October 2011
1 post
K Sawyer Paul: The Sony Reader Wi-Fi Review →
ksawyerpaul:
Though the Kindle is obviously the most popular e-book reader around its easy to forget that Sony has actually been in the game longer than Amazon. In fact, Sony has had more revisions of their reader than Amazon. Sony is also taken a different marketing approach than Amazon,…
June 2011
2 posts
1 tag
Why and How I Self-Published a Book →
I’m seeing more and more of posts like this lately.
Advances are quickly going to zero. Margins are going to zero for publishers. There’s no financial benefit for going with a publisher if advances are going to zero and royalties are a few percentage points. The publishing industry does minimal editing. The time between book acceptance and release is too long (often a year or more)....
May 2011
8 posts
1 tag
E-Book prices fuel outrage →
An e-book that costs the same as a printed book doesn’t feel right. No trees died to make it. No heavy machinery ran to print it. No planes flew to ship it. You might need to buy one of those new $139 Barnes & Noble Nooks, announced this week, to be able to read it. So why should you have to spend as much as you would for a heavy hardcover book to own it? Blame the latest phase of the...
1 tag
The Kobo Reader Touch →
Just as I’m considering buying the Sony pocket touch, here comes this little number. Handy compare chart, too. I really, really like the idea of reading life, an xbox live-style acheivements for your own books. And $129? If it’s as good as it seems to be, we’ve got a new number 1 ebook reader.
1 tag
Amazon to Allow ePub eBooks on the Kindle e-Reader... →
With many companies all telling us the same thing off the record it is confirmed that the Amazon is moving in this direction.
The lack of epub used to be the reason not to go with a Kindle, but in the last year or two other reasons have sprung up. This is possibly great news for a contingent of digital readers who don’t like their Sony’s or Nooks, but it’s also a news item...
1 tag
The Stockholm Syndrome Theory of Long Novels →
And there is, connected with this phenomenon, what I think of as Long Novel Stockholm syndrome. My own first experience of it—or at least my first conscious experience of it—was, again, with The Recognitions. With any novel of that difficulty and length (976 pages in my prestigiously scuffed and battered Penguin edition), the reader’s aggregate experience is bound to be composed of a mixture of...
1 tag
Dale Peck Says Writers and Readers Must Fight... →
Because the only way we can get on with our business is if we finally bury publishing’s corpse and rechannel the energy we’ve spent propping it to build something new. Something that serves the needs not of editors, or marketers, or publishers, or shareholders, or the culture industry, but of writers and readers, who together are recto and verso of the literary community, which is to say, the...
2 tags
How Viral PDFs Of A Naughty Bedtime Book Exploded... →
The response from his friends was so fierce that Mansbach decided to make his joke book a real one. Go the Fuck to Sleep, which he bills as a “children’s book for adults,” will hit stores on June 14, published by the Brooklyn press Akashic. If it’s not even due for a month, though, how did a little 32-page book already snag a film option deal with Fox 2000 and, today,...
1 tag
Megan Lisa Jones’s Novel Captive Exceeds 400000...
“Captive’s numbers illustrates a direct for all forms of digitalcalm in a BitTorrent ecosystem. Progressive authors like Ms. Jonesare heading a approach for a new form of reader engagement, and we’re verygratified with her success,” pronounced Shahi Ghanem, arch strategist atBitTorrent.
“BitTorrent was a smashing partner and is really attuned to theirassembly needs; a village truly embraces a...
1 tag
How Writers Build the Brand
In this era when most writers are expected to do everything but run the printing presses, self-promotion is so accepted that we hardly give it a second thought. And yet, whenever I have a new book about to come out, I have to shake the unpleasant sensation that there is something unseemly about my own clamor for attention. Peddling my work like a Viagra salesman still feels at odds with the high...
2 tags
Podcast services now available
Podcasting is an incredibly popular way to extend or create a brand online, but organizing and hosting podcasts can be time consuming and difficult. We take out all the heavy lifting so you can concentrate on creating great content.
With our podcasting services, all you need to do is upload your audio file through any FTP program, copy the URL, and paste it into a blog post. Instantly, your...
April 2011
5 posts
1 tag
The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime:... →
It is the Victorian era and society is both entranced by and fearful of that suspicious character known as the New Woman. She rides those new- fangled bicycles and doesn’t like to be told what to do. And, in crime fiction, such female detectives as Loveday Brooke, Dorcas Dene, and Lady Molly of Scotland Yard are out there shadowing suspects, crawling through secret passages, fingerprinting...
2 tags
The Death of the book →
The emphasis shifts with each telling, but every writer, editor, publisher, bookseller, and half-attentive reader knows the fundamental story. After centuries of steady climbing, book sales leveled off towards the end of the 1900s. Basic literacy began to plummet. As if television and Reaganomics were not danger enough, some egghead lunatics went and built a web—a web!—out of nothing but...
1 tag
Penguin Launches Book Country, An Online Community... →
Looking to support and develop writers of genre fiction, Penguin is launching a public beta of Book Country, a free online writing community and publishing services venture. In development for more than a year, Book Country offers writers a place to upload new works and receive feedback and criticism from a community of writers and readers; a place for agents and editors to look for new talent;...
1 tag
Does anyone want to be "well read"? →
Roger Ebert on never having the time in one’s life to read enough, and the problems of accepting your own mortality:
There is no pattern. My only goal is to enjoy reading. I learn that he average American teenager spends 17 minutes a weekend in voluntary reading. Surely that statistic is wrong. Do they mean reading of “serious” novels? I would certainly count science fiction, graphic...
March 2011
4 posts
Barnes & Noble Struggles To Find a Buyer →
Barnes & Noble has struggled to find a buyer, according to a recent report. The company’s stock price closed at $9.10 yesterday–half its price in February.
Here’s more from Business Week: ‘Barnes & Noble Inc., the largest U.S. bookstore chain, is likely to end its months-long search for a buyer without a sale of the company, said five people with knowledge of the bidding process …...
2 tags
Adam Engst on iPad and ereaders →
In the past few weeks, in fact, we’ve figured out a sneaky process to create our own EPUB files via Pages, which allows us to make them look a lot more like our PDF originals (previously we were forced to outsource the task and put up with what we got back). And we’re coming close to a site design change that will make it easier for readers to download various formats from their...
1 tag
Why are books so big? →
Next time you’re squinting at your mass-market copy of Dan Brown’s latest wishing the pages were just a smidge roomier, blame the medievals for not having bigger sheep.
1 tag
The Weight of a Good Notebook →
It pains me to be the kind of person who uses sickly back-slashed phrases like “weekly planner/diary,” but I suppose there’s no getting around the fact that I’m a notebook person — specifically a lined, college-ruled, unnumbered pages kind of notebook person. And with one notable exception, I’m probably not too different from the other notebook snobs that you’ve known and mocked over the years....
February 2011
20 posts
The 2011 Gredunza Publishing Package
Gredunza Press has offered different publishing packages throughout its existence. Each has been loosely based off the idea of charging for individual publishing services and providing our clients with as much freedom and rights-holding as possible. This year, we’re continuing that philosophy in our 2011 Package, which in our opinion offers independent content creators the best possible choice for...
2 tags
The 2011 Gredunza Publishing Package
Gredunza Press has offered different publishing packages throughout its existence. Each has been loosely based off the idea of charging for individual publishing services and providing our clients with as much freedom and rights-holding as possible. This year, we’re continuing that philosophy in our 2011 Package, which in our opinion offers independent content creators the best possible choice for...
1 tag
Google One Pass →
By providing a system for user authentication, payment processing, and administration, Google One Pass lets publishers focus on creating high quality content for their readers. Publishers have flexibility over payment models and control over the digital content for which they charge and the content that is free for consumers.
I’d say this qualifies as a big deal.
Typographic pizzazz: Coming to a Web near you →
That’s because of a new technology called Web Open Font Format, or WOFF, that has attracted support from all the right players: browser makers, standards groups, typography designers, and online…
1 tag
How the Internet Gets Inside Us : The New Yorker →
Of course, if you stretch out the time scale enough, and are sufficiently casual about causes, you can give the printing press credit for anything you like. But all the media of modern consciousness—from the printing press to radio and the movies—were used just as readily by authoritarian reactionaries, and then by modern totalitarians, to reduce liberty and enforce conformity as they ever were...
1 tag
How can you improve the state of eBooks? →
Read voraciously and on every device within reach.
Take copious notes on the device.
Take copious notes about the device.
Take your eBooks on adventures.
Read while traveling.
On trains, in planes, on the backs of elephants, by the beach.
What about the experience delights?
And, to a lesser degree, what annoys? (But try to focus on delight.)
Do not feel compelled to scale your map 1:1...
1 tag
Evolution in the Book Industry? →
But do I expect more from my publisher now, knowing Amazon would give me 70% of my book’s sales instead of 10%? Yes. There are Canadian publishers who should be ashamed of how little they do for their writers. Some publicists don’t even respond to emails, or they neglect to submit books to awards, what good are they?
Women Get Published and Reviewed Less Than Men in... →
Here’s a good idea:
Maybe magazines should go back to publishing lists of the people they’ve received work from and rejected. Transparency is necessary in the process, because the outcome has been disturbing and there’s little doubt that something has to change.
1 tag
The 2011 Tournament of Books by ToB Staff →
This is how book awards should work. Exciting stuff.
1 tag
Ebook readers "too easy" to read? →
Rather than making things clearer, e-readers and computers prevent us from absorbing information because their crisp screens and fonts tell our subconscious that the words they convey are not important, it is claimed.
Interesting, but you’d think they’d ask more than 28 people for the study. Of course, many ebook readers allow you to choose the size and font of the text, thereby...
What's the best font for a book? →
Scala is probably my favourite.
The Hipster Huckleberry Finn →
A classroom-friendly version of Mark Twain’s classic novel, with every occurrence of the N-word replaced by the word “hipster.” Thanks to editor Richard Grayson, the adventures of Huckleberry Finn are now neither offensive nor uncool.
A free download. I got it just for posterity.
Unevenly Distributed: Disillusionment, Clark Nova,... →
But in the MacBook Air’s perfection as a writer’s machine, it just as silently, just as elegantly robs me of the crutch of imperfect tools to explain my own mediocrity. The MacBook Air might be the perfect laptop for a writer, but that doesn’t change the fact that I’m not nearly as suited to the task of writing as it is.
"books with movie adaptations do particularly... →
You don’t say.
So you want to write a novel →
Terrific autotune argument.
Best comment: “I know 10 of these guys.”
1 tag
Mike Angley interviewed me on his website →
It was a fun interview. He gave me lots of time to talk about No Chinook, A Record Year For Rainfall, and Gredunza Press.
1 tag
Google's ebook store launches in US
Google’s been working on its ebook store for what feels like eons, but it’s finally here, at least if you’re a US customer. Canadians will find the store available but its shelves empty of anything that wasn’t already available in Google’s free books area. It’s a little odd being able to click around an empty online store. to tell you the truth.
The helpful...
1 tag
How to Review a Book Without Reading It
From Gawker:
The Onion’s A.V. Clubhas forthrightly apologized after discovering that one of their writers wrote a review of a book without reading it. Because ithadn’t been published yet. How’d the writer manage to fool his editors? Watch and learn.
I’ll never lose faith in the laziness of fact-checkers.
1 tag
Piracy spurs sales?
From O’Reilly:
Data that we collected for the titles O’Reilly put out showed a net lift in sales for books that had been pirated. So, it actually spurred, not hurt, sales. But we were only looking at O’Reilly and Thomas Nelson. The results are not emblematic of publishing overall. It could be more conservative, it could be less conservative. We just don’t have enough...
September 2010
13 posts
1 tag
Scrivener
The world’s best book writing application (at least in my view) is finally being updated after years and years of only minute changes. Scrivener 2.0 looks pretty awesome, and the designers have blog posts up explaining (in longform philosophy-style) what will and won’t be in the new version. I can’t wait.
1 tag
How to get a book deal in the 21st Century
From CBC Books’ Rosie Fernandez:
Gone are the days of submitting pages and pages of heartfelt work to publishers (well, sort of) as now the publishers come courting you. Selling yourself as a brand online has led to all kinds of book, television and film deals for creative, inventive entrepreneurs.
2 tags
Wouldn't that be something?
Aaron Miller:
If there was any sense in the publishing industry at all, there would be some big publisher or distributor who marketed permanent backups of your paper in the cloud. With all the rights, plates, and digital masters, there would be no laborious unbinding and scanning to cut into profits. And surely there are enough people feeding a $50B sector to ensure a pretty large number of...
1 tag
The line between book and Internet will disappear
Hugh McGuire:
We are a long, long way from publishers thinking of themselves as API providers — as the Application Programming Interface for the books they publish. But we’ve seen countless times that value grows when data is opened up (sometimes selectively) to the world. That’s really what the Internet is for; and that is where book publishing is going. Eventually.
2 tags
Bowker stats bookreaders
From Mary Ann Gwinn:
More than 40 percent of Americans over the age of 13 purchased a book; the average age of the American book buyer is 42.
Women make 64 percent of all book purchases, even among detective stories and thrillers, where they buy more than 60 percent of that genre.
Thirty two percent of the books purchased in 2009 were from households earning less than $32,000 annually. A fifth...
1 tag
Canada probing Apple's iBookstore over "cultural...
Nate Anderson:
On August 20, Canada’s Privy Council Office issued an order targeting Apple and the company’s new Canadian version of the iBookstore. Referred to simply as an “order authorizing a review under the Investment Canada Act of Apple Canada, Inc.’s proposed establishment of a new cultural business carried on by iBookstore in Canada,” the order means that...
1 tag
Long novels are making a comeback
From Garth Risk Hallberg:
To be even more crassly economic, in the slog of the Great Recession, the long novel offers readers a compelling value proposition.
For a deeper explanation of the long novel’s enduring health, we have to look toward something harder to quantify: the construction of the reader. The more we’re told we’re becoming readers of blogs, of texts, of tweets, of files the...
2 tags
James Patterson world's best paid author
I’m not surprised. From CBC:
Thriller author James Patterson has topped a Forbes.com list of the world’s best paid authors with an income of $70 million US last year.
Patterson, author of more than 50 bestsellers including the Alex Cross and Maximum Ride series, recently signed a deal to write 17 more books by the end of 2012.
I wonder how much the kids writing those 17 books...
2 tags
William Gibson on social engagement
From The Wall Street Journal:
As you publish your new novel, are you noticing a difference in the business since your last book?
I’ve noticed two things. One is that I’m able to observe via Twitter the global launch of the book. I’m able to simultaneously see for the first time that the English language editions, which have been exported from England into Europe and Australia, are released a...
1 tag
Interesting
Rich Adin on the Sony Reader:
Sony also has its flaws. Perhaps the most significant flaw is the failure to include a firmware upgrade that would expand the DRMed ePub capability to include the B&N flavor of DRM. This is significant because there are now 3 major places where one cannot buy ebooks for their Sony without stripping the DRM from the files: B&N, Amazon, and the...