The tsunami of advice and self-help books courses, seminars and retreats is one of the few boom areas in the publishing business at the moment - each time an editor is made redundant, they either become an agent, or set themselves up as book doctors. Dave Bartram finds all this onanistic self-regard deeply disturbing (are you an 8-point arc girl or a hero's journey boy?). But can you really achieve truth in your writing when you're following a formula? We're lucky to be joined this week by mega-selling YA author Cathy Hopkins, whose personal experience sheds valuable light on this complex subject. Graham Marks is here too - an accomplished YA author himself, and also a veteran publishing industry commentator too. With Donna Ballman adding her incisive legal mind and Eve Harvey conducting full-body scans in the chatroom, you're in for a great evening!

The e-book is barely with us, yet already it's threatening to undermine the whole publishing edifice. The news that Britain's WH Smith and Amazon are apparently getting into a price war (Dan Brown at £2.78 from Smiths; Stieg Larsson at £2.68 from Amazon) is bad news for everyone - but particularly writers. "Cheaper is not better", says marketing guru Jamie Mollart. "Making something cheaper only makes something cheaper!" It's a terrific discussion - make sure you listen - and tell your publisher to listen, too!

Our Summer break's over and we're back with a bang tonight - with panellists that include the writers' therapist Dr. Susan O'Doherty from New York, award-winning author and broadcaster Philippa Ballantine from New Zealand, writer and marketing guru Jamie Mollart from England and writer, bookseller and one-woman multi-functional device Eve Harvey live and direct from Edinburgh where the Festival is in full swing.

Litopia After Dark is on its annual summer holiday - we’ll be back live on air on Friday 13th August (superstitious? nous?) but until then, please enjoy this special show that Peter, Eve and Dave have put together featuring a wide range of summer reading suggestions for you. We hope you’re having a terrific summer (if you’re in the northern hemisphere!) and very much look forward to being back with you again...

It's our last Litopia After Dark before our summer break - we'll be back live and kicking on Friday 13th of August, do join us in the chatroom to celebrate - and we're certainly going out with an all-star bang!

One hour before last week's Litopia After Dark started, we opened up the lines to anyone who wanted to call in and chat - it was so successful that we're going to do this regularly. Here's the recording of our first OPEN HOUSE - featuring a chat with David Bridger, whose first book is published next week, and some great questions to Peter. To call in, you need the free program Skype, and preferably a headset microphone connected to your computer. But even if you don't have a microphone, you can still take part in the chatroom. Lines are open from 7pm UK time / 2pm EST.
So... join Peter and other Litopians in the next Open House next week!

"Fiction is dead", proclaims Lee Siegel in the New York Observer. Fiction is now a profession - not a vocation - and that simple fact means that fiction is now culturally irrelevant. In what Siegel calls the Golden Age of fiction - the period immediately after WWII – books such as From Here To Eternity, To Kill a Mockingbird and The Naked and the Dead were not only commercial fiction: they were also massive best sellers that spoke to people’s everyday experience of life. Such books do not exist today. On tonight's show, Cath Murphy asks whether Siegel is right - and if so – how do we breathe life into the corpse of fiction writing?

Writers are inherently sensitive people: part of a continuum that at its furthermost extremity finds not just intense creativity but also florid psychosis. So is writing a disorder, then - a maladaptation to the "real" world? Alternatively, are "normal" people (i.e. non-writers) essentially lacking in sensitivity and only dimly conscious of the intensity of their surroundings? That's Dave Bartram's thesis this week, and we're lucky enough to have Dr. Susan O'Doherty on the panel tonight (Dr. Sue is the writers' therapist) to get stuck into a fascinating discussion.

How green is your e-book? How much do you care about the environmental impact of the words you read... or about the sweatshop workers who assembled your shiny new iPad? Tonight's special guest is Raz Godelnik from Eco-Libris - the organization that encourages readers to do something to make the world greener - and he's got some surprising facts about the relative impact of e-readers compared to paper books.

Is the internet a concrete realization of Jung's collective unconscious? Dave Bartram believes it is, and tonight advances the argument that viral advertising on the net is effective precisely because of this deep psychic connection to the gestalt consciousness. Indeed, it's a show full of Big Ideas this evening - be careful you don't think yourself to death (which coincidentally happens to be one of the titles in tonight's Commissioning Meeting). Publishing business legend Martyn Daniels is back to explode some myths about the much-lamented halcyon days of the Net Book Agreement - an era when book prices were set by publishers and price competition was banned by law. Some say those days are about to return with the advent of the so-called "Agency Agreement" - pshaw, says Martyn - poppycock!