FICTION & CNF
The fab five: Canlit’s hottest up-and-comers
July 1, 2012
From the Globe and Mail this weekend, a tasty roundup of Canada’s latest literary stars. Add these authors to your Goodreads list and dive in!
With eBooks replacing hardcovers, social media replacing book tours, Amazon replacing bookstores, and bookstores replacing books with gardening supplies, the state of the book business (and of books themselves) remains uncertain.
Read “The fab five: Canlit’s hottest up-and-comers” by Kate Carraway and Victor Dwyer at globeandmail.com
Stakes (No Worcestershire Sauce Nor Fangs Required)
June 24, 2012
In Just What Is It About Mad Men?, I asked what draws viewers to the hit show season after season. I still don’t have that answer. What I do have is another question that perhaps the writers collected will discuss.
What are the stakes for Don Draper? In other words, what does he have to lose and how high are those stakes for him? For us? The discussion is relevant to the the writing of single stories such as novels and feature films as well as to the writing of stories told in series.
Read on
Zadie Smith’s Rules for Writers on The Guardian
May 20, 2012
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Ten lovely and very true observations on her writing life by the author of NW, White Teeth, On Beauty, and many others.
Read “Zadie Smith’s Rules for Writers” at The Guardian UK
LIFE’s Famous Literary Drunks & Addicts
April 14, 2010
Make of this what you will.
“Famous Literary Drunks & Addicts” (all 46 of ‘em) from LIFE Magazine.
Click through to the LIFE site to read the captions (and names, sheesh!) about each author.
Thanks to Mike H. for the linkage.
Declan Burke on Indie Publishing
March 14, 2010
On authors, editors, and the state of the Publishing Union, author Declan Burke (Crime Always Pays and The Big O) says it better than most in a recent guest column in Irish Publishing News:
…like-minded writers should get together and set up a co-op, akin to the United Artists studio of early Hollywood lore. In theory, it can be done: e-publishing and print-on-demand are just two elements of contemporary technology that allow writers to circumvent the publishing circus and go straight to readers.
He also quotes author Henry Porter from a related post on the Guardian Book Blog:
What worries me is the loss of income for writers in what is a pretty healthy market, the loss of good editors from publishing houses and the disdain for writers by retailers – people who depend on them. If they are not careful the core talent of the book trade may well combine in new types of ventures – collectives and transparent relationships where writers and editors go into business together on a 50:50 basis and are enabled by web platforms, ebooks and print on demand… disintermediation of a more radical sort.
Hey, that’s a great idea.
“So You Say You Want A Revolution?” in Irish Publishing News (with links to the original post on his blog)
“As I start to write my latest book, I fear for the future of publishing: Retailing pressure and the emergence of the ebook are threatening the future of authors and their work” by Henry Porter at The Guardian Blog (observer.guardian.co.uk)