Today’s news and links include paranormal detectives, the latest Amazon controversy, and some good new blog posts… (Keep reading …)

Last night I attended one of the most interesting dinners I’ve ever been to, and like all good experiences, it ties in with an aspect of writing.

The meal was a special event hosted by Context Travel, one of their “Out of Context” events. It took place in Rome, in Enoteca Casa Bleve, and it was a scent dinner. (Keep reading …)

The Guardian today has a good piece by Philip Pullman about the move in the publishing industry to introduce age banding on children’s books. I could explain all the reasons why that’s a bad idea, but he does it so much better, so go and read it.

You can also visit the website that Pullman has set up with a couple of other authors, and if you’re in the industry you can sign their petition. That’s here.

The BBC has an article on the virtues of typewriters.

“Have you ever tried to hack into my typewriter?” asks Frederick Forsyth. “It is very secure.”

Read it here.

One of the areas where I think even some of the best book blogs let themselves down is in their outbound links.

Nowadays, I tend to ignore links in book blogs. I’ve just come to expect them to lead to either the Wikipedia entry or a page on Amazon. It’s not that I disapprove of those websites; I just already know that they’re there. They’re easy to find, and if I want the information they carry, I can go straight to them and get it for myself.

When I’m reading somebody’s blog, I’m really looking for something new. This can be what’s written in the blog itself, of course, but the outbound links are part of that, and it’s really a shame how many blogs waste these opportunities to improve their readers’ experience. (Keep reading …)

This week’s literary news includes the publication of an unfinished Nabokov novel, a computer game based on the life and work of the Brontës, and a bizarre mistake in a new biography (Keep reading …)

If you’ve got some time on your hands, US magazine Poets & Writers has a very interesting interview with literary agent Nat Sobel (Keep reading …)

This Telegraph article, claiming to list the 50 best cult books, is causing much puffing up of chests over missed classics, and sniping at overrated ones.

With book bloggers queuing up to argue over their favourite titles, it’s worth a read. (That said, I’m not sure I can wholeheartedly recommend an article that seems to favour John Fowles’ awful Durrell lite The Magus—which even its own mother couldn’t love—over The Alexandria Quartet; or that thinks the UK still had rationing in 1957…)

It’s not really possible to start a new publishing house.

As a small press, if you want to be sold through the big chains, you’re going to be selling your books through a distributor, which cuts further into your rapidly diminishing profits. Amazon will buy directly from you, but they charge you for the privilege of selling to them, meaning that most of your sales will earn you no more than 40% of the cover price. So, if your book costs £6, that’s £2.40 to pay for printing, author royalties, book design, advertising, administration, delivering the books to the distributors, getting the ISBN number, sending out review copies, mortgage payments, rent when you lose your house, telephone calls to your wife’s mother, hiring a divorce lawyer, the bus fare to go and visit your children, and paying somebody to pulp the unsold copies of your books.

Charles Boyle has started a new publishing house. (Keep reading …)

A couple of months ago, somebody shoved something called Monocle under my nose. Some kind of style magazine, it didn’t really interest me until I found its tiny books section. (Sadly, I mean a tiny section about books.)

One of the titles mentioned was The White Room, from the new independent publisher, CB editions. It was unusual to see a small press book mentioned in a glossy magazine (or anywhere else, for that matter), and so I looked online and started to find out more about them. What I discovered was very interesting…

More about CB editions in a future post; for now I want to talk about one of their books, Days and Nights in W12 by Jack Robinson (Keep reading …)