A couple of years back, I was faced with a group of twenty-five nervous freshers in a first-year psychology seminar. I broke the ice by playing the Three Things About Me game. This game – or, at least, the version I play – involves saying three things about yourself. Two things must be true and [...]
This morning you can find me over at BubbleCow dispensing some advice on editing. Like the guy on Apocalypse Now said: ‘Get some!’ Some insight is required on your part to answer this question. It’s somewhat akin to asking what kind of cleaning your house needs if you want to sell it. You need to [...]
Over the past week or so, I’ve being making rounds to various blogs. Over at Scott Pack’s place, I’ve been writing about my experiences of publishing Déjà Vu: So I’m looking at this Amanda Hocking headline. Flecks of tea are moving down the screen of my laptop like the raw Matrix. The half-formed idea in [...]
My, hasn’t time flown? I sat down to update my blog this afternoon certain in the knowledge that my last entry was about a month ago. It turns out I published my retirement speech in mid August. I thought it would be worthwhile providing an update on my books. Several people have been kind enough [...]
What follows is a very personal post, for which I do not apologise.
Jim Hines, a science fiction author, has been collecting some data on how professional novelists broke into the profession. The goal of the survey was to [...] use actual data to confirm or bust some of the myths about making it as a novelist. Some interesting data, and some surprises. ► Jim C. Hines » [...]
Dani Shapiro on the ‘sell – or else’ mentality. If they were enrolled in medical school, in all likelihood they would wind up doctors. If in law school, better than even odds, they’d become lawyers. But writing school guarantees them little other than debt. ► A writing career becomes harder to scale – latimes.com
I’ve spent most of this morning reading through some documentation sent to me by John Jarrold, my agent, concerning the Google Book Settlement. Google is in the process of digitising books. It began this, and has continued to do so, largely without the permission of rights holders. The issues are complex. Even the summary I [...]
Further to my review of the COOL-ER eBook Reader, it’s worth noting that, elsewhere, the Internet is lighting up with comments, speculation and reviews about the coming storm in publishing that is the digitisation of literature. Check out this MacWorld story. It outlines the ten new ebook readers announced or released at CES this week. [...]
My review of the device, together with some comments on how ebook readers might affect publishing, can be found as a guest post over at Scott Pack’s blog today.