Following on from the post about publishers’ websites, I wanted to start looking at some specific sites and find out what they do well… and what they do badly. First up is Angry Robot Books, an imprint of HarperCollins, which I first discovered through a news post on NextRead.

The stated aim of Angry Robot is “to publish the best in brand new genre fiction – SF, F and WTF?!”, and it’s clear that their web presence is central to their imprint’s identity—as it should be. (Keep reading …)

I seem to spend a lot of time browsing publisher websites and, with some exceptions, I’m always surprised at how little effort these sites put into attempting to engage me as a consumer. The Internet is a great tool for communicating with your customers, and for direct selling, and publishers just aren’t taking advantage of this. In this post, I’ll try to lay out some of the specific features that should, or could, go into a strong web presence. I’ll develop these ideas separately in future posts. (Keep reading …)

If you are planning to write and publish books, or if you’re engaged in any kind of activity that would make an online presence useful, one thing you should do right now is get your name as a domain. It doesn’t matter if you’re not quite ready to start a website yet: you don’t need to do anything with the domain. The important thing is to make sure it’s yours. (Keep reading …)

One of the hardest challenges for a novelist is knowing what to leave out of the book. Whether the background details to a story are invented by the author or based on historical research, it’s the author’s responsibility to make choices, inserting only the most relevant information, where it’s most useful, and keeping things tightly to the theme of the story. Too much superfluous detail can suck the life right out of a story, and this is the problem with The Last Dickens, Matthew Pearl‘s tale of a hunt for the final installments of Charles Dickens’s unfinished final book.

The Last Dickens is Matthew Pearl’s third stab at a literature-themed thriller. The first was The Dante Club, a tale of murders surrounding the first American translation of the Divine Comedy. From what I remember, The Dante Club wasn’t badly executed at all. Pearl came unstuck with his follow-up, The Poe Shadow, which presented the reader with plenty of research, but little in the way of story.

The Last Dickens comes somewhere between these two: it pays more attention to story than The Poe Shadow did, but it’s still hampered by constant asides into research. (Keep reading …)

I’ve been revisiting the Atlantic Crime Classics range lately, taking a look at their February title, a new edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin stories, collected under the title of the first and most famous tale, The Murders in the Rue Morgue. (Keep reading …)

I’ve preached before about the importance of reading outside your comfort zone. While usually that advice was directed at new writers, it’s a good idea for all of us not to turn too quickly away from the less familiar shelves in the bookstore.

One of my own literary blind spots is poetry. While I appreciate and enjoy “poetic prose” (and there’s a vague term for you), and have a great fondness for a well-turned phrase, straight verse has always been something of a mystery to me. I don’t read it, write it, or edit it. So, while it’s not technically poetry itself, Edmund White‘s Rimbaud: Double Life of a Rebel, published earlier this year by Atlantic Books, looked like a good opportunity for me to place at least a toe outside of my own prosaic comfort zone, and start to read around the genre a little. (Keep reading …)