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London Book Fair 2013: In Keynote, Gaiman Says ‘Try Everything’

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In his keynote at the fifth Digital Minds Conference, bestselling author and Twitter superstar Neil Gaiman kicked off the London Book Fair by likening the digital transition to being on an unruly, but exciting new frontier. "People ask me what my predictions are for publishing and how digital is changing things and I tell them my only real prediction is that is it’s all changing," Gaiman said. "Amazon, Google and all of those things probably aren’t the enemy. The enemy right now is simply refusing to understand that the world is changing."

Over his 30 minute talk Gaiman entertained and challenged his audience to think creatively about the future, conceding that he himself was “perfectly willing to acknowledge the possibility that the novelist may have been a blip” in our cultural history. “The model for tomorrow, and this is the model I’ve been using with enormous enthusiasm since I started blogging back in 2001,” Gaiman said, “is to try everything. Make mistakes. Surprise ourselves. Try anything else. Fail. Fail better. And succeed in ways we never would have imagined a year or a week ago.”

via London Book Fair 2013: In Keynote, Gaiman Says 'Try Everything'.

Melvin Burgess: a life in writing | Culture | The Guardian

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A substantial Guardian profile of Melvin Burgess includes mention of his new novel:

His latest novel, The Hit, is a dystopian thriller set in the future, which imagines a new pill known as Death. The chemistry is hazy but the concept is clear: this drug will give you the time of your life, an unbelievable high lasting a week, and then you will die. Burgess’s teenage hero Adam takes the drug. The novel is about what happens next.

Unusually, the idea for the book was offered to Burgess by someone else. Brandon Robshaw and Joe Chislett are philosophy teachers who came up with the idea of a week‑to-live drug with a group of students. They wrote a manuscript and sent it to Barry Cunningham, founder of Chicken House publishing, who bought the first Harry Potter novel for Bloomsbury before quitting to set up on his own.

Cunningham liked the idea but not the draft, so he offered Robshaw and Chislett a fee and set up a meeting with Burgess. The men got on well; Burgess made the story work on his second attempt, using many of the original elements and introducing new ones – including a beefed-up role for Adam’s girlfriend Lizzie. The book is dedicated to his two "co-conspirators".

via Melvin Burgess: a life in writing | Culture | The Guardian.

Ebook Growth Slows in 2012 to Only 41%; What Does It Mean for the Publishing Industry? – Forbes

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The AAP has been tracking ebooks since 2002. That year, ebooks represented 0.05% of all trade publishing revenues. To get to the current 23% number, the biggest gains were made in 2009, 2010 and 2011, the years immediately following the 2007 launch of the Kindle. In 2008, ebooks were 1% of publisher revenue. In 2011, they were 17%. Those were the years of triple-digit growth numbers, a trend publishers thought would continue until ebooks were at 50% of revenue or more. But in 2012, according to these new numbers, growth in ebooks has hit an inflection point in the U.S.

via Ebook Growth Slows in 2012 to Only 41%; What Does It Mean for the Publishing Industry? – Forbes.

Channel 4 Education and Chunk let teens turn their sleep into a game with new app | The Drum

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Channel 4 Education and Chunk have today launched a new app, which lets teenagers record their sleep patterns, which is then used to build a ‘track’ for a game.

Called Zeds, the tracks created by the apps reflect the pattern of the sleep, changing features as you move from light to deep, and aims to show teenagers the effects of poor quality of sleep.

via Channel 4 Education and Chunk let teens turn their sleep into a game with new app | The Drum.

Self-Taught

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I taught myself HTML in the summer of 1997, using Laura Lemay’s Teach Yourself Web Publishing with HTML 3.2, and immediately  launched the first iteration of ACHUKA, using a brash, notice-me pink and green theme, that some of you may remember.

I carried on learning from other books, becoming comfortable using PHP and MySQL within Dreamweaver.

For a while ACHUKA was a database-driven site, but I have returned to coding pages manually.

I no longer use Dreamweaver, just a code editor.

ACHUKAbooks was redesigned in the summer of 2012, using Twitter bootstrap and an intentionally plain design.

In Spring 2013 I decided the time was right to move the ACHUKA blog to the WordPress platform. The blog had been established in 2003, using Movable Type. The database is too large to migrate across to WordPress, so the old blog has been ‘mothballed’ and a new blog established.

Recently I have found video tutorials on sites such as Lynda.com the best way of learning. Currently I am working on a child theme for the WordPress theme I have adopted for the new ACHUKA blog.

Tim Waterstone In New Ebook Venture

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Tim Waterstone In New eBook Venture

as reported by John Harris in The Guardian (worth reading in full):

[Tim Waterstone] is also about to return to bookselling as non-executive chairman of a new venture called Read Petite. This will be launched to the trade at next week’s London Book Fair, and to the public in the autumn. An online outlet for short-form ebooks (fiction and non-fiction), its users will pay a monthly subscription – “a few pounds” – and have unlimited access to texts of around 9,000 words or under.

But this is no literary Spotify, offering hundreds of thousands of items with little quality control: Waterstone is insistent the service will be “curated” to ensure a high standard. Authors will have appeared in traditional print, and have been brought to Read Petite by a publisher. “The individual short story, or whatever it is, may not have been published, but the author will be an established, published writer,” he says, drumming his fingers on the table to emphasis those last three words. “The whole point is to avoid a slush-pile of material. What we’ll guarantee is quality writing.”

Read Petite’s name was inspired by Reet Petite, Jackie Wilson’s 1957 rhythm and blues classic. One of its key players, former Bookseller editor Neill Denny, has come along to further explain what it is all about. The pair are particularly excited about the chance to serialise new fiction à la Charles Dickens, reintroducing readers to the long-forgotten art of the cliffhanger. They enthuse about how e-readers seem to have increased people’s appetite for short-form writing. In the US, the New York Times has reported on a resurgence of the short story, benefiting new and established writers. We talk about such short-story masters as Somerset Maugham, Stephen King and Annie Proulx, and why the publishing industry has never quite managed to market the form.

“A lot of the best short fiction has never been properly exposed, because publishers don’t find it commercially comfortable,” says Waterstone. His bookselling business did have success with Graham Greene’s short stories, but such successes were rare. “Even with a collection, how do you package it? It’s difficult in print: traditionally, money was used up on production and distribution, and not enough was left for promotion. In the digital world, production costs are virtually nil, and distribution costs don’t exist, so you’re left with a much cleaner sheet.”