• Natasha Marin's promotion fundamentals course for authors is happening at the end of this month at Hugo House. Here's a course description:

This class, led by conceptual artist, writer, and communications professional Natasha Marin, will help you develop strategies and goals for effectively promoting your work. Through interactive exercises and group discussions, you'll identify the best platforms for your work, learn the key components of your web and social media presence, and practice your networking skills, so you can talk about your work online or in person with confidence.

• Now that his show's been cancelled, Bill O'Reilly's book sales are down.

• Can this tweet possibly be real? It seems too good to be true.

Friend is reading Harry Potter for the first time. He suddenly realizes he's read a fanfiction Order of the Phoenix instead of the real one. pic.twitter.com/tKNgT6usi6

— Shelley Zhang (@shelzhang) July 10, 2017

• I don't know which of the following three observations by conservative film critic Kyle Smith on the Bechdel Test is worse:

Suppose your favorite film critic started sprinkling his reviews with references to the “Cowboy Test” and made it clear that he was factoring into his appraisal of a work of art whether it contained cowboys.

Movies (at least Hollywood movies) are about people on the extremes of society — cops, criminals, superheroes. These extreme characters tend to be men, and men tend to be the ones who create them. Women enjoy much more prominence in the milieu of low-budget independent movies, where the stories are more focused on ordinary people with real-world problems, but those movies usually attract small audiences.

To be slightly less reductionist than the Bechdel Test, women tend to write movies about relationships, and men tend to write movies about aliens and shootouts. Have a wander through the sci-fi and fantasy section of your local bookstore: How many of these books’ authors are female? Yet these are where the big movie ideas come from. If a woman wants the next Lord of the Rings–style franchise to pass the Bechdel Test, then a woman should come up with a story with as much earning potential as J. R. R. Tolkien’s.

• But that last observation really doesn't make any sense. Has Smith ever been to a bookstore? Does he really not know the names Octavia Butler or Margaret Atwood or Ursula LeGuin or Mary Doria Russell or J.K. Rowling or Mary Shelley? How big of an idiot is Kyle Smith, anyway? And what kind of a publication would let Smith embarrass himself like this? Do the editors at the National Review really hate Kyle Smith that much?