Seth Godin announced to great fanfare and hubub in the blog world that he will no longer publish his books through a traditional publisher.
Some see this as a big author shaking off the shackles of evil publishers; some publishers see this as Godin taking advantage of the investment traditional publishing made on his behalf, by [...]
If the object of writing is to deliver to readers a text that is engaging & enlightens, or entertains them in some way or other, then the idea of maintaining a fixed form of a book needs to be reexamined. Writers will probably always want to keep control of their work, but who is to [...]
Book Oven pal Mark Bertils writes about Cloud Publishing on indexmb, focusing mostly on the reader-side, with services like Shortcovers and the more forwardlooking expectation of booky-APIs, Kindle’s or big cloud-based catalog initiatives.
The stuff that’s happening and going to happen on the finished product/reader side is exciting, but it pales, I think, in comparison [...]
Henry Baum of Self-Publishing Review interviewed me the other day about Book Oven. With Henry’s permission, I’m reposting the whole thing below.
Self-Publishing Review: So how’s the site work? What do people do once they create a project and how can writers contribute to other writers’ projects?
Hugh McGuire: Firstly, we’ve just launched and we have [...]
The Newspaperman and the Blogger
On July 9, Ian Shapira, Staff Writer for the Washington Post wrote a 1,500 word fluff piece about consultant Anne Loehr, who explains GenY to their cohabitants in the workplace. Then Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan blogged the story, reprinting some of Anne Loehr quotations from the Post piece.
Ian Shapira was initially happy: [...]
From CBC’s Writers & Company:
This week, international crime. From Italy, Gianrico Carofiglio; from Sweden, Asa Larsson; from Scotland, Louise Welsh; and from Canada, Giles Blunt – talk about mystery writing.
> Listen here.
From Jean Hannah Edelstein in the Guardian, this sounds like fun:
I didn’t expect to love the Literary Death Match. A bookish evening in the upstairs of the Old Queen’s Head (think chandeliers, pale green walls, elaborate rococo moulding), in Islington? Could it be any more middle-class, more asymmetrical haircut, more vintage black-rimmed spectacles? I was [...]
Mark Medley has a delightful story in the (increasingly great) National Post Afterword blog about his attempts to talk to British writer Martin Amis about what it’s like to teach creative writing. Amis was the star instructor at the Humber School for Writers. Medley had to do some work to talk to him.
Long and [...]
How’s this for a bio-slug, in Katha Pollitt’s article in Slate:
Not many writers furnish enough material for a biography focused entirely on their love lives. In his short life (1788-1824), George Gordon, Lord Byron, managed to cram in just about every sort of connection imaginable—unrequited pinings galore; affairs with aristocrats, actresses, servants, landladies, worshipful fans, [...]
The most striking fault in work by young or beginning novelists, submitted for criticism, is irrelevance—due either to infatuation or indecision. To direct such an author’s attention to the imperative of relevance is certainly the most useful—and possibly the only—help that can be given.
–Elizabeth Bowen
