I’ve always known I’m not alone in my book-sniffing habit – when I worked at Waterstones, I caught several of my colleagues sticking their heads into freshly opened boxes to breathe in deeply that glorious fresh, woody, inky scent – but I hadn’t realised how many people take bibliosmia even more seriously than I do. For […]
Continue readingSo this is fascinating: the world’s first ‘smart typewriter’. Typewriters have romance, but they’re hopelessly impractical these days. You can’t juggle text around in the way we’ve become used to on our laptops and PCs, and they are offline relics in an online world. Many writers like the idea of using one, just like Hemingway, […]
Continue readingIt’s been a tough week. By midnight on Monday 15 proposals had landed on my virtual doormat from the 10-day Business Book Proposal Challenge participants. That’s not as many as some previous challenges, so it should have been easier to choose a winner, right? Wrong. I managed to narrow it down to a shortlist of […]
Continue readingOne phrase in this week’s podcast particularly caught listener Bec Evans’s ear: ‘find your tent poles’. It is a GREAT metaphor: it conjures up a vivid mental image, it makes you think ‘Huh?’ and the almost immediately ‘Oh, I see!’ Here it is in context: Mark Levy talking about how you create an original book […]
Continue readingI met a great publishing buddy for coffee today in Winchester. She’s just left her job to go freelance, hence the swanning around Winchester in the sun on a Wednesday. Winchester’s lovely at any time, but today, basking in spring sunshine, it was hard to imagine a nicer place to be. We’d last met at London […]
Continue readingToday’s blog is over at BookMachine: reflecitons on publishing’s role in positioning authors following my conversation with Mark Levy. Read more…
Continue readingThis is/was Delivery Day, twice over. 1. I delivered the first section of my own book to the editor today. (I now have a cover design too, which I absolutely love.) 2. The completed proposals are trickling in from those who’ve completed the 10-day Business Book Proposal Challenge. The deadline is midnight, there are 11 […]
Continue readingMachine learning is where Google, Amazon, Apple and others are focusing their investment, and it’s impacting every industry from medicine to manufacturing. You’d think writing and publishing might be immune, but there are already AI-authored books out there (last year a largely machine-authored book passed the first stage of a literary competition in Japan). Another […]
Continue reading[NB deliberately posting in afternoon to avoid suspicions of April Fooling – though the real news is so bonkers these days that all the fun seems to have gone out of the tradition….] One of the most fundamental personality traits, common to almost every method of measurement, is the tendency towards extraversion or introversion. It’s […]
Continue readingI’ve just read – for the first time – George Orwell’s famous essay ‘Politics and the English Language’. I’m not sure why I hadn’t got to it before now, it’s exactly the sort of thing I’d usually have been all over as a keen Eng Lit undergraduate. I can only think the ‘Politics’ bit put […]
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