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.
Archives for category: Writing news
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.
The Terry Pratchett Anywhere But Here, Anywhen but Now Prize is for aspiring novelists older than 18 living in the UK, Ireland or the Commonwealth who have not had a book published. The winner will receive a publishing contract with Transworld plus a big advance. Entries close at the end of the year.
From Sir pTerry: “In short, the story must be theoretically possible on some version of the past, present or future of a planet Earth.”
You can read more at the Terry Pratchett website.
The New Yorker has an article about ebooks and the iPad versus the Kindle and Amazon versus Apple and the publishers. As per usual, lots of input from the publishers in this article, not a lot from the readers who actually want to buy ebooks and are being put off by the trifecta: DRM, pricing higher than the paperback, unavailability due to delayed release or geographic restrictions. From the article: “Publishers’ real concern is that the low price of digital books will destroy bookstores, which are their primary customers”. Not readers, but bookstores. And this is why readers are being denied what they want at a time when there is burgeoning competition for their time in digital entertainment. (And I personally don’t think embedding video and audio etc in ebooks in the way to compete with other forms of entertainment; when I read, I want to read, not watch a video).
Don’t worry, Alot is here to help you with your minor grammar mistakes.
I can’t even pretend this is related to reading or writing, but people stuck in the wrong country need some plane humour right now. Don’t forget the mouse-over text.
Bad — correction, the worst — SF covers.
Does anyone remember choose-your-own-adventure books?
I don’t often write short stories and it’s even rarer that I (try to) sell any, so this is the first time I’ve been stuck with this issue: an editor has failed to pay me for a short story and is ignoring my follow-up emails. I’d give her the benefit of the doubt and suggest they might be being spammed, except I’ve tried a couple of different addresses now and also double-checked that my mail server is not blacklisted.
I’m following the advice at Writers Weekly for pursuing payment from a deadbeat editor. This letter has worked for others, but not for me (you might find it useful). Read the rest of this entry »
A new ebook reader is on its way: Blio eReader. This kind of fully featured ebook reader will come in its own now that Apple iPad and other such tablets have made their appearance. I’m happy with something that displays text nicely, really.
An interesting article from about a year ago pointing out the deficiences of the grammar bible, The Elements of Style. Worth a read, even just for the demolishing of the rule that we have to write “none of us is” (singular) rather than far-more-intuitive “none of us are” (plural).
How smaller and independent publishers can get themselves onto the iPad. My latest is on there via Smashwords (as far as I know…I can’t actually check without owning an iPad, given that you can’t browse the iBookstore without one); in addition to the options in that article, Ingrams/Lightning Source has indicated they will be distributing to the iPad — this may be turn out a better option than Smashwords depending on your situation, as the formatting can be nicer on ePubs via LS vs the mass-crunch formatting on Smashwords.
Nonplus means to bewilder to the point of speechlessness, from the Latin “not more” or “no further” — nothing further can be done (or said). To be nonplussed, then, is be in a state of perplexity or confusion, at a loss for words.
That is always the sense in which I have known this 500-year-old word and how I have read the word’s meaning. But over the years, and in fact, twice in the last week, I’ve come across it used to mean the exact opposite — as if “nonplussed” meant “not fussed” — in published, supposedly edited, works. This isn’t recent, as this commentary from 1999 shows, but it is a language change that I can point to as something I never came across in childhood, and am coming across relatively often now. Read the rest of this entry »
A survey on how professional writers broke into publishing, part 1.
You’d think Amazon would have learnt this lesson the first time round…
Newsflash: people still enjoy reading. Who knew?
