‘My Personal List Of Ebook Headaches’ Sorry to interrupt that fun-in-the-sun thing you’re doing, but some chilly winds are blowing in on a topic you may have thought you left safely tucked away and handled: ebooks and the digital disruption of publishing. Publishers, if they want to survive…better learn the tricks of ebooks quickly. Not… Read More
In Publishing's CyberVillage: So Much Anger
Calling Them Out Provocations graphic by Liam Walsh IRL, in real life, if you were mad at someone for something, would you walk into the village square, face the buildings, and start yelling that person’s name and your complaints about them? You’d be calling them out, physically, demanding that they change their ways and accusing… Read More
'And We Are Outbound From Pluto': Twitter Is A News Medium
‘We Have Visited Every Planet In Our Solar System’ Before Tuesday (14th July), we couldn’t say that we human beings had in some way engaged with every planet in our solar system. Now we can. That’s one of the lines I got out on Twitter Tuesday evening — maybe you did, too? — as soon as NASA… Read More
Is A Fan A ‘Quantified Reader’?
Michael Bhaskar: ‘Fans are critical to what it means to be a publisher today’ Historically, publishing meant amplification. “Making stuff available,” Canelo Publishing’s Michael Bhaskar told our Berlin audience. Putting something into print was enough to amplify it. But actually, now, on the Internet, when everything can be made available automatically, simply having stuff available is no longer… Read More
Why Are Boys Not Reading More?
‘We Are Not Creating Male Readers’ I would suggest to you that we have shared responsibility here — teachers, parents, authors, and publishers. Literacy is the kingpin skill of school success. Unless we get all kids reading, they’re not going to be successful. That’s Peg Tyre, author of The Trouble with Boys: A Surprising Report Card on Our Sons,… Read More
‘All Calendars Suck: Start Saying No’
The Curse of the Calendar Reversals of logic stay with you, witty whiplashes show you something looking unlike it did before. That’s how Mike Monteiro’s article The Chokehold of Calendars may work on you. Monteiro writes: All calendars suck. And they all suck in the same way. Calendars are a record of interruptions. And quite often they’re… Read More
Should Authors Write Without Pay?
From anyone else, the advice might sound like right-headed rationality, itself. But as the author Roxana Robinson (pictured) can tell you, when you’re the president of the Authors Guild, nothing you say seems to fall on unbiased ears. This time, Robinson is talking about what authors may be doing to inadvertently diminish their own perceived… Read More
In And Around London Book Fair: Authors, IndieReCon And ALLi’s Third Anniversary
And Spectacular Weather As if heeding a request from London Book Fair (LBF) director Jacks Thomas, the sun flooded Olympia London with bright springtime light all week. We weary stand-and-stairs brats now head back to planes, trains, and waiting families. Smaller by design — Olympia is a markedly more compressed space than Earls Court — the transfer went remarkably… Read More
If the 'Elastic Mind' Snaps: A Lenten Lullaby
“This will be my last post until Monday, April 13, 2015.” No, not me. (You wish.) No, that’s a colleague, the memoirist Kathy Pooler. She’s a good, cold-weather Catholic, mind you, so Lent means a lot more to her than it does to troppo Protestants like me. Following a retreat with some author-colleagues, Pooler has decided… Read More
If Writers Don’t #CreditWriters, Who Will?
Science: Breathing Down Your Narrative One reason that writers might want to be sure to credit each other for their work — in tweets, on Facebook, in their own posts and stories — is that there are alternatives not just in the pipeline but on the pages and Web sites of some news outlets near… Read More