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A World Without Agency

I was doing a bit of internet stalking the other day and came across this article by Rjurik Davidson about creative writing courses and so forth. It’s an interesting read, but there was one line in particular that hit out at me from a guy he interviewed (Errol). [I]n the 1970s, there was a much smaller [ READ MORE ]

The Forum Frenzy

I do hate a lot of things (Disney, marketing, Andrew Wiley etc) but I want to put it out there that this isn’t all I’m about. I got really excited when Tim Hely Hutchinson (CEO of Hachette UK) decided to go with the agency pricing model, Amazon be damned, and was excited again yesterday when [ READ MORE ]

The Jackal versus Publishers

There’s been a recent development in the ebook royalties debate, with literary agent Andrew Wylie taking matters into his own hands and negotiating a deal with Amazon to sell ebooks through an imprint of his agency called Odyssey Editions. That’s right. Imprint. Agency. That shit happened for real. I guess this is so he can [ READ MORE ]

Yeur Orl A Barnch of Caahnts! or Why I have Decided to Boycott Disney

I wouldn’t count myself as particularly anti-capitalist, or particularly political. But this article on Disney deciding to set up schools in China made me so angry I thought I was going to vomit. Then I read this other article on the same issue, realised it was worse than I originally thought. Like eating cereal for [ READ MORE ]

I Don’t Care How Much it Fucking Cost, That Tracksuit Makes you Look Like a Chav.

My whole world at the moment is about marketing. Against my will, it’s become increasingly important to my job and my life. Sales figures, profit margins, the whole lot. I know I might have been pretty critical of the way independent publishers don’t use marketing to their advantage, but the more I learn about it [ READ MORE ]

Anti-Saturation: Are Independents Their Own Worst Enemy?

I’m in the kitchen at the café, scraping the detritus of some asshole customer’s food into the bin and the radio starts playing that song I can’t stand. I suddenly can’t tell what I hate more: the fact that I just stuck my finger into a pile of half-eaten and probably now disease-carrying scrambled eggs, [ READ MORE ]

Security in Obscurity

We were lying in the fields on an overcast Saturday, 28 degrees, the sugar of iced lollies dribbling down our hands and hoping the sun would bless us for long enough to darken our transparent skin. Beautiful people surrounded us on all sides: impossibly thin; impossibly well dressed in that garage-sale chic kind of way; [ READ MORE ]

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Ryan Paine

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