GalleyCat says that Once Sold Tales, an online retailer in Kent, is closing, and the owner needs to get rid of 500,000 books. A Redditor explains:

Carrie will be operating her website and selling books at the warehouse (1$ for paperbacks, 2$ for hardback, or 1.50$/lb) until the end of May … Details are still getting worked out but it looks like 10 dollars for 8 books or 18 for 16.

If you're into spending your days rifling through a warehouse packed with dirt-cheap books, it sounds like a road trip might be in order.

Back in February, I told you about the Hugo House's awesome new Made at Hugo program for local writers:

It's like a more pragmatic version of the classic writer-in-residency: Last year, Hugo House put out a call for writers age 35 or younger, living in King County, to describe a project they'd like to complete. From more than 50 applicants, House program director Brian McGuigan and an anonymous panel of poets and novelists chose six writers. Those writers get access to office space in the House, they have monthly progress meetings and contribute to a private blog on which they can share work, and they can attend any of the Hugo House classes, featuring teachers like Eileen Myles, Peter Mountford, and Sam Lipsyte, for free.

The application process for this year's Made at Hugo program is now open. If you're a writer younger than 35 and you're working on a project that you need to finish, you should consider entering into this program. It gives you the support and the advice you need to help get it done.

Here we go again: A couple months after digital comics seller Comixology pulled (and then reinstated) an issue of the popular series Saga from the Apple App Store for fear that the comic was too racy for Apple's guidelines, they've just announced that they've pulled 56 titles from their app's store for the same reason. Robot 6 says Saga is unaffected this time around, but Comixology pulled titles ranging from local publisher Fantagraphics' Angry Youth Comix to Joe Casey's new Image Comics series Sex, to...

...Jess Fink’s Chester 5000, Reed Waller and Kate Worley’s classic Omaha the Cat Dancer, Johnny Ryan’s Prison Pit and the gay-comics anthology No Straight Lines, which features the work of Alison Bechdel, Howard Cruse and Eric Shanower, among others.

These books are still available from Comixology's website, but they're not available from Apple's Comixology app. That distinction is probably enough to pacify many people who'd otherwise be angered by this move, but I still think this is bullshit. Apple needs to sell adult content—not even pornography, I'm talking about comics created for adults by celebrated cartoonists like Alison Bechdel and Howard Cruse, for fuck's sake—and not be stupid Puritan fucksticks about it. Those books have been available in Barnes & Nobles around the country for years now, to no great controversy. When the biggest digital storefront for comics in the world restricts the books they sell to all-ages content, they are holding the medium of comics back from what it could become. (And this is especially ridiculous when you acknowledge the fact that you can buy 50 Shades of Grey in the iBookstore any time you want.)

We told you in Loose Lips this week that Joan Didion cancelled her upcoming appearance at Benaroya Hall, due to an "unforeseen personal conflict."

We just got a press release from Seattle Arts and Lectures announcing Joan Didion's replacement. It begins like this:

SEATTLE, WA: Seattle Arts & Lectures’ 2012-2013 Literary Arts Series concludes with Amy Tan on Wednesday, June 5, 7:30pm at Benaroya Hall. Unfortunately the previously scheduled speaker, Joan Didion, unable to make her appearance on June 5th. We are excited to announce Amy Tan as a replacement.

Amy Tan is well known in literary circles for her sensitive and witty exploration of the complexity of mother daughter relationships starting with her debut novel, The Joy Luck Club that was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her theme continued in her equally successful novels from The Kitchen God’s Wife to Saving Fish from Drowning to the Bonesetter’s Daughter. In addition, to her novels Ms. Tan co-produced and wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation of the Joy Luck Club. Ms. Tan is also the author of a memoir, The Opposite of Fate, two children’s books, The Moon Lady and Sagwa, The Chinese Siamese Cat and numerous articles for magazines, including The New Yorker, Harper’s Bazaar, and National Geographic.

Stranger Editor Christopher Frizzelle, who was going to interview Didion onstage, will not be interviewing Amy Tan.

Like it says up there in large print, a new Pearl Buck novel is going to be published this fall:

The manuscript was stumbled upon in a storage unit in Texas and returned to the Buck family in December in exchange for a small fee, said Jane Friedman, the chief executive of Open Road Integrated Media, the publisher.

Buck, the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, is believed to have completed the manuscript for the book, “The Eternal Wonder,” shortly before she died of cancer in 1973, said her son Edgar S. Walsh, who manages her literary estate.

I'm willing to bet that most Americans now know Buck best as an Oprah's Book Club-approved author. Many of these sorts of posthumous manuscripts are unpublished for a reason, but this one, at least, sounds like a complete manuscript, which increases its chances of at least being readable.

(Thanks to Slog tipper—and big Buck fan—Cienna.)

This could potentially be a huge deal:

Get ready for Kindle Worlds, a place for you to publish fan fiction inspired by popular books, shows, movies, comics, music, and games. With Kindle Worlds, you can write new stories based on featured Worlds, engage an audience of readers, and earn royalties. Amazon Publishing has secured licenses from Warner Bros. for Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, and The Vampire Diaries, with licenses for more Worlds on the way.

The Kindle Worlds Self-Service Submission Platform will launch soon and enable you to submit your original works for publication.

I gave a talk a while ago at Nerd Nite suggesting that the publishing platform of the future would find some way to incorporate fan fiction into the platform. I also said that genre publishing platforms should encourage fan fiction by publishing the best stuff as canon and paying the author for the work. This is a smart way for Amazon to tap into a huge publishing ecosystem that already exists and is barely tolerated by the publishing industry. Maybe more importantly, it's yet another opportunity that traditional publishing has squandered.