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A couple of items of bad news today for various imprints of Simon and Schuster. The more important one is that Valerie Plame's book probably won't contain much of anything interesting after the CIA Publication Review Board gets through with it; possibly endangering her big fat book deal, which had already fallen through once elsewhere before S&S scooped it up. And Galleycat reports that at Touchstone, another S&S imprint, the Sobol Awards book will be scuttled after bad word of mouth (like ours, for example) soured everyone on the idea of the pay-to-play literary contest. S&S, we know that recent publishing firings have left some big cloven hooves to fill. But let's let this stuff be a lesson, shall we? Okay, now we're getting down off our high horse and going back to scouring the internet for celebrity crotch shots.

Writer's Block: Valerie Plame Vs. The CIA [Newsweek]
Bad Word of Mouth Kills Sobol Prize [Galleycat]
Earlier: Literary Contest Winners to Be Published, Screwed