News From The Colony
The Writer’s Essential Tackle Box, the must-have bible for all would-be authors, has landed a UK foreign rights deal with Snowbooks.
Written by Litopian Lynn Price, Editorial Director at California-based Behler Publications, Tackle Box is a treasure trove of insider advice and information on how the publishing industry works – and the tools a writer needs to navigate it.
Have you ever wanted to know what agents, editors and publishers are looking for in a query, and why they reject...
Star Columnists
Martyn Daniels
Today’s trade press is littered once more with assumptions about the state of book piracy and its impact on revenues and the market. This is an emotive subject which has many issues, much sensitivity and is often divorced of real facts.
Attributor, who monitor the access to illegally posted content through their FairShare Guardian service, have released a report based on their tracking of 913 books in 14 subjects in the final quarter of 2009. It estimates from this that over 9 million copies of books were illegally downloaded from the 25 sites it tracked. So they extrapolate, estimate and come up with figures which make many...
Agent
My first column of the year in the British publishing trade magazine The Bookseller has just been...
Martyn Daniels
So when is it right to apologise to one group of people but not apologise to another when you have done exactly the same thing to both...
Martyn Daniels
It now appears that anyone electronics firm standing has created their own ebook reader. Everywhere you turn you find a new one and as we have said many times, differentiating between them is very...
Martyn Daniels
In our New Year Predictions we made reference to the opportunities and dangers that face the digital public library in the UK. We have written previously on the views expressed by the UK Minister...
Martyn Daniels
In the article which was published in the New York Times today,‘There’s More to Publishing Than Meets the Screen’,Jonathan...
Martyn Daniels
Having already made seven predictions for 2010 and into the next decade, we continue and offer our final three.
8.Publishers
We have talked about bookstore...
Litopia Blogs
RL Sutton
I finally tackled another rewrite of my short story, posted on Johnson. It moves better, and doesn't have so many holes in it as before, but it has really only served to get me enthusiastic about the long neglected rewrite on my Novel #2 WIP. While neglecting the WIP I've taken a few months to read some good books, both fiction and non-fiction. I've repaired a roof -- well at least I thought it was repaired. I've laid about...
cathmurphy
Being in the right place at the right time. The best kind of luck because you don’t know it’s luck. Like the way I met my husband: his train was cancelled, mine was delayed. The seat at my table came free just as he came down the corridor. The paper he pulled from his bag to read was on neural networks – one of the subjects covered by my PhD thesis.
Reader I married him.
That’s how it was with the hunt for our dream property in...
CatWake
George Vernon Hudson:
I love him in the Fall,
I hate him in the Springtime...
...when I think of him at all.
Submitted for your consideration, this moment of cranky bitterness. :-)
Current favorite word: isometrics
Current least-favorite word: glottal
Quacker
As a small publisher, just starting out on the road to bestsellerdom and Booker award dinners (because that's what it's all about, right?), one of the most important issues to address is the rise of the ebook.
I say rise, because even if the ebook's percentage of today's market today is relatively minor - research stats vary, but it's only a few per cent, if that - you can rest assured that the number is rising, and isn't likely to...
sarbonn
It doesn't seem all that long ago that being a professional writer was not all that difficult. Yes, it was still a difficult field to break into, but once you did, you were pretty much a part of...
worldper
When did I become this dumb? Stupid. Unable to communicate. Where did the brain go and why didn’t it leave a forwarding address? I tried to MapQuest it, but my fat fingers typed in NapWurst. I...
Calibriel
Ace thinks he's trained the cat, but I know better. The cat has a short memory. He must have: he thinks I'm his mother. And when Ace points to the utility room and says "bed", the only reason he...
1 comment
Crowe
A few years ago I was taking pictures along a rocky stretch of the coastal path in Cornwall. A coastguard was yomping the same stretch and stopped to give me a warning. "So far this year we've had...
8 comments
zerlina
The sky is grey. Every so often it spits out fat drops of rain, which somehow lower the temperature by about five degrees (Celsius). The dog is lying on his back in his basket, the husband is in...
2 comments
Donna
I watched What Happened in Vegas over the weekend. I figured with the ever-charming leads of Cameron Diaz and Ashton Kutcher, it was hard to go wrong. The story was light and cute – perfect...
litlove
It's a joke I often use against myself that I can only tell stories that have already been told - which is why I write non-fiction. I don't know how other people manage to figure out who does what...
3 comments
Calibriel
Just an excuse to go back to Venice? Well, I had to check the details ...
I didn’t set out to write a book set in Venice. I set out to write a book as different as possible from the one I’d...
1 comment
Quacker
I have a problem. No, not that one. Another one. Just one hour into editing Quackenbush last night, and I had to put the manuscript aside. Out came the notebook, and I tried to resolve the issue I...
David Bridger
Background: a sudden fibromyalgia flare-up hit me in the middle of last week and put me out of action for five or six days.
Fibro is a constant in my life and I work around it. A flare-up...
6 comments
skipperjeru
It's a golf joke. I was wondering about making a Tiger Woods gag just to see if I could hear Donna the Debriefer's legal head explode all the way across the Atlantic.
Anyway. Fancying the...
2 comments
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