Today’s blog is over at BookMachine, and was inspired by my podcast interview with Matt Locke, founder of Storythings and The Story Conference. ‘Thousands of years ago, we told stories to each other. The best stories were those that could be repeated over and over again, changing little, those that embodied tribal memory, with strong, […]
Continue readingI recorded the intro and outro for Episode 77 of The Extraordinary Business Book Club yesterday, which was slightly surreal (you’ll understand why when you listen on Monday), which features an interview with Bridget Shine, CEO of the Independent Publishers Guild in the UK. She’s absolutely at the sharp end of publishing, and it’s a […]
Continue readingYesterday I focused on the entrepreneurial aspect of Warren Knight’s story (you can listen to the full interview here), but today I want to mention an interesting aspect of his approach to publishing his book Think #Digital First: he very consciously took the decision to use a partner publisher, to buy in their expertise but […]
Continue readingCreating a book cover is an exciting part of the publishing process, but also a notoriously difficult one. Sometimes authors know exactly what they want and are able to give the designer a clear brief: most times it’s a dance that goes backwards and forwards a few times. I’ve found creating my cover a particularly […]
Continue readingThe FT/McKinsey Business Book of the Year longlist has been announced: https://ig.ft.com/sites/business-book-award/books/2017. It’s heavy on finance and economics, with a side dose of technology. Only 4 of the 17 books on the list are by women, but that’s a fair or even a better-than-fair reflection of the numbers of business books written by women in […]
Continue readingDelighted to see that two of my favourite organisations – the National Trust and Falmouth University, where I occasionally speak as a guest lecturer – have come together in a pioneering new venture. Writer-in-residence there Wyl Menmuir (a Booker Prize longlister who used another favourite of mine, Prolifiko, to write his novel), has written a […]
Continue readingI’ve posted before about the Diagram Prize, one of the grandest traditions of the publishing industry, in which a bottle of claret is awarded with great ceremony by the Bookseller’s Horace Dent to the person who nominates the title that is popularly chosen as the year’s oddest. This year’s winner has now been announced: The Commuter […]
Continue readingAfter I’d posted yesterday’s blog on the IKEA effect and how you can use it to your advantage when writing your book, it occurred to me that there’s another interesting was of leveraging the phenomenon in publishing: personalization, where the customer co-creates the book to some extent. Two great examples of this are LostMyName, now Wonderbly, […]
Continue readingI’ve just interviewed Matt Watkinson, author of The Grid: The Decision-Making Tool for Every Business (Including Yours), for the Extraordinary Business Book Club podcast. He’s an extraordinarily nice bloke: today’s interview had to be rescheduled when my call recording tech failed last week (thankfully I realised before we’d got too far into the interview), and […]
Continue readingAn interesting article in the Bookseller’s Futurebook about the ebook, which 10 years ago seemed to represent the future of publishing and has so spectacularly failed to deliver – at least for traditional publishers. Simon Rowberry makes some excellent points about why this has happened, and why the picture is rather more complicated than you […]
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