Author Archive

Being Better Producers

or You Can’t Polish a Turd As publishers, I think we’re picking up some bad habits. Maybe this is partly due to the panic of digitisation – more likely it is due to an increase in competition as producers from people like Amazon and a decrease in disposable income. Whatever the reason, there are a few [ READ MORE ]

Retaining Copyright

Think that Copyleft sounds like a shitty socialist pun? You’d be dead right. But it’s a socialism of ideas, and isn’t that shitty… kinda. In essence, Copyleft says two heads are better than one, and what’s in my head might do just as well to be in your head, and really we should just work [ READ MORE ]

Is All New Literature This Awful?

or: The Terrible Writing of Jonathan Coe. It has been a long time since I read an author I didn’t already know about or have recommended to me by a mate. I actually ended up picking up this book by Jonathan Coe entirely by accident as I thought it was a writer I knew and liked [ READ MORE ]

Bricks and Bullshit

Buying books from Waterstones is ideologically similar to buying organic items at Tesco – it’s better than some of the alternatives (ie: Amazon), but I can’t feel as smug as I might if I bought from an independent. Still, there’s so much doom and gloom in the industry news at the moment following the Red [ READ MORE ]

What WBN Stands For

It stands for World Book Night– new champion among publishing events. It stands for about a million free books, and for Jamie Byng’s lovechild. … It also stands for a major ideological problem for me. … The basic premise of the night is that individuals register on the World Book Night website to be ‘givers’. On March 5th, 20,000 [ READ MORE ]

Which Enemy Will You Sleep With?

After a decent stint in a large publishing house in London, I find myself washed up on the shores of Australia again, without a job or any real idea of what skills I might possibly have to move me in a direction that approximates something I think is worthwhile. So to avoid actually doing something [ READ MORE ]

Freetastic

I have about 9 mailboxes at work, one of which regularly receives email from this guy ben@sprint-mail.com. I think it’s spam, but it could be some r-tarded subscription whose use has long since worn out. Anyway, when I had nothing to do last week I had a flick through the shit he’s sent was really [ READ MORE ]

Reasons The Book Industry Is Not ‘Going The Way of The Music Industry’

Or: Your predictions of doom are unfounded, and you pessimism is bringing everyone down. … 1. There is a huge difference between the consumption of a novel and the consumption of a single. This in turn will lead to different buying patterns, and in turn different anti-piracy strategies. For example, the music industry has adjusted their business [ READ MORE ]

Technology in Circles, Slowly Downward

A four year-old iPod is not something anyone can rely on, and, after leaving it in the snow last year then drying it on the radiator, dropping it several hundred times, getting sand in and out of the screen, and more relocations than I can count, it’s not really that surprising that mine’s on the [ READ MORE ]

The Value of Violence and Youth

Another exciting week of admin and damage control draws to a close and I find myself buying a jar of Vegemite to scrape me through the homesickness that rears its head this time of year in the UK – when the sun goes down at 4:30 and you can smell a mixture of other people’s [ READ MORE ]

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