With BookMachine Unplugged, our event which celebrates the culture of collaboration in publishing, kicking off in a couple of weeks, we’ve been thinking about the collaborative process and how this works from an author’s perspective. Maggie Eckel interviewed Rob Weston (children’s and YA author) about publishing trends back in March; and we thought we’d interview him again, to find out why he says that ‘collaboration has been a great experience’.

Big announcement today. Juliet Mushens will be joining us as our fourth speaker at BookMachine Unplugged on May 23rd.If you use the discount code ‘Juliet’ you can get 15% off your ticket today (ends midnight).

Juliet was named as a ‘Rising Star’ in the Bookseller’s 2012 listing of the industry’s next generation of leaders and innovators. This year she’s also been shortlisted for the Kim Scott Walwyn prize, which recognises the professional achievements and promise of women publishers. We interviewed her to find out more.

In wholly unpleasant news that, on the bright side, has returned Harper Lee to public life, the beloved author of To Kill A Mockingbird and only a further handful of essays is suing her agent in a bid to regain copyright over her sole novel. 87 year old Lee claims that one Samuel Pinkus – president of the Pinkus plumbing company literary agent and son-in-law of Eugene Winick, formerly Lee’s agent of many years – took advantage of her declining health to trick her into signing over the rights to the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning book.

Fresh off its successful launch of stand-up turned historical novelist Rob Newman’s The Trade Secret, indie publishing house Cargo has announced a few of its acquisitions for 2013 and 2014, with the promise of more forthcoming along with the soon to be released details of the first leg of its Margins Book and Music Festival to venture outside of Glasgow. It’s a typically eclectic mix, both in terms of subject matter and in pedigree of author.

Almost exactly a year on from the untimely death of the much missed Adam (MCA) Yauch comes word in the New York Times that Michael (Mike D) Diamond and Adam (Ad-Rock) Horowitz, his surviving bandmates in Beastie Boys, have signed a memoir deal with Random House imprint Spiegel & Grau. The as-yet-untitled book will be gettin’ stupid in your area, causin’ all kinds of hysteria in the autumn of 2015 and, as you would expect from one of the most inventive, influential musical acts of the past thirty years – especially one that has mad hits like it was Rod Carew – will emphatically not be a straightforward ghost-written tell-all.

These Pages Fall Like Ash is a first-of-its kind narrative experience, leading its readers around the city of Bristol – armed with a wooden book and a smartphone device. Intrigued? We were.

Emma Smith spoke to creator, Dr Tom Abba, to find out more (before venturing West and trying it out for real).

A strange story is unfolding in Bristol this Spring…

Two cities, each overlapping the other. Streets bordering two worlds.

Two people who can no longer remember the other’s existence.

I love books. I love the musk of a secondhand bookshop. The friends standing eager in my shelves. The osteopathic crack as I break a hardback’s spine. So you might imagine I hate the way ebooks are beeping out the death-knell of the printed page.

Actually, I believe digital publishing may save what’s most important about books: the words, the stories – the art. And, with your help, this might herald a golden age of literature. But more of that in a moment…

This is a guest post from author Judith Summers, who is currently storming the Kindle charts with her book Dear Sister.

I’ve been a No.5  bestseller in the past, I’ve  been a No.4 bestseller – but it’s taken thirty years of being an author, ten published books and the advent of Kindle  for me to hit  the No.1  spot . Now I’ve finally scored – and with my  first published novel.

With Bret Easton Ellis seeming at long last to have gotten the message that no, he will have absolutely nothing to do with the film adaptation of Fifty Shades of Grey, no matter how often he creepily insists that James Deen would be perfect to star whilst staring, unblinking, into your own eyes (again, please do not Google James Deen if you’re unfamiliar with the name and at work or around children), another long-time chronicler of the beautiful and vacant has proven a source of unexpected ardour for the project: Film-maker Gus Van Sant, director of American arthouse classics like Gerry, My Own Private Idaho and Drugstore Cowboy, is seemingly so eager to steer the book to the screen that he’s already filmed one of the sex scenes, entirely unsolicited and off his own back, if that phrasing isn’t too misleading given the circumstances.

Today, 23 April, is known across the world as the day when Harold Bloom traditionally lays a single red rose at the entrance to the Globe Theatre and sighs wistfully, i.e. the date of Shakespeare’s birth and death. As every literary murder truther knows, it is also the recorded date of Cervantes’ death, the very same year as Shakespeare’s (and you thought we had it rough when Princess Di and Mother Theresa died in the same week). In what is either a massively fortuitous coincidence or somehow deliberately planned to commemorate these events, 23 April is also the UNESCO-appointed international day of the book, upon which is celebrated World Book Night, the post-watershed equivalent to the more kid-oriented World Book Day.