No more excuses, blocked novelists: A shrink convinced nervous London lawyer Joseph O'Neill to follow his novel-writing dream. Ten years on, he took the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

HarperCollins is paying Nick Douglas a five-figure sum for Twitter Wit, a book of the Gawker alum's favorite Twitter posts. Is getting paid for aggregating other people's "tweets" as lazy as it sounds?

In your crazyland Tuesday media column: PR wizardry at the bankrupt Philly papers, Starbucks sliding down the publishing D-list, the perils of journalism in Utah, and Getty says you owe it money:

Jerelle Kraus, former art editor of the NYT's Op-Ed page, has a new book out, and she's telling all of the paper's sexy art secrets! Here, three images the Times killed for being too erotic:

Those recordings of Barack Obama cussing for his book are being squandered. After three whole weeks there are barely any juvenile mashups! Apprently we have to get the ball rolling.

The publishing industry is led by experienced professionals with deep knowledge of literary appeal. So if they say Kathy Griffin deserves a $2 million book deal, who are you, the public, to argue?

Lost in all this controversy over NY Post cartoonist Sean Delonas' ham-handed monkey bigot hackery is this: will this national uproar hurt the sales of Delonas' kiddie book? That would be the real tragedy.

In your informative Thursday media column: Wired's publisher is out, John Updike's death begets a new book, NYP employees are pissed, and good and bad ideas for newspapers:

A plugged-in tipster directed us to the freshly-uploaded YouTube video above, in which Rosenblat speaks to an unseen interviewer. He could be talking to a GMA producer in a pre-interview, doing media training with a publicist, who knows. (The video is carried in a YouTube channel named after Rosenblat, although the title of this video curiously misspells his last name.)

Attention, New York Times employees: Form an orderly line and prepare to walk up to 66th street to hear your colleagues discuss their quickie Obama book. Oh! And we know what you should wear:

"Steve Jobs has started writing a book," a plugged-in tipster tells me. It's the barest of rumors, but the book industry is already eagerly anticipating the Apple CEO's autobiography.

So it turns out Ian McEwan totally had his friend Salman Rushdie's back twenty years ago, after Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against Rushdie for Satanic Verses. No wonder McEwan is so anti-Islamist.

Scandal- and bad-hair-ridden ex-Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich was spotted at the Flatiron offices of Macmillan, the book publisher. Blagojevich, who loves poetry as much as he loves profanity, must surely have a memoir in him.

Alexandra Penney—the stupendously un-self-aware once-rich former magazine editor and sex book author who lost all her money to Bernie Madoff and became our favorite blogger—has a book deal! "Notorious" is the new "Deserving."

In the March Harper's there's an article about last fall's Frankfurt Book Fair, where the publishing industry gathered to bemoan its recession-era fate. Will a world with poorer authors really make publishing more pure?

Today is a major layoff day at publishing house HarperCollins. Below, two internal memos [Updated: three], and the rumors we've heard so far:

Layoffs are underway at publisher HarperCollins. Please send us details.

When you think of "Hot Celebrities Who Provoke Bidding Wars Among Publishers," the first name that springs to mind is "Diane Keaton." Her barely-sketched book idea is sure to recoup all those millions:

Would you read a comic book about unrepentant would-be terrorist Bill Ayers? Of course! Unless it was a comic book about his life as a teacher and his educational philosophy. That would be boring.

He must have learned it on Wall Street. Michael Lewis, the Salomon Brothers trader turned journalist, is, by the standards of newspaper hacks, a financial genius. And now he's got a movie deal.