11.:59 BST tonight is the deadline for the poor souls who’ve completed the 10-day Business Book Proposal Challenge but are still desperately ttitivating their proposals to be in with a chance of winning a publishing deal with Practical Inspiration Publishing. On the one hand, a deadline is marvellous because it focuses the mind. The dishwasher […]
Continue readingBernadette Jiwa writes brilliant books. Books like Difference, Marketing: A Love Story, and Hunch. And one of the first things you notice about them is that they’re very short. Beautifully, enticingly, ‘it-would-so-easy-to-read-this short. I asked her about it when I interviewed her recently on The Extraordinary Business Book Club. ‘You know what I noticed, I […]
Continue readingI’ve just spent a glorious evening at St James’s church, for the final evening of the Bramley and Little London music festival. There’s something magical about sitting in such an ancient, beautiful village church, especially one so familiar and dear to me, with flowers and foliage spilling from every ledge, listening to world-class music. Tonight […]
Continue readingThe end of another amazing, exhausting, exhilarating 10-day Business Book Proposal Challenge, and one proposal submitted already, which is incredible (the deadline for the prize of a publishign deal isn’t until midnight on Monday). As usual, I invited particpants to tell me how they found the challenge – I can go on all day about […]
Continue readingI was talking today to the wonderful Joanna Pieters, host of the The Creative Life Show podcast, about the nature of creativity. She gifted me a beautiful phrase, when she described the creative act – writing, art, music, whatever – as ‘building a bridge in the air’. Isn’t that beautiful? It’s hard work, of course, […]
Continue readingIt’s a big day for Practical Inspiration Publishing: the publication of the first book on the list to have come out of the 10-day Business Book Proposal Challenge. Thriving Abroad: The definitive guide to professional and personal relocation success by Louise Wiles and Evelyn Simpson was joint winner of the very first Challenge almost exactly […]
Continue readingOne of the loveliest side-effects of a career in publishing is a social feed full of interesting literary and linguistic observations. (This is especially true when you’ve worked with so many lexicographers – they’re something of a separate breed. Never, ever get into an argument with a lexicographer about hyphenation of compound adjectives or the […]
Continue readingToday’s Extraordinary Business Book Club episode features Christian Madsbjerg, author of a startlingly good book called Sensemaking: The Power of the Humanities in the Age of the Algorithm. His argument is that with all the talk about machine intelligence and big data, we need to recognise the irreplaceable role of human intelligence and intuition. And […]
Continue readingJust occasionally, you read a blog post and instead of writing your own thoughts/response, all you want to do is hold it up and say to anyone who’ll listen: This. This. https://cookingonabootstrap.com/2017/06/07/we-need-to-talk-about-diane-abbott-now-explicit-content/
Continue readingIn the wake of Labour’s historic, game-changing victory and the so-called ‘rebirth of socialism’, it seemed appropriate to head out on this morning’s up the Radical Road that leads from the Palace of Holyrood along the base of Salisbury Crags. Intrigued by the name, I Googled it as I dried out, steaming gently alongisde my […]
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