‘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
When ‘There Are No Words,’ I Can’t Even
One of the most perceptive regulars in #FutureChat, The FutureBook digital publishing community’s weekly live discussion, is Carla Douglas of BeyondPaperEditing.com in Kingston, Ontario. And in a recent doing of the discussion, Douglas pointed out that writing, while once among the most isolated and solitary of careers has been made one of the most social by digital… 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
In The Season Of Giving: Unwrap The Truth For Your Creative Loved Ones
A Token Of Your Esteem: Honesty The greatest gift you can give to a creative friend or relative sometimes is a compassionate, thoughtful, patient negativeresponse. Not negative in terms of how you say it or any intention of being hurtful. Exactly the opposite: negative in the sense of an authentic, truthful reaction in a world… 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
Is the honeymoon over? KU comes between Amazon and its self-publishers
A kind of downgrade for Amazon, and nowhere near Wall Street The most significant change is that Amazon KDP has slipped to third and also reflects the growing discontent self-published authors have with the introduction of Kindle Unlimited and recent communications regarding the new VAT law in Europe for 2015. We also have five new providers entering… Read More