Archive
“The iPod Moment for Books”: How Serious is the UK Publishing Industry?
Amid all the chat about Kindles, Iliads, SonyReaders and ebooks generally revivifying a “flat” books market, there is the latent hope/fear that Apple’s next iPhone (to be announced next Monday, keep up) will also have ebook capability.
Such a sexy, “converged” device would surely corral latent consumer desire to read books on a screen rather […]
Published: June 6, 2008. Read more →
BEA: Filtered Highlights
We didn’t go to BEA this year (and what with the podcasts and prevailing attitude to conference attendance, I’m not sure we should have done) but reading the following reports, it seems that there was some good electronic-y / webby thinking inspired by the close of the conference.
Admittedly, much of the following reportage seems […]
Published: June 2, 2008. Read more →
Classics: For Shame?
Spotted this morning in Waterstone’s, Chiswick:
There was a time when I obsessed over Faber and Faber’s designs almost as much as I still do those of Penguin. Whilst my favourite Penguins were generally of the Facetti / Marber era (with special exceptions made for contemporaries such as Hyland, Intro, David Pearson and Gray318) the Faber […]
Published: April 22, 2008. Read more →
New Work: www.granta.com
We’ve just launched the first phase of the new website for literary quarterly, Granta Magazine.
Granta is “the magazine of new writing”, and recently celebrated its 100th issue. The magazine dates back to 1889, and our new site coincides with the publication of Granta 101, the first issue edited by Jason Cowley, who was appointed by […]
Published: April 15, 2008. Read more →
Why Agents Need Good Websites
Do agents need (good) web sites? It depends who you ask. Some agents don’t have web sites at all - and, alarmingly, some agents I’ve spoken to continue to take a fairly dim view of the web as a whole, almost considering it beneath or outside their areas of responsibility.
None (that I know of, […]
Published: March 31, 2008. Read more →
James Frey
We’ve just launched a site for James Frey’s UK publisher, all about A Million Little Pieces and My Friend Leonard.
Given the whole Oprah / Smoking Gun stuff, there’s still a lot of debate about the books.
There’s some details about why we did what we did over here, or you can engage in the […]
Published: February 18, 2008. Read more →
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (200,000 times)
In 1999, I wrote a business plan for the company I was then working for, Canongate Books. The plan was for the Scottish Arts Council, and the idea I’d come up with was to make “pop promos for books” which would get a web and film festival showing, and drive traffic to the Canongate site […]
Published: February 14, 2008. Read more →
Free: PDF vs. MP3?
In among all the recent interest in free I wanted to pick up on something I mentioned in passing (I think during a question) at RRO a couple of weeks back.
We have an increasingly broad range of options these days for electronic reading devices - be it the basic (phone, computer), dedicated (Kindle, Sony Reader), […]
Published: February 13, 2008. Read more →
Free (conomics)
We’ve long, long, long-since argued that giving books away for free online is a great way to market them.
However, not all - in fact very few, possibly close to none - of our clients agrees, despite some great anecdotal evidence from the like of Corey Doctorow, Seth Godin and now, as fate would have […]
Published: February 11, 2008. Read more →
Reaching Readers Online - follow up
So, a few technical hitches* aside, Thursday went well. The seminar was held at the London Stock Exchange, which was all very shiny and expensive and flash. (I particularly enjoyed seeing The Source sculpture first hand.)
All of the files presented are available here as PDF (with and without notes), and embedded Powerpoint.
My favourite bit was […]
Published: February 4, 2008. Read more →