The Book Bar is open - Welcome Everyone!

Raising the Bar on Reading! 

Welcome to The Book Bar everyone.  Something different today for you to enjoy....Grab a drink and scoot over to the Gossip Lounge to hang out with your friends or to go make some new ones.  I got some "juicies" to share with you all!!  Enjoy your stay...

Did you know?  I had no idea...  OMG!!  That's incredible!!!  PPSSTT!!!  Don't tell anybody but ...  That's crazy!!!  Really?  Who'd have thought!!! Don't tell anyone...  It's pretty astounding what I just found out...  Shhhh!!!

Forbes put a list together ranking this year's top ten authors and what they earned.  Fascinating. Let the countdown begin...

 10.  

John Grisham, $14 million

Grisham’s earnings from his latest novel, Gray Mountain, combined with royalties from his back catalogue help him make the cut as one of the year’s ten highest-earning authors. Sales show that Grisham’s crime stories remain popular for years after their publication. That’s good, because Grisham’s one-book-per-year writing pace is fairly slow compared to some of the prolific authors on this list.

9. 

Nora Roberts, $18 million

Nora Robert's latest book has not sold very well, but her massive back catalog (well over 200 books) keeps selling at a decent clip. With her classics still flying off the shelves, Roberts seems to have cemented her place among the world’s top-earning authors for at least a few more years.

8. 

Steven King, $19 million

Horror writer Stephen King makes so much money, it’s scary. Forbes notes that King’s earnings are down compared to prior years, but even “declining” King earnings land him the number seven slot. When $19 million is a “bad” year, you know that you’re pretty good at your job.

7. 

J. K. Rowling, $19 million

No new Harry Potter books, no problem! J.K. Rowling is still one of the highest-earning authors on the planet. Writing as Robert Galbraith, Rowling has built a second career as a crime fiction writer.

6. 

Janet Evanovich, $21 million

Evanovich is known for her excellent Stephanie Plum mystery series. She’s also a prolific writer who puts out several books a year. So it’s no mystery that Evanovich earned more than $20 million this year!

5. 

Jeff Kinney, $23 million

Jeff Kinney is the author of the Wimpy Kid series. His ability to connect with young readers has made him a millionaire many times over. Kinney is the top-earning children’s author on this list.

4.

Danielle Steele, $25 million

According to Forbes, much of Steel’s income comes from hefty advances on her novels. And she publishes a lot of them, having written nearly 100 since her debut in the 1970s. With the extra money coming in from her back catalog, Steel will continue to earn big bucks for years to come.

3. 

Veronica Roth, $25 million

Veronica Roth’s Divergent trilogy has made her an incredible amount of money, and most of her career still lies ahead of her. Roth is only 26, making her the youngest author on the top earners list. It will be exciting to see where she goes next with her career!

2.

John Green, $26 million

Green’s $26 million is nowhere near what the top-earning author on this list brings home, but it’s still a huge chunk of change. Green leads a group of young adult authors who are invading the top earners list. As Forbes points out, the industry is seeing more and more millionaire young adult writer

1.

James Patterson, $87 million

You can’t say that James Patterson doesn’t earn his industry-leading paycheck. He cranks out more than a dozen books a year (with coauthors, of course - the man isn’t a machine.) Patterson is also known for his generosity, so we can’t think of anyone who better deserves the top spot on this list.

John Green featured image courtesy of http://bit.ly/1Qdha6g. 

Now you do!

AND furthermore....

The most popular successful book to get your hands on to date is...

The Girl on The Train is one of the most successful books of the year and has already been on the New York Times best seller’s list for 23 weeks since its release in January. Compared to Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, the plot similarly pivots on suburban psychosis and focuses on one girl’s disappearance, leaving readers to figure out what happened with three very untrustworthy narrators telling their perspective.

Praised by everyone from Reese Witherspoon to Stephen King, it’s the one book everyone seems to be talking about this summer. Here are 13 facts about the runaway best seller.

1. The author, Paula Hawkins, was almost broke when she sent the unfinished manuscript with just 45,000 words to a publisher.

“I couldn’t afford to wait until I finished the book to get a deal. I needed some sort of income, and my agent thought the first half (of the book) was very strong. ‘The Girl on the Train’ was a last roll of the dice for me as a fiction writer,” she said.

2. It’s the fastest-selling adult novel in history.

The book has sold more than two million copies in the U.S. alone since it was published in January.

3. The book has already been optioned as a movie.

DreamWorks Studios bought the rights for movie adaptation and Marc Platt is set to direct it. Although the author is excited, she’s trying to take it all in stride.

“It’s very exciting, yet I’m trying to not be too excited,” she said. “These things take a really long time. It could be years, it may not happen. It feels unreal.”

Emily Blunt is in talks with DreamWorks to star in the film.

3. The author came up with the storyline while on her own commute.

“When I first moved to London and started commuting into the centre, the bits of the journey I loved most were when the train ran close enough to houses so that I could see right into people’s living rooms. I always found it gave me a feeling of connection, most strongly when you actually saw a person in there, making their morning tea or reading the paper. I never saw anything out of the ordinary, but I did start to wonder what would happen if I did: what would I do if I saw something shocking or frightening? That’s where the germ of the idea came about, but it was only much later, when I had the character of Rachel walking around in my head, that I started to think about how someone like her, lonely and damaged as she is, might react if she saw something strange on her daily commute, and I found that a whole world of possibility opened up,” she said.

4. The word ‘girl’ was used in the book’s working title long before “Gone Girl” ever became a hit.

“The Woman on the Train just didn’t sound as good. I’ll take care next time not to have girl in the title,” she told The Guardian. She knows the main character, Rachel, a 30-something, is “not a girl, but I do call people girls all the time – I refer to myself as a girl and I’m in my 40s”.

5. Before she wrote The Girl On The Train,  Hawkins wrote several books under a pen name.

Under a pen name she published four novels – Confessions of a Reluctant Recessionista, All I Want for Christmas, One Minute to Midnight and The Reunion – although none of them garnered much success. Hawkins said with each one she wrote, their stories became darker and darker until she realized romantic fiction wasn’t really her.

“The last one has loads of terrible things happening in it and ended up being rather tragic in a lot of ways,” says Hawkins with a laugh. “Nobody bought it.”

6. None of the characters are actually based on anyone in the author’s life.

In interviews Hawkins regularly gets asked if the book is based on anyone she knows but she insists they aren’t.

“There are small bits of me in all the women in The Girl on the Train(and possibly in a couple of the men, too). But the main the characters are works of the imagination,” she said.

7. Critics often compare Hawkin’s novel to last year’s successful psychological thriller Gone Girl, but she isn’t sure if this would happen if both books were written by men.

“I don’t know if this would have happened if the book had been written by the man. I don’t know if those same types of comparisons are made for books written by men. Certainly, there is a tendency to lump women who write similar types of books together, and it’s not just in crime, is it? Women’s fiction is supposedly a whole genre of itself. There’s no male equivalent.”

8. While doing research for the book, the author studied the way alcohol affects memory to better understand the way her characters would behave.

“I have read about it, and the thing about blackouts is, there still is quite a lot about blackouts induced by alcohol use that I think we just don’t know. It’s not completely understood why some people get them and other people don’t. That’s as far as I understand— there are probably scientists who will tell me I’m wrong. [laughs]”

“But it was quite useful to me because I could have parts where she does remember things and parts where she doesn’t. Also memory loss can be affected by a host of other things as well like a traumatic incident or a blow to the head. So the blackout is a useful device for the thriller writer, but there are obviously other factors at play when it comes to memory.”

9. Hawkins worked as a financial journalist prior to being a novelist.

“I spent a lot of time writing about tax and pensions and mortgages,” she said. Throughout the 90s she focused on writing about Eastern Europe then joined the Times, where she worked until 2004 before going freelance.

10. The book is inspired by the author’s love for all things Hitchcock.

“I was going for a slightly Hitchcock-style atmosphere. I did want that feeling of paranoia, self-doubt, suspicion. In that movie [“The Lady Vanishes”], everyone thinks that woman is making things up, and I wanted this book to have a similar sense. You can do fascinating things with the tricks memory can play and tell. People can come to believe things which didn’t happen at all if they’re told them enough times.

11. In creating the narrative, Hawkins wanted to write a crime novel that looked at what happened from the victim’s perspective.

“The stranger lurking in the dark alleyway or the man who breaks into the house are the stuff of nightmares, but in reality most victims of violence are attacked by someone they know, often in their own home, and that for me holds its own particular terrors, because you are talking about the place in which you are supposed to be safest, and the people in whom you are supposed to place your trust, ” she said.

“For example, we are told by politicians and other commentators that ‘stranger rape’ is so much worse for the victim than ‘date rape’, but this ignores the fact that an attack in the home, by someone you know, can be every bit as brutal and terrifying as an attack by a stranger, and it involves a devastating betrayal of trust.”

12. The book was almost written solely in Rachel’s POV.

In an interview with TIME, Hawkins said, “I actually started out just writing from Rachel’s perspective, but I thought that I needed to get inside Megan’s head as well, so I introduced her. Then, later on, I decided to write from three. For me, a lot of the book is about perceptions of people and how they change and how they can be completely off. So I think it was interesting to see these women all looking at each other and the men in their lives and make judgments. And then we can see it from somebody else’s viewpoint, and we can really understand the assumptions that are being made and the preconceptions that different people have.”

13. The author is already working on a follow up, a Gothic-tinged psychological thriller about sisters set in Northern England that will be released next summer.

“It’s about the relationship between two sisters and memory is a strong theme,’ she revealed. “The way we create memories is so unreliable that it’s possible to retain completely false memories of your childhood.”

Like The Girl On The Train, the book will also be an unconventional crime novel.

“There doesn’t always need to be a killing in it,” Hawkins said. “But there’s an atmosphere of menace that infects the everyday.” 

- source Koty Nellis fro thoughtcatalog.com

Refill your glass and linger here a while.  Chat and laugh and have a great time. You're in "The Book Bar," a place that you are always welcome.  Until next month.... read on!

Cover charge? A Smile.