May 2012
13 posts
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Matt and Asia’s Minecraft wedding →
Not only very cool, but some sharp photography there.
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Book Places in the Digital Age →
Hmm… now there’s a thought (if we ignore the possibilities of monopoly production behind the scenes) for future bookstores. (via @spinetinglermag and Andrew Sullivan)
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Would the last bookseller out please turn off the...
So apparently, Waterstones has decided that capitulation is the only honourable choice, that or the chain’s upper management have been smoking some really rocking shit. The details are yet to be released, but from the sounds of the arrangement, Waterstones and Amazon will have a deal whereby you can buy books via your Kindle in-store from Amazon, presumably allowing Waterstones an affiliate...
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“I call the people who say such things the Gutenbourgeois. They believe in the...”
– Paul Ford - The Web Is a Customer Service Medium
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“Aidan: I’m going to be really smart for the wedding.
Me: I know, mate....”
– Aidan, men’s formal wear expert.
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“There is a window of opportunity now to expand upon the concept of a...”
– All of this is good: @Suw in her Forbes column, on Pottermore-type platforms for publishing.
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“No. Just no. Just fucking… I mean, Pinterest? No. Fucking no. I hate Pinterest....”
– Stuart Heritage on Pinterest, in a gleeful shower of awesome.
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I need a wig for I am judging
The charming Kate Horsley has invited me to judge Crimeculture’s new genre-bending Sherlock Holmes flash fic competition. What does this mean? It means Crimeculture are running a genre-bending Sherlock Holmes flash fic competition! Entry’s free, deadline’s June 15th and all the details including prizes and delicious things are on Crimeculture’s website.
My past ventures...
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“Amazon.com, for all its glory, is one of the least transparent companies in the...”
– Sales of both the e-ink Kindle and, after launch, the Fire seem to have collapsed by at least 75% in the first 3 months of the year. Maths! (via Daring Fireball)
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Why the Publishers Association should walk the...
Via @david_hewson (and I know, before we start, that my views and David’s are very different on the subject, but that’s totally cool), we have a Bookseller piece in which the Publishers Association - an organisation surely in need of an apostrophe - calls for the fight against piracy to be escalated and for “authors to press the case against copyright theft”.
Incoming...
April 2012
8 posts
6 tags
If you ask legacy publishing’s defenders, “Which is the monopoly: the entity that charges high prices and pays low royalties, or the entity that charges low prices and pays high royalties?”, you’ll be told by those defenders (tortured logic to follow) that of course it’s the latter.
Further to the last, Barry Eisler continues to give Amazon a reach-around with a...
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“The most thunderous argument in Amazon’s favour is that the market has...”
– @Harkaway talks sense on Amazon (via @stevemosby)
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Dear @Natwest_Help -
Your bank has a system whereby if post sent to an account’s address is returned for any reason, a “return to branch” marker is put on it and no more post is sent. This is very sensible. Kudos!
What is not sensible is:
No message is sent to the account holder - bearing in mind you have my two phone numbers and my email address so it shouldn’t be...
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Tor/Forge E-book Titles to Go DRM-Free →
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Maths: "ebooks are 10% less to produce"
Copying this from @LucaVeste’s Facebook stream, because the typing was lengthy and the numbers interesting. This article suggesting that, for a publisher, an ebook is only ~10% less expensive to produce than a print book has been doing the rounds. You might be forgiven for thinking that this means the sale price of each should only be 10% (or less) different to make the same profits for all...
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KDP: licensed to ill
While we’re talking Amazon, and while Apple and publishers are locked in somewhat ludicrous court battle over agency pricing and collusion (as if they needed to collude to agree that Apple’s long-standing standard practice was more attractive than Amazon’s shit-on-a-stick; that’s another argument for another day), let’s get legal for a moment.
This isn’t going...
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“By foolishly insisting on DRM, and then selling to Amazon on a wholesale basis,...”
– The always excellent Stross on Amazon. If you haven’t read this, you should.
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March 2012
12 posts
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The Man Who Broke Atlantic City →
Fascinating.
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“The same cannot be said of society. In the UK we are all, as subjects of Her...”
– Mr Oswald is eminently sensible.
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“The truth is, the government doesn’t need our approval to get things done.”
– via Steve Mosby (and everyone else) Mediocre Dave on the bill to privatise the NHS and how representative democracy is a farce.
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“Police said they received several calls yesterday at 11:30 a.m. of a man in...”
– Invisible Children Co-Founder Detained. Quite spectacularly, it seems.
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Curated: swearing in fiction
The following is a lengthy conversation on Twitter started by Steve Mosby and Luca Veste, and rapidly dominated by an overbearing me who should’ve been working, about whether it’s OK to be offended by language in works of fiction. The argument and subject were interesting ones and we knocked around some good stuff. And then I derailed it on to asterisking out words, which I loathe....
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Queen of the May by Suw Charman-Anderson —... →
A thing worthy of your attention. (And a fine concept, I might add.)
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“Maybe we’re not in real life. Maybe we’re in somebody’s story. Maybe the [proto-humans in Africa] are actually still alive and we’re just in their story.” -Aidan, deep.
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“Impactful” is a made-up buzzword, colligated by the modern marketing...”
– via @suw, 20 Common Grammar Mistakes That (Almost) Everyone Makes.
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“The two heterosexual marriages I’ve attended in the last six months were...”
– Steve Mosby, good man.
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February 2012
15 posts
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Lengthy: Software, Editing, Gadgets
I am, while I try to finish the rest of it, rereading and editing a partially-finished book. On my phone. Not because I’m an outrageous techie geek or an idiot, but because it’s the best available option, though it shouldn’t be, if Android were everything it’s supposed to bloody be.
There are four options available to me:
I can print it out, Old Skool, and go at it...
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They Shoot Novels, Don't They?
Last night I decided to down tools on the current WIP nearly halfway into the story and about a quarter into the actual word count. (Because I tend to skip bits if they’re awkward/simple and then back-fill later.) This 1:1 ratio of done to skipped is a little higher than usual, and the fact I’ve been working on this for (allowing for Christmas, family death plague, et al.) a month or...
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“This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be...”
– The Smashwords license boilerplate is - to my mind - unnecessarily dickish. (Not that I’m using them, but read at the start of James’s NATURAL CAUSES.)
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A Kids Story: Billy McPugh & The Monsters' Ball
It’s book season in reception and I wrote a story to read to Aidan’s class last week. Some of the rhythm is iffy and the rhyme pattern shifts all over the place, but thirty 4-5 year olds loved it. They played the part of the Squeaks (there’s a line naming three of them and their teacher; amend to suit) and got to roar all together at every RARGH! in the text. And no small child...
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“If you’re expecting that we’ll replace fossil fuels and do it on the cheap, you...”
– The excellent Do the Math reaches the first stage summary. The blog should be required reading for anyone wanting to sound informed on energy issues.
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Aar! Take Two
Further thoughts following responses to my previous ‘pirate crew’ writers’ collective notion via all sorts of different channels.
Consensus seems to be that it’d be a fascinating idea, with the potential to descend into a howling shitstorm of hatred, accusations, and rage should such a thing prove successful. (“A good way to lose friends” I think was how my...
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Thank You, And Good Night
Seems iBA has been updated with a clearer EULA with this at the top:
IMPORTANT NOTE:
If you want to charge a fee for a work that includes files in the .ibooks format generated using iBooks Author, you may only sell or distribute such work through Apple, and such distribution will be subject to a separate agreement with Apple. This restriction does not apply to the content of such works...
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MY BAD - Anthony Neil Smith: 2012 →
While we’re on the subject, this from @DocNoir - as opposed to the bullshit from Trestle after the fact (edit: now linked as a FreezePaged copy of the Google cache) - is how you define a mistake (as opposed to knowingly ignoring the rules), and the correct, classy way to deal with one. Good stuff.
Edit to add: Incidentally, I don’t have Neil’s vast back catalogue, but of the...
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Aar, A Writer's Life For Me
And so, while the Trestle Press art theft debacle unfolds - seriously, the ease of finding some of the originals is laughable - I find myself thinking of a notion I had a while back. Nothing so fully-formed as an idea. A dream, maybe.
A writers’ co-operative.
Modelled along pirate lines.
I, uh, should probably explain. We’re all either involved with or at least watching the...
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Trestle Press, Art Theft
I know a few people with ebooks put out by one-man-band publisher Trestle Press, who have a stable of decent writers under some (apparently famously) deeply shonky typography. Now it seems Giovanni “G-Man” Gelati, the one man in the aforementioned band, has been using massive amounts of copyrighted images for cover art without the artists’ permission.
Gelati has responded to...
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“I don’t give a fuck anymore. Whatever will be, will fuckin’ be. I...”
– Ray Banks on the e-ndustry (if you see what I did there).
January 2012
15 posts
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The Ghost Of Book Puns Past
I discovered this ancient list of change-one-letter-in-the-title book puns with associated blurbs buried in a long-disused, spider-haunted folder on my hard drive yesterday evening. I seem to remember doing it several websites and at least one pen name ago, based on what I saw on the shelves nearby. In fact, it must have been before BCon in Madison because I vaguely remember Lee mentioning...
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Ebooks Encourage Authors To Stare At Their Shoes... →
And hot on the last post’s heels, this piece from the mighty @suw.