Join hosts J.D. Barker, Christine Daigle, Kevin Tumlinson, and Jena Brown as they discuss the week's entertainment news. Then, stick around for a chat with Karin Slaughter!

Karin Slaughter is one of the world's most popular and acclaimed storytellers. She is the author of more than twenty instant New York Times bestselling novels, including the Edgar–nominated Cop Town and standalone novels Pretty Girls, The Good Daughter, and Pieces of Her. She is published in 120 countries with more than 40 million copies sold across the globe. Pieces of Her is a #1 Netflix original series starring Toni Collette, and WILL TRENT, based on her Will Trent series, is on ABC (and streaming on Hulu in the U.S. and Disney+ internationally). False Witness and The Good Daughter are in development for television. Slaughter is the founder of the Save the Libraries project—a nonprofit organization established to support libraries and library programming. A native of Georgia, she lives in Atlanta

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Join hosts J.D. Barker, Kevin Tumlinson, and Jena Brown as they discuss the week's entertainment news, including identity verification for KDP authors and Spiracle's ‘Audiobook in a Card.' Then, stick around for a chat with L.S. Stratton!

L.S. Stratton is an NAACP Image Award-nominated author and former crime newspaper reporter who has written more than a dozen books under different pen names in just about every genre from thrillers to romance to historical fiction. She currently lives in Maryland with her husband, their daughter and their tuxedo cat.

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Join hosts J.D. Barker, Christine Daigle, Kevin Tumlinson, and Jena Brown as they discuss the week's entertainment news, including SPF podcast shutting down, why X is under pressure from regulators, and how Instagram starts letting people create AI versions of themselves. Then, stick around for a chat with Sophie Brickman!

Sophie Brickman is a writer, reporter and editor based in New York City. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Saveur, The San Francisco Chronicle, the Best Food Writing compilation, and the Best American Science Writing compilation, among other places. She is currently a columnist at The Guardian.

She wrote a monthly column for Elle interviewing influential women—including Nancy Pelosi and Joyce Carol Oates—about their paths to success, served as Executive Editor of a travel publication launched jointly between Hearst and Airbnb, and was the Features Editor at Saveur. As a staff reporter at The San Francisco Chronicle, she won first place in the 2011 Association of Food Journalists’ feature writing category, for a piece about Napa’s French Laundry restaurant, and third place for best column.

In a previous life, after attending the French Culinary Institute, she worked the line at Gramercy Tavern, making risotto and lamb ragù for the lunch crowd. And before that, she graduated with honors from Harvard College, where her studies in social theory and philosophy prepared her for very few practical endeavors. Hence the desire to learn how to chop an onion correctly.

Her first book, Baby, Unplugged, about the intersection of parenting and technology, was published by HarperOne in Fall 2021, received a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly, and landed her a spot on Good Morning America. Her first novel, Plays Well With Others—a satirical epistolary romp through New York City, following the life of one mother as it begins to unravel in spectacular fashion—will be published by William Morrow in summer 2024.

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Join hosts J.D. Barker, Christine Daigle, Kevin Tumlinson, and Jena Brown as they discuss the week's entertainment news, including: Hugo awards organizers reveal thousands were spent on fraudulent votes to help one writer win; Orbit, a division of Hachette Book Group, announced the launch of Run for It; and HarperAlley, the graphic novel imprint at HarperCollins, expands into Adult Graphic Novels. Then, stick around for a chat with Daniel Silva!

Daniel Silva has been called his generation’s finest writer of international intrigue and one of the greatest American spy novelists ever. Compelling, passionate, haunting, brilliant: these are the words that have been used to describe the work of award-winning #1 New York Times bestselling author Daniel Silva.

Silva burst onto the scene in 1997 with his electrifying bestselling debut, The Unlikely Spy, a novel of love and deception set around the Allied invasion of France in World War II. His second and third novels, The Mark of the Assassin and The Marching Season, were also instant New York Times bestsellers and starred two of Silva’s most memorable characters: CIA officer Michael Osbourne and international hit man Jean-Paul Delaroche. But it was Silva’s fourth novel, The Kill Artist, which would alter the course of his career. The novel featured a character described as one of the most memorable and compelling in contemporary fiction, the art restorer and sometime Israeli secret agent Gabriel Allon, and though Silva did not realize it at the time, Gabriel’s adventures had only just begun. Gabriel Allon appears in Silva’s next twenty-one novels, each one more successful than the last.

Silva knew from a very early age that he wanted to become a writer, but his first profession would be journalism. Born in Michigan, raised and educated in California, he was pursuing a master’s degree in international relations when he received a temporary job offer from United Press International to help cover the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco. Later that year Silva abandoned his studies and joined UPI fulltime, working first in San Francisco, then on the foreign desk in Washington, and finally as Middle East correspondent in Cairo and the Persian Gulf. In 1987, while covering the Iran-Iraq war, he met NBC Today National Correspondent Jamie Gangel and they were married later that year. Silva returned to Washington and went to work for CNN and became Executive Producer of its talk show unit including shows like Crossfire, Capital Gang and Reliable Sources.

In 1995 he confessed to Jamie that his true ambition was to be a novelist. With her support and encouragement he secretly began work on the manuscript that would eventually become the instant bestseller The Unlikely Spy. He left CNN in 1997 after the book’s successful publication and began writing full time. Since then all of Silva’s books have been New York Times and international bestsellers. His books have been translated in to more than 30 languages and are published around the world. He is currently at work on a new novel and warmly thanks all those friends and loyal readers who have helped to make his books such an amazing success.

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Join hosts J.D. Barker, Christine Daigle, Kevin Tumlinson, and Jena Brown as they discuss the week's entertainment news, including: "CCC Announces Collective Solution for Internal AI Licenses," "Audible Rolls Out New Royalty Plan," and "Hachette Reorgs Workman, Moves Algonquin into Little, Brown." Then, stick around for a chat with Katherine Wood!

Katherine Wood – QUICK FACTS:

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Join hosts J.D. Barker, Christine Daigle, Kevin Tumlinson, and Jena Brown as they discuss the week's entertainment news, including Random House Publishing Group acquiring Boom! Studios, WIPO launching a toolkit for authors and publishers, and TikTok’s AI Chatbot called Genie. Then, stick around for a chat with Peter James!

Peter James is a UK No.1 bestselling author, best known for his Detective Superintendent Roy Grace series, now a hit ITV drama starring John Simm as the troubled Brighton copper. 

Much loved by crime and thriller fans for his fast-paced page-turners full of unexpected plot twists, sinister characters, and accurate portrayal of modern day policing, he has won over 40 awards for his work including the WHSmith Best Crime Author of All Time Award and Crime Writers’ Association Diamond Dagger. In 2024, it was announced that he is the creator of Her Majesty Queen Camilla’s favourite fictional detective. 

To date, Peter has written an impressive total of 20 Sunday Times No. 1s, sold over 23 million copies worldwide and been translated into 38 languages. Her Majesty Queen Camilla has announced that Detective Superintendent Roy Grace is her favourite fictional detective. His books are also often adapted for the stage, with his six stage shows grossing over £17 million at the box office – the most recent being Wish You Were Dead.

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Join hosts J.D. Barker, Christine Daigle, Kevin Tumlinson, and Jena Brown as they discuss the week's entertainment news, including controlled digital lending, The 'Wall Street Journal' dropping its bestseller lists, a Kindle Vella contest, and TikTok lifting Kindle sales. Then, stick around for a chat with Kelsea Yu!

Kelsea Yu is a Taiwanese Chinese American writer who lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and children. Whether through a speculative or real-world lens, her writing explores diaspora identity, twists on folklore, complicated interpersonal relationships, and characters who make unconventional choices.

Kelsea’s novella, Bound Feet (Cemetery Gates Media), is nominated for a 2022 Shirley Jackson Award. Her debut novel, It’s Only a Game, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury Children’s in 2024, and her next novella, Demon Song, is forthcoming from Titan Books in 2025. She has stories and essays published in magazines such as Clarkesworld, Apex, PseudoPod, and Fantasy, and in various anthologies. Her nonfiction has been published in Nightmare, Sarah Gailey’s Personal Canons Cookbook, and elsewhere.

Kelsea is an active member of SFWA and HWA, as well as a first reader for the Ignyte Award-winning and twice Hugo Award-nominated magazine, khōréō. Find her on Instagram or Twitter @anovelescape. She is represented by Jennifer Azantian of Azantian Literary Agency.

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Join hosts J.D. Barker, Christine Daigle, Kevin Tumlinson, and Jena Brown as they discuss the week's entertainment news, including how an agent was fired over Twitter posts, some actual Amazon book sales data, Shopify adding sellers to its third-party marketplace, and how ElevenLabs just launched its iOS app. Then, stick around for a chat with Snowden Wright!

Snowden Wright is the author of the novel American Pop, a Wall Street Journal WSJ+ Book of the Month, selection for Barnes & Noble’s “Discover Great New Writers” program, Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance Okra Pick, and NPR Favorite Book of the Year. A graduate of Dartmouth College and Columbia University, he has written for The Atlantic, Salon, Esquire, The Millions, and the New York Daily News, among other publications, and previously worked as a fiction reader at The New Yorker, Esquire, and The Paris Review.

Wright was the Visiting Writer and Prose Faculty at the 2021 Longleaf Writers Conference, and his debut novel, Play Pretty Blues, won the 2012 Summer Literary Seminars’ Graywolf Prize. Recipient of the Marguerite and Lamar Smith Fellowship from the Carson McCullers Center, he has attended writing residencies at Yaddo, Escape to Create, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Tusen Takk, Monson Arts, and the Hambidge Center. Wright lives in Yazoo County, Mississippi. His third novel, The Queen City Detective Agency, is forthcoming from HarperCollins in August 2024.

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Join hosts J.D. Barker, Christine Daigle, Kevin Tumlinson, and Jena Brown as they discuss the week's entertainment news, including Barnes & Noble purchasing Tattered Cover, how you can read classics with A.I. guides, Saturday Books' new launch, and how authors seek help to plug their own books. Then, stick around for a chat with Ace Atkins!

Ace Atkins is an award-winning, New York Times bestselling author who started his writing career as a crime beat reporter in Florida. Don’t Let the Devil Ride is his thirtieth novel. His previous novels include eleven books in the Quinn Colson series and multiple true-crime novels based on infamous crooks and killers. In 2010, he was chosen by Robert B. Parker’s family to continue the iconic Spenser series, adding ten novels to the franchise. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi with his family.

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Join hosts J.D. Barker, Christine Daigle, Kevin Tumlinson, and Jena Brown as they discuss the week's entertainment news, including The New List, Little and Brown hitting layoffs, and how English-Language books are filling Europe’s bookstores. Then, stick around for a chat with Kimberly Belle!

Kimberly Belle is the USA Today and internationally bestselling author with over one million copies sold worldwide, with titles including The Paris Widow, The Marriage Lie, a Goodreads Choice Awards semifinalist for Best Mystery & Thriller, and the co-authored #1 Audible Original, Young Rich Widows. Kimberly’s novels have been optioned for film and television and selected by LibraryReads and Amazon & Apple Books Editors as Best Books of the Month, and the International Thriller Writers as nominee for best book of the year. She divides her time between Atlanta and Amsterdam.

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