UPDATE: #GamerGate was in its last days when I wrote this. Today it died. Or was put out of its misery by Anita Sarkeesian on The Colbert Report. That’s right…#GamerGate set out to silence a feminist games critic. Two months later she is on one of the world’s most watched television programmes. Well done! Here itContinue reading “The last days of #GamerGate …actually it’s dead now”
Category Archives: Writing & Publishing
Digital Publishing – a thought experiment
Rewind your imagination less than a decade to late 2007. Amazon are making final preparations to launch the Kindle e-reader and the ebook store that would, in just a few short years, come to dominate digital publishing. Now imagine, in true sci-fi alternate history style, that the major publishers had actually taken up the baton ofContinue reading “Digital Publishing – a thought experiment”
Why is publishing so biased against Amazon? No one likes their own killer
Hugh Howey writes up a sharp piece on the massive bias against Amazon in the reporting of news around the publishing industry. Howey frames his argument in the bigger picture of technology disrupting industry. Tesla is disrupting the legacy car industry. Netflix is disrupting the legacy movie and tv industry. And the list goes on,Continue reading “Why is publishing so biased against Amazon? No one likes their own killer”
The lesson of Authonomy? Good writing has great value
Does anyone remember Authonomy? The site launched by HarperCollins back in 2008 was supposed to revolutionise and democratise how new writers were discovered. I try and keep track of new talent entering the writing field, and it occurred to me recently that I couldn’t think of a single writer to come out of Authonomy andContinue reading “The lesson of Authonomy? Good writing has great value”
The one technical skill no writer can do without
Technology and the internet have changed writing and publishing forever. Way back in the mists of time copying a book meant paying dozens of monks to sit and transcribe each word by hand. It was expensive! Around 1450 the Gutenberg printing press made it much easier to print a few hundred copies of a book,Continue reading “The one technical skill no writer can do without”
Being a professional writer is…kind of bullshit
The incorrigible Will Buckingham here literally de-bullshits the increasingly bullshitty idea of being a professional anything, and in particular a professional writer. Not because it’s bad to be a professional, but because our entire idea of what professional means has become corrupted away from it’s true meaning, to profess a commitment to a skill… *Continue reading “Being a professional writer is…kind of bullshit”
On not being a hack
There is a story that the young Plato, being gifted with an excellent intellect, wrote a play to submit for the Athenian Dionysia. Taking it to submit before the judges, he found Socrates meditating upon the steps of the theatre. Having been told the play was good by friends and family, Plato was only tooContinue reading “On not being a hack”
Why Ello’s $450,000 in funding is a really, really good thing
Ello is the hip young social network that this week seemed to cross the threshold, from one of many, to the single most serious contender for Next Big Thing in the social online world. It has picked up an unknown but significant number of new users, many of them power user migrating from Twitter. And,Continue reading “Why Ello’s $450,000 in funding is a really, really good thing”
Ello – why is everyone moving to this half built social network?
Trust me, this post really is about Ello, it just needs a little context. The world appears to be complicated. But really it isn’t. oh sure there are 7 billion people crowded on to this relatively tiny lump of orbital debris we call a planet, divided into some 196 states and some 2,896 major cities, operatingContinue reading “Ello – why is everyone moving to this half built social network?”
3 things books must do to survive in an attention economy
Much of my first decade as a writer was spent helping people read and write. I ran workshops and development projects for libraries, a part of my professional life I wrote about not so long ago. A big part of my work then was caught up with the question, asked in various different ways, “whyContinue reading “3 things books must do to survive in an attention economy”
FUCK YOU AMAZON! Fuck you for being right! Again!
Sigh. Writers and publishers are again up in arms about Amazon, this time because of a letter sent directly to thousands of self-published writers by the book behemoth, and repeated on a new Readers United website. Full text of the email below for non-KDP authors who are curious. So here we are again. Amazon isContinue reading “FUCK YOU AMAZON! Fuck you for being right! Again!”
Authors! Book pirates aren’t your best friends, they’re your only friends.
There are 7 billion people on planet Earth. 7,000,000,000. That’s a vast audience that in the digital age is only really limited by language and literacy barriers. But let’s be really tight, and say that the operational potential upper audience for your book is 1 billion people. 1,000,000,000. “Your enemy is not piracy, but obscurity.”Continue reading “Authors! Book pirates aren’t your best friends, they’re your only friends.”
Damien Walter 