Authors

"I have only the vaguest understanding of what TikTok is," said Ann Patchett, owner of Parnassus Books in Nashville. So she still doesn't quite grasp how savvily Sarah Arnold, Parnassus's marketing manager, has leveraged the platform to promote the bookstore-or what a microcelebrity Patchett herself has become on the app.

In the 18th-century, a specter was haunting Europe-the specter of "Werther Fever." Goethe's 1774 epistolary novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, was so popular that it catapulted the young Goethe into international fame and set off a trend of young men wearing yellow trousers and electric blue jackets... and also, allegedly, thousands of imitation suicides.

Anthony Horowitz has said "children's publishers are more scared than anybody" when it comes to so-called cancel culture, saying he was shocked when receiving the notes for his new work.

Why would anyone be interested in authors? It's not as if they're a charismatic, or even good-looking, breed. I mean that lovingly.  Read more

Despite the fact that she wrote 33 novels and 56 stories about him, Agatha Christie wasn't overly fond of her iconic detective, Hercule Poirot. The author described the character as a "detestable, bombastic, tiresome, egocentric little creep," and resented that his popularity meant that her publishers were reluctant to let her experiment with new, Poirot-free ideas.