for works that were still in copyright. At the insistence of Disney, Congress actually yanked works out of the public domain – works that had been anthologized, adapted and re-issued – and put them back into copyright for two more decades. Copyright stretched to the century-plus "life plus 70 years" term. Nothing entered the public domain for the next 20 years.

So many of my comrades in the fight for the public domain were certain that this would happen again in 2018. In 2010, e-book inventor and Project Gutenberg founder Michael S Hart and I got into a friendly email argument because he was positive that in 2018, Congress would set fire to the public domain again. When I insisted that there was no way this could happen given the public bitterness over the 1998 Act, he told me I was being naive, but said he hoped that I was right.

Michael didn't live to see it, but in 2019, the public domain opened again. It was an incredible day:

https://archive.org/details/ClosingKeynoteForGrandReopeningOfThePublicDomainCoryDoctorowAtInternetArchive

No one has done a better job of chronicling the fortunes of our fragile, beautiful, bounteous public domain than Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle of Duke University's Center for the Study of the Public Domain. Every year from 2010-2019, Boyle and Jenkins chronicled the works that weren't entering the public domain because of the 1998 Act, making sure we knew what had been stolen from our cultural commons. In so many cases, these works disappeared before their copyrights expired, for example, the majority of silent films are lost forever.

Then, in 2019, Jenkins and Boyle got to start cataloging the works that were entering the public domain, most of them from 1923 (copyright is complicated, so not everything that entered the public domain in 2019 was from that year):

https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2019/

Every year since, they've celebrated a new bumper crop. Last year, we got Mickey Mouse!

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/15/mouse-liberation-front/#free-mickey

In addition to numerous other works – by Woolf, Hemingway, Doyle, Christie, Proust, Hesse, Milne, DuBois, Frost, Chaplin, Escher, and more:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/20/em-oh-you-ess-ee/#sexytimes

Now, 2024 was a fantastic year for the public domain, but – as you'll see in the 2025 edition of the Public Domain Day post – 2025 is even better:

https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2025/

So what's entering the public domain this year? Well, for one thing, there's more of the stuff from last year, which makes sense: if Hemingway's first books entered the PD last year, then this year, we'll the books he wrote next (and this will continue every year until we catch up with Hemingway's tragic death).

There are some big hits from our returning champions, like Woolf's To the Lighthouse and A Farewell to Arms from Hemingway. Jenkins and Boyle call particular attention to one book: Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, its title taken from a public domain work by Shakespeare. As they write, Faulkner spoke eloquently about the nature of posterity and culture:

[Humanity] is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance…The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

The main attraction on last year's Public Domain Day was the entry of Steamboat Willie – the first Mickey Mouse cartoon – into the public domain. This year, we're getting a dozen new Mickey cartoons, including the first Mickey talkie:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mickey_Mouse_(film_series)#1929

Those 12 shorts represent a kind of creative explosion for the Disney Studios. Those early Mickey cartoons were, each and every one, a hybrid of new copyrighted works and the public domain. The backbone of each Mickey short was a beloved, public domain song, with Mickey's motion synched to the beat (animators came to call this "mickey mousing"). In 1929, there was a huge crop of public domain music that anyone could use this way:

Blue Danube, Pop Goes the Weasel, Yankee Doodle, Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush, Ach Du Lieber Augustin, Listen to the Mocking Bird, A-Hunting We Will Go, Dixie, The Girl I Left Behind Me, a tune known as the snake charmer song, Coming Thru the Rye, Mary Had a Little Lamb, Auld Lang Syne, Aloha ‘Oe, Turkey in the Straw, My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean, Habanera and Toreador Song from Carmen, Lizst’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, and Goodnight, Ladies.

These were recent compositions, songs that were written and popularized in the lifetimes of the parents and grandparents who took their kids to the movies to see Mickey shorts like "The Barn Dance," "The Opry House" and "The Jazz Fool." The ability to plunder this music at will was key to the success of Mickey Mouse and Disney. Think of all the Mickeys and Disneys we've lost by locking up the public domain for the past half-century!

This year, we're getting some outstanding new old music for our public domain. The complexities of copyright terms mean that compositions from 1929 are entering the public domain, but we're only getting recordings from 1924. 1924's outstanding recordings include:

George Gershwin performing Rhapsody in Blue, Jelly Roll Morton playing Shreveport Stomp, and an early recording from contralto and civil rights icon Marian Anderson, who is famous for her 1939 performance to an integrated audience of over 75,000 people at the Lincoln Memorial. Anderson’s 1924 recording is of the spiritual Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.

While the compositions include Singin' in the Rain, Ain't Misbehavin', An American in Paris, Bolero, (What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue, Tiptoe Through the Tulips, Happy Days Are Here Again, What Is This Thing Called, Love?, Am I Blue? and many, many more.

On the art front, we're getting Salvador Dali's earliest surrealist masterpieces, like Illumined Pleasures, The Accommodations of Desire, and The Great Masturbator. Dali's contemporaries are not so lucky: after a century, the early history of the works of Magritte are so muddy that it's impossible to say whether they are in or out of copyright.

But there's plenty of art with clearer provenance that we can welcome into the public domain this year, most notably, Popeye and Tintin. As the first Popeye and Tintin comics go PD, so too do those characters.

The idea that a fictional character can have a copyright separate from the stories they appear in is relatively new, and it's weird and very stupid. Courts have found that the Batmobile is a copyrightable character (Batman won't enter the public domain until 2035).

Copyright for characters is such a muddy, gross, weird idea. The clearest example of how stupid this gets comes from Sherlock Holmes, whose canon spans many years. The Doyle estate – a rent-seeking copyright troll – claimed that Holmes wouldn't enter the public domain until every Holmes story was in the public domain (that's this year, incidentally!).

This didn't fly, so their next gambit was to claim copyright over those aspects of Holmes's character that were developed later in the stories. For example, they claimed that Holmes didn't show compassion until the later stories, and, on that basis, sued the creators of the Enola Holmes TV show for depicting a gender-swapped Sherlock who wasn't a total dick:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/dec/22/lawsuit-copyright-warmer-sherlock-holmes-dismissed-enola-holmes

As the Enola lawyers pointed out in their briefs, this was tantamount to a copyright over emotions: "Copyright law does not allow the ownership of generic concepts like warmth, kindness, empathy, or respect, even as expressed by a public domain character – which, of course, belongs to the public, not plaintiff."

When Mickey entered the public domain last year, Jenkins did an excellent deep dive into which aspects of Mickey's character and design emerged when:

https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/mickey/

Jenkins uses this year's entry of Tintin and Popeye into the public domain to further explore the subject of proprietary characters.

Even though copyright extends to characters, it only covers the "copyrightable" parts of those characters. As the Enola lawyers wrote, the generic character traits (their age, emotional vibe, etc) are not protected. Neither is anything "trivial" or "minuscule" – for example, if a cartoonist makes a minor alteration to the way a character's pupils or eyes are drawn, that's a minor detail, not a copyrightable element.

The biggest impediment to using public domain characters isn't copyright, it's trademark. Trademark is very different from copyright: foundationally, trademark is the right to protect your customers from being deceived by your competitors. Coke can use trademark to stop Pepsi from selling its sugary drinks in Coke cans – not because it owns the word "Coke" or the Coke logo, but because it has been deputized to protect Coke drinkers from being tricked into buying not-Coke, thinking that they're getting the true Black Waters of American Imperialism.

Companies claim trademarks over cartoon characters all the time, and license those trademarks on food, clothing, toys, and more (remember Popeye candy cigarettes?).

Indeed, Hearst Holdings claims a trademark over Popeye in many traditional categories, like cartoons, amusement parks, ads and clothes. They're also in the midst of applying for a Popeye NFT trademark (lol).

Does that mean you can't use Popeye in any of those ways? Nope! All you need to do is prominently mention that your use of Popeye is unofficial, not associated with Hearst, and dispel any chance of confusion. A unanimous Supreme Court decision (in Dastar) affirm your right to do so. You can also use Popeye in the title of your unauthorized Popeye comic, thanks to a case called Rogers v Grimaldi.

This all applies to Tintin, too – a big deal, given that Tintin is managed by a notorious copyright bully who delights in cruelly terrorizing fan artists. Tintin is joined in the public domain by Buck Rogers, another old-timey character whose owners are scumbag rent-seekers.

Congress buried the public domain alive in 1976, and dumped a load of gravel over its grave in 1998, but miraculously, we've managed to exhume the PD, and it has been revived and is showing signs of rude health.

2024 saw the blockbuster film adaptation of Wicked, based on the public domain Oz books. It also saw the publication of James, a celebrated retelling of Twain's Huck Finn from the perspective of Huck's enslaved sidekick.

This is completely normal. It's how art was made since time immemorial. The 40 year experiment in life without a public domain is at an end, and not a minute too soon.

You can piece together a complete-as-possible list of 2025's public domain (including the Marx Brothers' Cocoanuts, Disney's Skeleton Dance, and Del Ruth's Gold Diggers of Broadway) here:

https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/cce/

[cherylmmbookblog]

#PublicationDay The Long and Winding Road by Lesley Pearse

Happy Publication Day! – From the No.1 bestselling author Lesley Pearce comes her own unforgettable story – The Long and Winding Road. Pic credit/copyright: Charlotte Murphy About the Author Lesley Pearse is one of the world’s leading storytellers with numerous No.1 bestsellers to her name and fans who span the globe. A Lesley Pearse book is sold every 4 minutes in the UK and with sales of…

[lilibetbombshell]

[july-19th-club]

seriously have been thinking about this all night long. call me autistic but the fact that 90% of workplaces the point is not to get your work done and then be done doing it but to instead perform an elaborate social dance in which you find something to do even when you're done doing everything you need to do in order to show your fellow workers that you, too, are Working . because you are at Work . disgusting why cant we all agree that if there is no work immediately to be done. we just dont do anything