As somebody who earned something between 'peanuts' and 'ooh, free copy of book' for contributions to academic tomes, I am Very Much Appreciative of the work of the Authors' Licensing and Copyright Society for gathering together micropayments in respect of copying for student packs etc on my behalf annually. While this may not exactly amount to a ( Read more... )

Smuggler found with nearly 1,000 cacti and succulents strapped to her body: maybe I am a bad bad person with a twisted mind, but I found myself thinking Her Kink Is Okay, It's Just Not My Kink, also there are rules about importation of biomaterials into New Zealand...
***
Dept of, I had issues with this publisher when I did a book with them, ( Read more... )

What I read
Finished The Virago Story about which I was distinctly meh - noticed several niggling errors in names and titles of books and stories in areas where I have some expertise and honestly, where does she get off saying the Women's Library is closed? It moved, there was masses about it in the press, and she was talking about that same Women' ( Read more... )

What I read
Finished The Black Book, a really solid and important work.
Though after that (and everything else) felt like something a bit lighter, so went for Margery Sharp, The Stone of Chastity (1940), which had been intriguing me for many years during which I had been unable to get hold of it. It's actually not, I think, among the top Sharps for ( Read more... )

Had an email from a complete stranger who has Writ A Book.
Falling within that field of study within which yr hedjog has published, which, we may say, covers quite a lot of ground.
And I think what they really want from me is practical advice on the road to publication which, larf, I fair lay on the ground, because my experience with this is so ( Read more... )

I have, my dearios, lately been apprized of a forthcoming work the advance notice for which suggests that the authors of whom the reader will detect 'echoes' are Thomas Mann and Flann O'Brien* (Penguin books tout him as 'Ireland's greatest comic writer', which one must concede must be a hotly fought-over crown).
Quite apart from that being an oddly ( Read more... )

Saw a discussion on Twitter earlier today about the YA category of books, which apparently somebody had claimed was some new millenial thing? and people were saying no, it went back earlier than that -

- and I went to myself, hang on, when I was But A Young Thing, Penguin Books put out a list for people who had slightly outgrown Puffins for the ( Read more... )

I have previously, I think, complained that Academic Publishers Who Are In The Habit Of Charging An Arm, A Leg And Several Internal Organs for the works they produce, except for the brief period when they hold their annual sale, whatever they are doing with those ill-gotten gains, they are not spending them on due diligence in the editorial process ( Read more... )

I commented a couple of weeks ago that maybe I'm not entirely past my best-before date yet, by the various things I have been asked to do lately -
Subsequent to which, I have had 2 requests to Talk About Stuff in the next couple of months, one of which also involves doing a radio chat beforehand -
Plus the thing that I was asked to do ages ago ( Read more... )

I am publishing a series of novels online via several different online channels. For all of them I am publishing, where there is a UK base, a UK price in GBP, which is automatically converted to the currencies of their other marketplaces.
I have lately had a communication from Major Online Digital Retailer saying that One (just one, though I think ( Read more... )