So Borders is having a contest for its 30,000 employees where they are encouraged to submit their manuscripts to their employer, which might then deign to make a book out of them! A "panel of judges at the corporate office" will award "a book deal including the full support of Borders merchandising and marketing arsenal" to the winning employee, according to today's press release. No mention, of course, of the money involved. But! "Our employees are talented and creative individuals who have a tremendous passion for books, and we believe that there are many who also have undiscovered writing talent," says Borders' executive VP for merchandising and marketing. Shelf-stocking slaves should note that they only have until January of 2008 to put (My Employer Is) Extremely Lame And Incredibly Condescending to bed.

The publishing industry, or whatever of it isn't at its beach house, is all atwitter today over the news that somebody is going to publish O. J. Simpson's 'If I Did It,' with commentary from the Goldman family, who won the rights to the contested memoir in a lawsuit. Will it be cheesy, slightly shady Atria, home of authors like Jodi Picoult and subway-erotica factory Zane? Or how about Broadway, which publishes everything from Bikini Bootcamp to I Got Your Back ("In a powerful testimony, music legends Eddie Levert and his late son Gerald offer up their father-son bond as a realistic and encouraging example of the healing and renewal that's possible in black families"). Of course there's also Hyperion, the Disney-owned house that usually tries to avoid soiling its hands with this type of thing—even as it prepares to publish You Can Run But You Can't Hide by Dog the Bounty Hunter. Or will it be someone small, some dark horse? Let's all hold our breath together.

We just got word that My Cock is is shopping a book proposal, and that the proposed title of the proposed book is Here I Come Again. It's "a memoir by a phallus who has always had an orgasm." The project is a handbook-cum-memoir, and is said to detail Cock's incessant ability to ejaculate. There's some graphic material here (a chapter entitled "Hawaii Five-O" details a shocking five-orgasm afternoon spent in the restroom of New York restaurant Hawaiian Tropic Zone) as well as some embarrassing revelations ("30 Seconds To Mars: The Early Years"). We reached My Cock for comment. "Dude," he wrote, "I'm a cock. I come all the time! In fact, I'm coming right now! I didn't know there was anything remarkable about it until yesterday, but, hell, if that's what the market wants, that's what they're gonna get. We want to get this out quickly, for the holiday season. Of course, the title is provisional: If anyone has a better idea, let me know."

According to IMDB, the author of Great American Celebrity Novel Courtney Thorne-Smith "once considered herself overly busty with a 32DD measurement but eschewed reduction surgery in favor of yoga which she says reshaped her figure of a C cup. 'My body fat got redistributed, and my breasts got smaller.'" That's crazy!

"The ambiguous ending of the last Harry Potter book has forced bookie William Hill to pay out on thousands of bets on the fate of the boy wizard." [Guardian]

Remember ousted Page Sixer Jared Paul Stern's book Stern Measures, the "ultimate, definitive, non-holds-barred-book on the business that is gossip" that was set to be published in Fall 2007? Well, unfortunately none of us will ever get to read Jared's insights into "the behind-the-scenes machinations of moguls, celebrities, politicians; publicists and secret sources; the inside dish on the sometimes dirty business"—Simon&Schuster imprint Touchstone Fireside has mutually agreed with Stern that everyone's better off without this book. "We just decided it was better this way," EVP and Publisher Mark Gompertz told us. "These things happen. He got busy with a lot of things, and so much time had elapsed since the events [that got him fired]. It was through no fault of anyone's." Also! "I'm sure at some point he'll have a really great book to write." Wow. Guess sometimes breaking up is pretty easy to do.

As we continue to enjoy the unghostwritten literary debut of one of America's most beloved television actresses, we learn a lot about pain and human nature and our heroine, Kate Keyes-Morgan. One of the things we learn is that her controlling husband has basically forced her to have an eating disorder. Fun times!

In this month's issue of Duke University's alumni magazine, much-ballyhooed debut novelist Dana Vachon mulls the disjunction between the book he thought he'd written and the book that most everyone else (except one of us!) thought he wrote: "As much as I was tempted to write 5,000-word riffs on greed, it does me no use if you close the book, right? I know I've said it before, but I honestly believe it: Vox populi, vox dei." One wonders, though, exactly what "populi" Dana's referring to here. The 8,405 people who, according to Bookscan (which only tracks about 70% of retail outlets), have bought the book in the five months since its publication? Well, maybe they are the voice of God. Anyway, the article also contains a shocking revelation. You know that Times Night Out With Dana? Turns out, he was faking being a douchebag at his publisher Riverhead's behest!

Remember Eric Schaeffer, the eating-disordered emosogynist who can't believe he's still single? You know, the guy we used to think was the most immature scary-deluded narcissist we'd ever encountered before we met Robert Olen Butler? Well, we had him on ignore for a while, which means we missed this SuicideGirls interview a few weeks ago. "I'm on the hunt bad," he tells Erin Broadley, who characterizes his memoir, which is partly about getting blow jobs from hookers, as "a personal and illuminating work that never shies from being up front and honest about looking for romance in a decidedly less and less romantic world." Okay! Anyway, that's not all our Eric has to say for himself.

Ever since it awarded a $4.5 million book deal to then-Speaker Newt Gingrich while Congress was preparing to address issues of media ownership, News Corp. has vigorously denied that any publishing arrangements it makes with influential political figures (Republican Senators Lott, Specter, Hegel, and Hutchison; Supreme Court Justice Thomas) are some kind of favor-buying ploy or campaign donation. So it was sort of weird to see this in the Post, News Corp.'s sister paper to the Wall Street Journal, today!

Excellent news, people. Lance Bass, who refers to himself as LBeezy, writes on his MySpace blog that "Howdy!! I just got the cover from my publisher of my book! It is under my pics because I dont know how to post it here. And since we are on the subject I just want to say I do not want my book to flop! One funny night I decided to "jokingly" say "oh it will probably flop" to a TMZ "reporter". (like all my quotes?) Again it was a joke. Im not an idiot— I wrote this book so that it might help those out there interested in the music industry, space, and/or coming out storit?y." So many topics!! How will the bookstores know where to shelve this one? (Hint: "space.")

LanceSpace [via Towleroad]

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins." "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." And now, unaided (her publisher claims) by a ghostwriter, one of America's most beloved television actresses has contributed to that list the following:

We hear that bottomfeedy lit agent David Vigliano is shopping Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo's journals, which, if they're anything like the rest of his creative output, started out world-changingly awesome and then became so lame they make Pete Wentz seem profound. Also, they're probably more in the vein of the essay about his battle with weirdly-defined celibacy he wrote at Harvard. Remember? "I didn't touch her down there, but I ran my hand up and down her arm, feeling her muscles tense up and twitch as she worked herself more and more furiously. She kept going until finally she let out a big moan and relaxed. I looked down on her, whimpered, and then fell over onto my back and stared at the ceiling, fire-like sensations bursting from every cell in my body." We can only hope there's more where that came from. Or, uh, forcibly-didn't-come from.

"When a book has a high-concept hook like "FORREST GUMP meets Powerball," it's going to go to auction and land a six-figure deal." [Galleycat]

Today Gatecrasher reported on yet another party for socialite Holly Peterson's "book" The Manny, the racist-'viral'-marketing marred debut whose lack of even trashy-fun value we noted a while back. It's, like, the tenth party we've heard of for this book, which came out in June, so far, and we were all ready to make a joke along the lines of "10 parties, that's one for every book that someone actually went into a store and purchased!" So we looked up Nielsen Bookscan numbers in an attempt to confirm our hunch. Bookscan tracks about 70% of retail sales, but doesn't track bulk buys ("special sales.") We rubbed our hands together gleefully, waiting for the dismal digits to appear on our screen.

How very, very wrong we were to dismiss insanely prolific celebrity biographer Andrew Morton's "Posh and Becks" out of hand! It turns out that the book contains a trenchant critique, not only of the current celeb-industrial complex, but of the bedrock of the global economy! And also it contains some of the most hideous cliche-stacks ever printed on paper.

"Fall," which now begins in late summer, has traditionally been the season when publishers bring out their heavy hitters. For Random House imprint Broadway, this fall's lead title is one of the most exciting they've ever published. It's by "one of America's most beloved television actresses" who "has had roles on (among other shows) 'Melrose Place' and 'According to Jim.'" Yes, we are talking about the debut novel of none other than Courtney Thorne-Smith, who, according to industry insiders, actually wrote the entire thing all by her own self. We don't yet have an advance reader's copy, so the book's description from Amazon will have to be what helps you determine where Thorne-Smith fits on the Paulina Porizkova-Ethan Hawke continuum.

Exactly a month ago, blogger Perez Hilton's book proposal was floating around the shops. Guess what! We hear a publisher bought it, for a "high five figures"! Here's to literature, and here's to some cash paying off Perez's legal bills in the wrangling against the photo agencies.

"All the outrage surrounding this particular book notwithstanding, contemporary publishers impose these blackouts not in the interest of readers but to protect the carefully planned publicity campaigns they create for books on which they have advanced large sums of money. This is the economic imperative that leads publishers to withhold the contents of even nonfiction manuscripts that contain news that the public has a vital interest in knowing. It's also why newspapers, including this one, routinely break those embargoes without any pang of conscience. Our first and most compelling obligation is to our readers' right to know and not to the commercial interests of publishers." [LAT]

Oh boy, were we excited to pick up "Posh and Becks," Andrew Morton's definitive take on the most chavghetto-fabulous couple of our times, Posh Spice and her husband, that hot gay-looking soccer dude. (After all, Morton wrote that masterpiece "Diana, Her True Story"!) And "Posh and Becks" is out now in a new updated mass market paperback edition! And yeah, we were so jazzed to pick the choicest excerpt for you.