Book News Roundup: Grab a milkshake and listen to some audio books

As you might imagine, I often get asked by young entrepreneurs for advice on how to start a business. What many seem to want is some sort of trick, some magic set of tools that will allow them to launch a thriving startup from scratch. Well, there’s no magic involved, but the keys to success are quite simple: Value your customers, hire well, find a market that isn’t being served, and realize that someday I will utterly crush you.
  • A 68-year-old writer is suing the Iowa Writers' Workshop for age discrimination. The L.A. Times's Jacket Copy blog smartly published the first paragraph of the writer's self-published novel so the audience could decide for itself whether he deserved to be accepted or not. Here's the first half of the paragraph:
The name of Norman Telos’ car was an automatic talk show joke. The Tork rhymed with stork, pork and cork. When the talking heads were done making fun of the Tork they went out and bought one because the Tork was the best two passenger sedan since the model T. Its diesel electric engine was the most efficient one on the market. Acceleration was better than any sports car. With 2 crossing roll beams and a domed roof it was the safest car around. The price was in the midrange of two passenger cars.

  • Sometimes a high sense of self-regard can be its own downfall, is all I'm saying.

  • An editor at Marvel Comics posted an innocuous selfie of a post-work milkshake party. That editor then received a deluge of hateful comments from comics-fan trolls. What did the editor do wrong? Well, uh, she's a woman.

She was immediately swarmed by a squadron of fanbabies furious that such “fake geek girls” had made their way into Marvel’s inner sanctum... According to Antos, the private messages she got in response to her tweet were considerably less polite. “[T]he internet is an awful, horrible, and disgusting place,” she wrote, noting that she woke up Sunday, two days after she posted the selfie, "to a slew of more garbage tweets and DMs. For being a woman. In comics. Who posted a selfie of her friends getting milkshakes."