Forget Your Writing Prompts This is the album of the future, and it’s fast becoming a hit. So says a pert, authoritative voice in the opening of the second track on composer-performer Florent Ghys’ new album Télévision from Cantaloupe Music. It’s called a CD. That’s short for compact disc. The music on one of these is… Read More
A Delicate Balance: Can Blurb Become All Things To All Authors?
‘The Best Parts Of Your 2014′ If you’re like me, you may find it somewhat difficult to remember “the best parts of your 2014,” but this, nevertheless, is the kind of talk we expect from Blurb. Here’s some more: The best parts of your 2014 were moments only you could live. Now turn them into… Read More
A HarperCollins Holiday Pop-Up Bookstore: ‘Innovation-Driven Environment’
Lean, Light, And Timely On New Year’s Eve, it will be history. The Holiday Pop-Up Store closes at midnight Eastern on December 31. But it will have been another of the tests that HarperCollins (HC) has launched, as it sifts through various avenues of D2C potential — direct to consumer. You still can access the store… Read More
Music For Writers: Donnacha Dennehy’s New Chapbook
A Sonic Anthology: The Abstract Gone Narrative There’s a kind of single-composer album that’s a lot like a writer’s collection of short stories or poems. So much of this ilk is the composer Donnacha Dennehy’s new album for RTEthat it arrives without an over-arching title of its own. It’s simply Donnacha Dennehy: Crane/O/The Vandal/Hive. Those… Read More
Digital Book World’s Choir: Keynotes From Amazon, Apple, And All
The First Major Publishing Pilgrimage Of 2015 Publishing conferences are ritual performances. They are to the varied segments of publishing what morality plays are to the various forms of Christianity. They are narratives that are organised to demonstrate, emphasise, and reinforce the orthodoxy. Those are the words of one of our most dependable iconoclasts, Baldur… Read More
Music For Writers: The Tidal Grace In Paola Prestini’s ‘Oceanic Verses’
Mapping Her Internal Geography This idea of disparate energies colliding is very much a part of everything I do. I’m interested in energies and styles that don’t necessarily go together and weaving them into a tapestry that to me makes sense. You can hear the singular beauty of Paola Prestini’s weave — and waves — in the newly… Read More
Girl Online Spooked: What The Zoella Ghostwriting Issue Tells Us
Ghosts Creep Us Out For A Reason This graphic landed in my Twitter stream today, supposedly from the UK-based “Campaign For Real Authors,” hashing themselves as #CFRA. I suspect this is from the Authors Electric collective, which in 2012 had some blog commentary focused on the priority some publishers seem to have for celebrity books over the… Read More
London Book Fair’s ‘Digital Minds’ Conference: A Call For Publishing Polyglots
Non sum uni angulo natus; patria mea totus hic est mundus The usual translation of this old quote attributed to Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 BC to AD 65), is: I am not born for one corner; the whole world is my native land. It’s the kind of line that gets people like me going,… Read More
Music For Writers: Cerrone’s ‘Cities’ Of Ancient Urban Mythology
Turn Off The Lights I have to agree with Tony Frankel at Stage and Cinema on this one: Get into your headphones and shut your eyes. Invisible Cities wants to live inside your head. And the darker that place might be, the better. Never in all my travels had I ventured as far as Adelma.… Read More
Music For Writers: New York Polyphony’s Grammy-nominated 'Nowell'
700 Years Of New Music We start from the Medieval carols from England, those are 14th and 15th centuries. We also have Renaissance music from the 15th and 16th centuries. Then we sing some pieces, actually, from the 19th century and 20th century, America. And then from the 21st century. That’s baritone Christopher Dylan Herbert, talking… Read More