Device for putting holes in book signatures

January 27, 2012

Whilst watching this video of John Carrera’s project to reprint the Pictorial Webster’s Dictionary, I spotted that he had a nifty little device for putting holes into his book signatures, making sewing large numbers of books much quicker and easier. Does anyone know if it’s possible to buy a jig like this? Is this standard [...]

Read the full article →

Four Corners: With the sun on my skin

January 27, 2012

Further to my post from the other day about my lost Four Corners post, recovered through the power of Twitter, I have dug up another of the essays I wrote for them. I had thought I’d written more, but it turns out there were only two posts, so from rom 26 April 2004, here it is [...]

Read the full article →

Four Corners: A little piece of history

January 24, 2012

In 2004, I was invited to write for a site called Four Corners. It was one of those blogs that aimed to be an international source of food for thought. Today a friend of mine asked about an old blog post that he remembered about me talking about history, almost as if the country was [...]

Read the full article →

The best advice for writers, bar none

January 21, 2012

Nick Mamatas says it better than I ever could: Ten Bits of Advice Writers Should Stop Giving Aspiring Writers.

Read the full article →

To free or not to free, that is the question

January 19, 2012

I was fascinated by this post from Tyler Nichols about his experience providing a freemium Letter from Santa service before Christmas. In short, Tyler had found that few people upgraded from the free version to the paid, and that those who did use the free version were much more likely to send him support queries. [...]

Read the full article →

The tragedy of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

January 17, 2012

I’m reminded by Simon Goode of the the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, a collection of translated poems by Persian poet, mathematician and astronomer, Omar Khayyám. In 1912, a version of the book was bound by London bookbinder Francis Sangorski, who had a bit of a thing for shiny. Simon summarises: The book took more than two years [...]

Read the full article →

What is literary fiction?

January 15, 2012

I belong to an internet forum populated by a right bunch of weirdos some lovely people, and in the course of discussions about my survey, the one in which I’m trying to figure out how people discover new books and authors (it’s still open, please answer it!), the question was asked: So what the hell is Literary Fiction? [...]

Read the full article →

Argleton audiobook now available

January 14, 2012

After several days of recording, re-recording and editing, I’m happy to say that the Argleton audiobook is now available on Bandcamp on a pay-what-you-wish basis, with no minimum price (i.e. free download). Due to Bandcamp upload limits, I’ve had to split it into Part 1 and Part 2, but you can buy them as an [...]

Read the full article →

William King’s ebook sales figures

January 13, 2012

I do love it when authors are honest about the kinds of sales they are making, particularly when they are not the pack leaders like Amanda Hocking or John Locke. I am sure both Amanda and John have worked incredibly hard for the success they currently enjoy, and I’m not slighting them in the least, [...]

Read the full article →

How do you find out about new books and authors?

January 11, 2012

I’m interested in finding out more from readers about what they like and how they find out about new books and authors. I’m starting off with a very simple two-question survey. Please do take a moment to fill it out! When I’ve got a significant number of responses, I’ll publish the results. UPDATE: Right, well [...]

Read the full article →

Ebook pricing experiment: First (tiny) milestone passed

January 11, 2012

Today I passed the first milestone in my ebook pricing experiment: I have sold as many copies of Argleton in the first 11 days of January as I sold in the four months it was available last year. However, and it’s a big however, I’ve made less than a quarter of the money in royalties [...]

Read the full article →

Authors: If you can’t take the heat, stay the hell away from your book’s reviews

January 7, 2012

Today I stumbled across a blog post by KB/KT Grant about how authors who can’t handle negative reviews should really stay away from reading them, and certainly shouldn’t throw a hissy fit about any criticism they get. I hadn’t previously seen any of the examples of authorial meltdown that Grant refers to, but she is absolutely [...]

Read the full article →

Argleton New Year Sale, Now On!

January 5, 2012

As a little experiment, I have put the Kindle version of Argleton on sale, so if you’d like to support my writing you can now do so even more cheaply than before! Here are the current prices (the confusion over the US price is because it shows up at $1.20 to me, but I had [...]

Read the full article →

For 2012

December 31, 2011

Last year, I laid out my goals for the year. If was a relatively modest list which I had no doubt I’d be able to plough through in no time at all. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. *pauses for breath* Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. At least I managed to [...]

Read the full article →

The role of belief in ebook pricing and what to do about it

December 23, 2011

So yes, I know it’s nearly Christmas Eve and I know I should be turning my brain off, but this blog post about ebook pricing by Declan Burke came across my radar today on Twitter (and yes I know I should have turned Twitter off too) and I couldn’t not reply. Declan writes about his [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →