Editor’s Note:  Each week we’re busy reading the wires and scanning pages of magazines, websites and blogs and every Friday, we share what we consider the top reads for freelance writers interested in perfecting their craft and building their business. This week it’s all about book publishing, cello pimping and crossword author espionage.

Happy Friday!

If you’re wondering why James Patterson is publishing books for middle-school-aged readers, the Times has an article that may shed some light on the subject. In the heyday of ebooks and speedy digital downloads, the dream of once-a-year publishing is slowly dying. “Authors are now pulling the literary equivalent of a double shift, churning out short stories, novellas or even an extra full-length book each year.”

On that note, @moglue developed a way for the aforementioned authors, and wannabe authors, to develop and publish interactive ebooks. Still in beta, publishing is free for authors using the MoglueBuilder and books created in the next four weeks will be free to everyone to download. After that, writers can start charging.

Modern tabloid news moguls have 19th-century newsman W.T. Stead to thank for getting it all started. Stead essentially invented the roadmap for today’s sensationalist journalism. Critic Tobias Grey reviews W. Sydney Robinson’s Muckraker for the Wall Street Journal.

“Stead’s innovations as editor of the Gazette included incorporating maps and diagrams into a newspaper for the first time, breaking up longer articles with eye-catching subheadings and blending his own opinions with those of the people he interviewed.”

You know it’s hard out here for a cellist. The Billfold’s @Logan Sachon talks to his cousin and cellist Peter Sachon about the never-ending hustle of finding work as a freelance, professional musician … Chess and a high school-based desire to impress girls inspire Pulitzer Prize winner and poet Charlie Simic to live a life of poetry… Silvio Teixeira’s business card flip book video just made a bunch of designers in the room jealous, and a bunch non-designers confused, but amazed … Who said the life of a crossword puzzle writer is stale and boring? In a story that reads like a plotline from MI-5, Neptali Segovia was accused of planning an assassination of Chavez’s brother through the use of coded crossword messaging … And now, a rollercoaster of an infographic on How a Book is Born from Weldon Publishing.
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Image courtesy of Flickr, Indi Samarajiva