Some motivational speech for us all this morning.
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From here, good news: “Australians can now use ther iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch as a serious e-book reader after Apple opened the doors to its iBookstore today.”
Bad news: “Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight books cost $12.99 each on the iBookstore, compared to $US8.99 on the US version of the iBookstore and $US8.59 on Amazon’s Kindle.”
I wonder when the strong Australian dollar is actually going to mean something to Apple/distributors? We’ve already stopped buying TV episodes and renting movies from iTunes because of how much more they are charging on the Australian iTunes store compared to what the US pays.
Great post categorising books into a ‘book pyramid’ re the fod nutrition pyramid, with some incisive comments about where fiction aimed at women fits in.
An interesting article (from July) about what we might be losing in a digital-based world…the art of slow reading.
From Bookninja, a useful list of collective nouns for supernatural beings. Though ‘a vexation of zombies’ seems a bit of an understatement…
Guardian article about the Page 99 test, which posits that an author is trying hard to impress on page 1, so you’re better off checking page 99, far enough in to test the author in full swing and the plot but not so far as to reveal plot twists, to assess the whole. Further:
A new website, page99test.com, launches next month to test that premise. It will offer (courageous) authors and aspiring authors the chance to upload the 99th pages of their works and invite readers to comment on whether they would buy, or like to read, the rest.
saying the usual about ebooks, but from a SF perspective.
And belated congratulations to China Mieville, who won the 2010 Hugo Award for best novel for The City & The City.
Interesting article with Joss Whedon
An article in Salon that finally remembers the reader in the ongoing debate about the ‘new world’ of publishing. Not that it’s good news for small writers and publishers, nor in the short term is it particularly good news for readers. But at least someone remembered the reader at last.
It is a mantra in writing advice that you should never give away your writing for free. Writing as a specialised skillset has become so devalued by the interaction between cheapskate publishers and writers desperate to be published that it’s a race to the bottom to see if they can get us to pay them to publish us (oh, wait…). To try to mitigate this continual erosion of value in the writing field, experienced writers advise newbie writers to never give away their writing for free. This can be as strict as telling them to not keep a blog, write for friends, or write for charity newsletters and the like. It can also include not writing for less than a certain number of cents per word.
This is undoubtably good advice, especially for non-fiction, but also for fiction which is, if anything, even more devalued. But I recently came across something that puts it in a different light. Read the rest of this entry »
