As well as running and blogging every day I have another daft habit game I’m playing with myself: ahead of my 50th birthday in two years’ time I’m reading a book from every year of my life. I started back in 1969 with Slaughterhouse-Five, and I’ve taken in so far Grendel, The Dice Man, Stepford […]
Continue readingYesterday marked 350 days of running and blogging every day: nearly the year. And I’m going to make the year, of course – whatever it takes. You don’t get to within a fortnight of the end and quit (or at least I don’t plan to). But I won’t be carrying on every day after that. […]
Continue readingWhat do you think of when you think of balance in life? One of my bootcampers is exploring this at the moment: what began as a book about how to achieve a better balance has taken off in a fascinating new direction (as book so often do) about what balance means, and whether it’s actually […]
Continue readingI’m revising my manuscript at the moment, and rather than do it on screen I decided to take a different perspective: I printed out the manuscript and inserted the pages into a ring binder (note to self: add page numbers before printing next time). What’s interesting is how much I’m enjoying this stage (which I’d […]
Continue readingRemember all that dancing around when I finally (FINALLY) finished the first draft of my book? Well, here’s the view from the other side. Bec Evans of Prolifiko was the one who invited me to stay with her as she house-sat in Devon, because she knew I needed to get away from the million day-to-day […]
Continue readingI heard the other week that one of my favourite teachers had died – he seemed ancient to me when I was at school in the 80s so he must have been a good age when he died, but it still shocked me. He was a small man, with incredible energy, bustling around the cloisters […]
Continue readingWhen Bryony Thomas tries out a marketing technique for her book, smart business book writers take notice. Right now, Bryony is running a promotion that makes absolutely no sense at all to anyone stuck in a traditional view of books as a means of generating passive revenue. As she explains in The Extraordinary Business Book […]
Continue readingThis week’s guest in the Extraordinary Business Book Club is Pam Didner, author of Global Content Marketing: she’s one of those great guests who’s interesting not only because of her experience planning, writing and publishing a business book, but because her area of expertise is intriniscally interesting to anyone involved in putting content out there […]
Continue readingWhat is the University Press’s role in the modern world? Traditionally it has fulfilled several functions: championing the highest standards of peer-reviewed schoarship globally, providing a platform for works that are of significant interest to scholars but not sufficiently profitable to be of interest to commercial publishers, increasing the prestige and reach of the university […]
Continue readingMaybe it’s a generational thing, but my Gen X brain is still wired to think most immediately through pen onto paper. When I first came to map out my book I did so on the back of a series of napkins, in some cases quite literally, and although I wrote the bulk of it on […]
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