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In a surprising twist, it appears that Fox News’s Glenn Beck has helped to make a best seller of The Coming Insurrection, an incendiary text written by French anarchists under the pseudonym “Invisible Committee,” whose call to arms “takes as its starting point theft, sabotage, the refusal to work, and the elaboration of collective, self-organized forms-of-life.”

Written in the aftermath of the 2005 riots in the Paris suburbs and published by La Fabrique in 2007, L’insurrection qui vient was denounced by the French government as a terrorist manual. The text first gained significant attention in 2008, following the arrest of its alleged authors, a group of youths now known as the Tarnac 9, on charges of sabotaging French train lines.

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If you’re worried about the fate of the literary magazine in this hectic new era of apps and tweets, you might find solace in Electric Literature, a bold new bimonthly with a plan to capture and convert a broad and highly mobile readership to literary fiction. Founded by Andy Hunter, 38, and Scott Lindenbaum, 26, who met in the Brooklyn College MFA program, the magazine is available on every possible platform, including paper (printed on demand), Kindle, iPhone, and audiobook. Although many literary publications have begun to offer electronic delivery in some form or another, Electric Literature may be the first to blanket the whole field.

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Storm clouds remain heavy over New York publishing, but the sun is shining in Austin, Texas, where Greenleaf Book Group is turning the industry’s traditional business model on its head: instead of counting on a few blockbuster titles to compensate for insufficient sales across much of their catalog, the company expects each title to earn its keep. Greenleaf offers no advances and requires authors to cover their own production costs. In exchange for assuming this risk, authors retain the rights to their work and receive a substantially bigger cut of the royalty on each copy sold. If a book sells well, the author wins; if it doesn’t, he or she absorbs the loss but is free to walk out the door.

Not just a glorified vanity press, Greenleaf has built a strong brand identity by accepting only about 3 percent of the submissions it receives. The lucky (and apparently promising) few benefit from Greenleaf’s reputedly excellent marketing and distribution services, selling on average between 3,000 and 5,000 copies in their first year. According to a profile in the September 7 issue of Forbes Magazine, the ten-year-old company saw revenues increase by 37 percent to $8.1 million in 2008 and is on course to exceed $9 million this year.

Check out the article to read how it all began in 1997, when founder Clint Greenleaf (then a rookie at Deloitte and Touche) decided to put out his own 30-page grooming handbook, Attention to Detail: A Gentlemen’s Guide to Appearance, to prove to his friends that writing a book is—well, just not that hard.

Who maintains the most popular Twitter feed on earth? Guess again, it’s Ashton Kutcher.

The Iowa-born actor came to fame playing Michael Kelso on the FOX sitcom That 70s Show. In 2003 he created a minor media sensation by hooking up with Demi Moore, who had launched her career on the ABC soap General Hospital when Kutcher was only 4. Also in 2003 he became the creator, executive producer, and host of the MTV series, Punk’d, in which hidden cameras catch celebrities at the receiving end of practical jokes.

Now Kutcher, whose Twitter handle is @aplusk, is becoming a star in the tech sector, too. In April of this year (just as Oprah was sending out her first Tweet), Kutcher won a much-publicized race with CNN to become the the first Twitterer with 1 million followers.  For a recap of the whole “feud,” see Kutcher’s 4/17 victory appearance on Larry King Live:

 

Some criticized Kutcher’s achievement as a little more than a PR stunt and questioned the means by which he’d amassed a million followers. Still, Kutcher seemed earnest about the democratic power of microblogging, telling King,

“We now live in an age in media that a single voice can have as much power and relevance on the Web, that is, as an entire media network.”

Kutcher also emphasized to King that the brilliance of Twitter is that it is not only a “send out” but also a “take in” medium, through which he is having a direct conversation with his fans.

Now approaching the 3 million followers mark, Kutcher highlighted the potential of Twitter’s “take in” feature recently when he sent out a Tweet asking followers to suggest a joke for a scene in his upcoming movie, The Killers. The jokes flooded in, and apparently one of them fit the bill. As reported by Fishbowl LA, Kutcher’s making no promises that the joke will survive the movie’s final cut. (Also, it remained to be seen whether the contributing fan would receive credit, or payment, for the joke.) Still, the incident must have made The Killers’s screenwriter(s), and perhaps writers everywhere, a little uneasy.

What recourse does a lone independent bookseller (or even several hundred of them) have to fight the megapower of Amazon? Everyone knows the indies can’t compete on price when Amazon can leverage its economies of scale to sell books at significant discounts.

On the other hand, the algorithms of the Amazon brain (Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought…) are no substitute for the informed, individual, hands-on customer service—the inspired and unusual recommendations—that you’re likely to get at your local independent (if it still exists). And the indies know it.

 

That’s why they’re rallying around IndieBound, an initiative from the American Booksellers Association (ABA), designed to champion the “buy local” movement. Members are banded together by a common logo and a fierce “Declaration” that opens like this:

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for individuals to denounce the corporate bands which threaten to homogenize our cities and our souls, we must celebrate the powers that make us unique and declare the causes which compel us to remain independent.

Introduced a year ago, IndieBound is an expanded, rebranded, and reenergized version of BookSense, the ABA’s original vehicle for promoting the cause of independents. The new website features bookseller recommendations and best-seller lists, as well as copious DIY resources for independent booksellers to customize their IndieBound identities. By joining the community, users can create their own personalized wish lists, plug their favorite stores, and participate in social networking activities.

Big news at the BEA in May was the launch of IndieBound’s new iPhone application. Here are some of its features:

• Browse indie bookseller recommendation lists (The Indie Next List, The Kids Indie Next List) and best-seller lists (The Indie Bestseller Lists)

• Search for books from a comprehensive database of in-print titles

• Review detailed book information

• Buy books online from indie bookstores

• Find local, indie bookstores nearby or across the United States

• Find other independently owned businesses, like coffee shops, movie theaters, and bicycle stores

The application’s been downloaded more than 60,000 times in a month—which seems like a glimmer of hope in this otherwise dark night of the indie bookseller’s soul.

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