Romance is going to Yale! Historical writers Lauren Willig and Cara Elliott are teaching a romance novel course at Yale. 80 interested students applied for 18 slots.

If you’re looking for an agent, you might want to follow the Ask Agent site on Twitter. I hear it has a lot of good information.

Do you write Chick Lit? It’s listed as one of the interests of agent Joy Azmitia at Russell & Volkening.

RWA’s new Hot Sheet really is hot with the changes they’ve made to recognize publishers based on “publishing lines.” Opinons pro and con seem to be split pretty evenly. You can read more about it on this Dear Author post.

E-books and e-book readers were in the news. Kristin Nelson at Pub Rants wrote a great blog on the iPad being a game changer in the e-book business.

“Most folks in the industry see the Apple announcement as a game changer—a company big enough and nimble enough to give Amazon a run for its money in terms of being the dominant player of eBooks.

As agents, the electronic rights playing field is literally shifting daily.”

Until I read this, I was focusing on iPad’s unfortunate name choice. But there are more important things at stake.

According to this New York Times article, the bestsellers on Kindle are books that are given away free. A conundrum, as Project Runway’s Tim Gunn would say. Some publishers, including Penguin and Hachette, are not buying into the idea that free books will increase sales. Yet Zondervan, a HarperCollins imprint, and Samhain Publishing say it’s working for them.

Sales of the Sony e-book reader have quadrupled in the last year in the U.S. It was such a popular Christmas present that “the servers for the Sony Style went down because too many people tried to register on the Web site Dec 25, 2009.”

Acer expects to join the e-reader boom “by offering an online applications store and its first electronic book reader by mid-year.” Fine with me. The more e-readers, the lower the price.

I’m directing everyone to Dear Author again for Jane’s Friday Links, in which she links to articles about Steve Jobs complaining that publishers are punishing Amazon (anyone feeling sorry for him?); AT&T activating over one million e-readers in the last quarter of 2009; Barnes & Noble being investigated for selling membership account information to discount clubes (which they deny); and Borders laying off another 10% of its workforce.

This interview of a book pirate isn’t going to make authors happy. Titled “Confessions of a Book Pirate,” a better title would be “Self-justification of a Book Pirate.”

Know any teens who love to write? HarperCollins debuts a writing site for teens. Inkpop is an interactive writing platform and community for teenagers created by the HarperTeen imprint of HarperCollins Children’s Books. Inkpop serves as an online community for young writers. The publisher calls inkpop the “anchor” of its digital strategy for the teen market.