• Thick as Thieves, the excellent young Seattle-based comics newspaper, is running a Patreon to fund future issues. If you put in $5 a month, you'll get five copies of every new issue of the paper. (Admittedly, Thick as Thieves is a free paper, but I don't have to explain to you that art is worth money, do I?)

• Yes, Bill Clinton and literary sweatshop owner James Patterson are "collaborating" on a novel about a missing president. No, you shouldn't read it. Anything that Patterson touches turns into a soulless brick of commercial fiction.

• In the Fantagraphics Free Comic Book Day comic, Pepe the Frog creator Matt Furie killed Pepe once and for all. Furie had tried to do battle with the Trump-loving white supremacists who ran off with his creation, but it's almost impossible to reclaim a symbol like that, once it's been turned into a sign of hate.

• In a masterful show of trollery, Amazon is opening its 13th brick-and-mortar Amazon Books location in a Washington DC space that previously was home to a Barnes & Noble store.

• In a shitty show of trollery, Amazon is changing its deal with booksellers and authors. In response, an author named Brooke Warner published an essay titled "How Amazon, Once Again, Is Driving Down The Value Of Books And Undermining Authors." That headline is pretty much evergreen.

• Some good advice for booksellers and librarians everywhere:

Booksellers/librarians:

"I need a book rec for a 6yo."
✅ "Cool! What do they like?"
❌ "For a boy or girl?"

Thanks in advance.

— Jay Elliot Flynn (@jayelliotflynn) May 8, 2017